Spanish views from a small town

I've really been remiss about writing recently. There have been days I vowed to stay home in the morning, write a post, continue editing my story, and simply lose myself on the keyboard, but life snuck in and upended my plans. Life continues submerged in much the same chaos, and the pandemic numbers are slowly ticking upward, and all I care about is the beauty of the days I am living. Apart from errands that seem never-ending, I have been going for my walks in the woods. Yesterday, taking advantage of the fact that our daughter was home, I went to half of a talk about the tumuli on the other side of the highway that runs beneath the hill behind our house. The talk began down in the parish cultural center of Leiro, but it seemed too long to walk for me yesterday, so I walked to the tumuli, and waited for the appearance of the group around twelve, which was their scheduled time of arrival. I got there early, and sat on a stone, waiting for them in the warm sun, with a cool morning br...

Reading history is humbling. You realize you're not that special. You also realize just about everyone went through the same things you have. And sometimes you also learn that things which seemed solid knowledge are really based on quicksand. For many years I have heard that Galicia is a Celtic nation, along with Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany in France. But that's not quite true. The idea of a Celtic nation is also under debate.  The idea of a Celtic nation is something relatively recent. Arqueologists will confirm that there was no such thing as a Celt. There were similarities in communities stretching from central Europe to the Atlantic shores from about 2000 B.C.E. until the ascension of the Romans, but from that to an ethnically homogeneous community is a jump taken by the Romantics in the nineteenth century with no real basis in fact.  Nineteenth century nationalisms have their roots in the rising of European states in medieval times. The fact is th...