This is one of those years of tiny, big moments. It's the year where two years of labour and questioning evolved at last into one moment of standing on stage and receiving my Master's degree. All I heard in that moment was the fierce beating of my heart, pounding ecstatically against my ribs: I've no idea what was actually said. (Though that might be also the result of two years of school-related sleep deprivation...)
This is a year that will quietly watch me slip into the next age marker and I find myself reflecting often on who I am now and how I want to grow myself for the next five years. I look at pictures of a five year old me, an eleven year old me, and I wonder who that I was then is still now, and what of who I am now would I have wanted to be at that age if I could only have known to want it. Which makes me wonder how I will look back on this age, and on this age I am slipping into.
Today is the anniversary of when my family left my first home, my beautiful island in the Caribbean, so I am extra pensive and lost to nostalgia, to thinking about home and place and belonging.
When I ride in the cabs and talk with drivers who are from Ethiopia, Uganda, and elsewhere, they reminisce to me of home, spell out for me the language of land written on their hearts, and I see the place stamped on their being. Then I ask how long they have been in the States now, and each time--each and every time!--it is longer than I have lived here in this country. And they have been gone from their homes that long (longer yet if they were refugees at some point), and yet it is to them still the compass which guides them through their life.
I think, if they can have their homeland still affect them so, is it so strange that my own heart is often still awash in longing for the otherness I know? For my other worlds? Even though in every place I go, that longing persists because I have lived and loved in too many?
What is the limit of the human heart?
I have become very adept at making home wherever I am, at building place and setting down roots whilst still carrying with me the places and people I love, while still holding onto the many different and opposing things that have made me the strange person who I am--and I am enormously proud of this accomplishment. I think, in a life full of fracture, finding a way to some sort of wholeness is a pretty satisfying thing to accomplish, and probably explains why I have cared so much more in my life about who I am as a person than what I am doing or going to do. Being a person is a lot of hard work, and I cherish my beingness.
But what now? And how now?
Maybe that will be the next five years of learning for me.
I returned not half a month ago yet from a trip to Iceland. What a beautiful country. I don't even have the vocabulary yet to adequately talk about it, though I have begun to read Icelandic literature in hopes of discovering and growing that ability.
Going there, I hoped most to be able to step outside myself a little, to step into a place I do not know at all, have never been. To bathe in the strange newness of it all and so, being outside of my world, gain rest and better my vision. I wanted to celebrate what I have achieved (the degree) and reward myself. Wanted to dance with the Northern Lights and experience their magic for the first time, to ride on the back of the wind. I wanted so badly to find something that looks like the edge of the world and stand trembling on the brink of it full of wonder at life and the stark beauty of it all, raging and silent in a single breath, luminescent as the glaciers and black as the sand, rock, and night encompassing it all.
And the thing that I love most about experiences like that; it isn't the going there and then , eventually, turning back and returning to the place you were before. It's that you don't return to the place you were before.
I will always, forever, be homesick for something. My heart beats the song of saudade; an eternal song of melancholic loss for the other.
But that doesn't mean that I do not nor cannot love the new, the next, or the present. And I do, enormously and passionately.
But when you go enter a neverland or stand at the edge of any world, there is always a door. Though I did turn and drive back the way I had come, though the next day I got on a plane and flew back to my present home which I adore, that next portal has been crossed and I passed into a new place, a new world to explore which will become a part of the fabric of my being. I didn't even fully realise it then, but now, when I find myself reading new books since my return, writing new things and thinking in language I have not before, I know.
Know that for the first time, I have come to love and appreciate change as much as I have always hated and feared it. Many of us carry wounds and split hearts and live in between worlds with that continual ache for the otherness of home, but as T.S. Elliot said, "the end of all our explorations will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." Which in the end, means that the place and we ourselves are as new; reborn and more full.
Isn't the evolution of our being a wondrous thing?
Showing posts with label place. Show all posts
Showing posts with label place. Show all posts
Thursday, 2 April 2015
Friday, 19 September 2014
In search of Alchemy
It's been a year now since I decided to leave my hard earned home of five years and go out into the wide world once more.
Once more with nothing. With no furniture, not even a bed. With my books packed up and left behind, boxes of colour and memory dusting in a barn. My piano gone, pictures locked up, papers destroyed.
I left with no job and limited savings to make my way alone in a place I had never lived. To move back into a city from deep rolling hills, back into all the languages of the world and the engine of city traffic from the kayikiki call of fox outside my window and coyote and bear in the woods. To make friends in a city of strangers after leaving those who would come by with homemade butternut soup and thermometers when I was sick or hunt christmastrees with me, swim in lakes and pools, and explore the surroundings of a whole wide state.
It was just this idea of where I wanted to be next, who I wanted to enable myself to become (again?) and what I wanted to surround myself with. An image of the lifestyle I wanted to experience next and opportunities to find.
How has it nearly been a year since I was packing all my things away to set out across the country?
And what has been done or found or left in that year?
I have travelled through and explored
New York, New Hampshire, Massachusets, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina
as well as
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Guatemala
I have depleted my yatch savings fund to nearly the last dollar, but starting saving over again.
I slept on a floor and then an airmattress for three months.
I worked as a canvasser on the street, a cashier and hospitality hostess in a pizza place, and am in my second position doing development and marketing work in an awesome arts organization now.
I completed two residencies, two terms of grad school, a critical thesis, and am preparing to graduate with my first Masters degree. (There is always room for another MA...)
I've missed my friends, people who have poured into my life over the five years who feel like family, who may themselves have moved, too, but many of whom still keep in touch, find ways to say hello and an "I'm thinking of you" and some of whom have even managed to visit.
I've made new friends and reconnected with friends from my past--discovering one college friend and I can see each other's bedroom windows from our rooms here in all the expanse and building jungle of this city.
There have been organizations to discover, to join and participate in. Women's groups, political groups, arts groups, writing groups, UN groups, groups from my life's many homelands, embassies, music, bellydancing, martial arts, concerts, all my favourite food groups, rake-leaves-at-the-monuments--so many different experiences to explore and wonder at. So many fascinating new people with complex backgrounds and stories far crazier than my own. Giving strangers in the metro or at a restaurant my name, my number, my smile.
I've made it to a movie theater five times. (LOTR the Hobbit II, Frozen, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Maleficent, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, again--if you were wondering...)
I sold my car.
My belongings are still in storage and I miss my books and my piano every single day.
I've acquired more books and learned how to use a library at last (though I still don't like them much!)
I've seen 2 ballets, 3 operas, 3 theater productions, 1 dance show, 1 musical, 1 concert (and I think more that I cannot recall offhand).
I have visited and been visited by my siblings more this year than perhaps the last two years combined.
I've run away to a nearby beach twice, and made it back to NY briefly twice, too.
It's been a scary year. A year of wondering, Am I going to make it? Can this work out? A year of signing onto leases before having employment, believing that the job was around the corner. Believing what I was earnestly looking for would come.
On the hard days, I would draw up this wonderful quote in my head from Theodore Roosevelt:
It has been a year of letting go of everything and finding a path through the sky.
And, in fact, doing not zero, not one, but TWO high ropes courses, despite vertigo and hating feeling out of control. And losing a friend to an accident, who two years earlier helped me first conquer those things, climb a 70something ft tree and jump off a 50 something ft pole.
This year has felt a lot like skydiving did last summer. At the beginning being excited, then going through the paperwork that lists in horrid detail every possible way you might die or worse, injure yourself and recieve nothing but a miserable life without any assistance. And then you see the little backpack that is supposed to let you soar and you think, no way. That will never work.
Yet still you get into a rinky-dink plane and you climb up two miles into the sky and you open that door and jump anyways and somewhere in that crazy freefall you discover what it is to fly, and you land on your feet ready to go up again, to fly some more, to see the world in a whole new way outside of itself and so far beyond your tiny little being.
It's one of the most beautiful things imaginable.
And it is my life.
And I am deeply grateful.
Once more with nothing. With no furniture, not even a bed. With my books packed up and left behind, boxes of colour and memory dusting in a barn. My piano gone, pictures locked up, papers destroyed.
I left with no job and limited savings to make my way alone in a place I had never lived. To move back into a city from deep rolling hills, back into all the languages of the world and the engine of city traffic from the kayikiki call of fox outside my window and coyote and bear in the woods. To make friends in a city of strangers after leaving those who would come by with homemade butternut soup and thermometers when I was sick or hunt christmastrees with me, swim in lakes and pools, and explore the surroundings of a whole wide state.
It was just this idea of where I wanted to be next, who I wanted to enable myself to become (again?) and what I wanted to surround myself with. An image of the lifestyle I wanted to experience next and opportunities to find.
How has it nearly been a year since I was packing all my things away to set out across the country?
And what has been done or found or left in that year?
"To live without roads seemed one way
not to get lost. To make maps
of stone and grass, to rub stars together,
find a spark."
~from "Spark," a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye
I have travelled through and explored
New York, New Hampshire, Massachusets, Vermont, Connecticut, Maine, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina
as well as
New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and Guatemala
I have depleted my yatch savings fund to nearly the last dollar, but starting saving over again.
I slept on a floor and then an airmattress for three months.
I worked as a canvasser on the street, a cashier and hospitality hostess in a pizza place, and am in my second position doing development and marketing work in an awesome arts organization now.
I completed two residencies, two terms of grad school, a critical thesis, and am preparing to graduate with my first Masters degree. (There is always room for another MA...)
I've missed my friends, people who have poured into my life over the five years who feel like family, who may themselves have moved, too, but many of whom still keep in touch, find ways to say hello and an "I'm thinking of you" and some of whom have even managed to visit.
I've made new friends and reconnected with friends from my past--discovering one college friend and I can see each other's bedroom windows from our rooms here in all the expanse and building jungle of this city.
There have been organizations to discover, to join and participate in. Women's groups, political groups, arts groups, writing groups, UN groups, groups from my life's many homelands, embassies, music, bellydancing, martial arts, concerts, all my favourite food groups, rake-leaves-at-the-monuments--so many different experiences to explore and wonder at. So many fascinating new people with complex backgrounds and stories far crazier than my own. Giving strangers in the metro or at a restaurant my name, my number, my smile.
I've made it to a movie theater five times. (LOTR the Hobbit II, Frozen, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Maleficent, and How to Train Your Dragon 2, again--if you were wondering...)
I sold my car.
My belongings are still in storage and I miss my books and my piano every single day.
I've acquired more books and learned how to use a library at last (though I still don't like them much!)
I've seen 2 ballets, 3 operas, 3 theater productions, 1 dance show, 1 musical, 1 concert (and I think more that I cannot recall offhand).
I have visited and been visited by my siblings more this year than perhaps the last two years combined.
I've run away to a nearby beach twice, and made it back to NY briefly twice, too.
It's been a scary year. A year of wondering, Am I going to make it? Can this work out? A year of signing onto leases before having employment, believing that the job was around the corner. Believing what I was earnestly looking for would come.
On the hard days, I would draw up this wonderful quote in my head from Theodore Roosevelt:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
It has been a year of letting go of everything and finding a path through the sky.
And, in fact, doing not zero, not one, but TWO high ropes courses, despite vertigo and hating feeling out of control. And losing a friend to an accident, who two years earlier helped me first conquer those things, climb a 70something ft tree and jump off a 50 something ft pole.
This year has felt a lot like skydiving did last summer. At the beginning being excited, then going through the paperwork that lists in horrid detail every possible way you might die or worse, injure yourself and recieve nothing but a miserable life without any assistance. And then you see the little backpack that is supposed to let you soar and you think, no way. That will never work.
Yet still you get into a rinky-dink plane and you climb up two miles into the sky and you open that door and jump anyways and somewhere in that crazy freefall you discover what it is to fly, and you land on your feet ready to go up again, to fly some more, to see the world in a whole new way outside of itself and so far beyond your tiny little being.
It's one of the most beautiful things imaginable.
And it is my life.
And I am deeply grateful.
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Overdue Post #1: London to Bangkok--Airport Musings
(written down and spit right back to you now at last, despite posts in the meanwhile. please pardon any repetition or confusion of the apparently sick writer of this near-week-old-post!)
After a very long time in motion, I have arrived in Thailand. I'm not sure I can say forward motion, since movement in a direction seems tied to time, and time is out with me right now. Currently waitng for my next flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, by the time anyone reads this I will have been travelling in airports and via planes for 24 hours.
I'm excited to be here in Thailand. It was always the most hyped-up last minute weekend away deal you would see plastered on all Bratislava's travel agent store-front windows. It looked so very inviting every time. Of course, most of those adverts were the beach, not Northern Thailand, with its valleys and mountains and no sea at all.
But there we come to something I've been thinking again about. I say again because this thought is neither a new thought to myself nor the first time I've shared it, though perhaps the first time in the forum of this particular blog.
Place isn't really choosy, so to speak. It invites anyone. Some places draw more people than others, especially some unvoiced thing inside them. Other places draw only a few, but those few are come with the call of the place clamoring in the very core of their being.
It doesn't make pretense, either; place simply is what it is, though it may perhaps not be what we had preconceived (a fault on us, not it). You can be absorbed into a place, grow green or brown or whatever shade predominates. Sometimes we say it claims its tribute of us--perhaps a climbing accident if you are of the mountains, or drowning if you are of the Sea: the completion of your absorption into place.
When my sister and I returned to Slovakia, we sought to see the place itself. The place that called to us, pulling at our hearts from so very far away. A far away which seemed so often insurmountable. We sought to taste, touch, breathe, feel--to smell it, to assure ourselves it still was itself; to assure ourselves it still welcomed us despite the distance stretched so long between us--unwelcome shadow. You can stay in touch with friends easily now in this day and age; a goodbye to a friend no longer need be the death of that friend to yourself; but a goodbye to a country, to a place is still something like a death because you cannot facebook it, skype it, email it, or meet up randomly with it except to go home again to it. To seek it out as we did on this trip. Sometimes even without all these forms of communication which can almost suffocate us now, you still "now" and you can still "pick right back up" with some friends without the slightest ripple.
Ripple. And there it is--the catch. Because people and place aren't isolated from each other, or from time. So while we returned to place that welcomed us home and could keep us again if we would; where we had lived before was in a particular space--an intersection of people, place, and time opening into our place of reality (which again was slightly different for us both as a result of our being individual beings already). This could not be revisited; cannot ever be revisited (unless you are dating Dr. Who...)
Returning releases us from the power of that space; we are no longer tied to it in the same way but are free now to make of that space--as well as the place and people of today, the moment we visited--whatever we would. That is the gift of closure.
The dificulty with people in a place is they haven't usually invited you... you simply showed up on their doorstep and said "surprise!" When we move to a place--any place--we should never expect its welcome to include automatic enrollment in the community, in Society. We are the newcomers, foreigners. Those who have yet to build and to establish trust. And as people ourselves, we must also learn to trust those around us.
People are so much harder than place to establish yourself into. But when you do; people are portable. Build your world into people and people into your world, and you will find home wherever they are, too.
Sunday, 24 June 2012
Departures and Welcomes
Greetings! I have made it safe and sound and happily to Chiang Mai, Thailand! I'm so happy. After a beautiful afternoon visiting my family (I'm not even going to put those familial terms in apostrophes because apparently it was believed for a whole year I was indeed adopted by them!) in Vienna again and a lovely homecoming to there, I had the pleasure of being driven to the airport and seen off. It was a perfect circle; welcomed home by my sister the week before; sent off with love by my brother.
I don't like goodbyes, but I love the hellos that we carry for each other in our hearts.
Now I have been greeted by such love again from dear friends at the airport in Chiang Mai. I've never been here before--never been on this continent at all before--and it still felt like a homecoming.
I love that.
It was, for the record, a good trip. Long, but good. I calculated spending 24 solid hours in the transition. But I slept on the plane and enjoyed the people around me and the food and the airports and didn't feel too sick. I felt funny slipping my tylenol on the plane and dropping my fizzy vitamin into the water. hahaha.
Ah, and what I found hilarious on the plane--the british pilot told us all "I'm sorry to say it's horribly hot in Thailand right now, about 32 degrees or 91 if you prefer F." It has been about 36-38 degrees in Slovakia almost all week! :)
Ok. Must. Sleep!!
I don't like goodbyes, but I love the hellos that we carry for each other in our hearts.
Now I have been greeted by such love again from dear friends at the airport in Chiang Mai. I've never been here before--never been on this continent at all before--and it still felt like a homecoming.
I love that.
It was, for the record, a good trip. Long, but good. I calculated spending 24 solid hours in the transition. But I slept on the plane and enjoyed the people around me and the food and the airports and didn't feel too sick. I felt funny slipping my tylenol on the plane and dropping my fizzy vitamin into the water. hahaha.
Ah, and what I found hilarious on the plane--the british pilot told us all "I'm sorry to say it's horribly hot in Thailand right now, about 32 degrees or 91 if you prefer F." It has been about 36-38 degrees in Slovakia almost all week! :)
Ok. Must. Sleep!!
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Positive Dissolution
I read once, somewhere--and how I wish I could remember where and by whom!--that the "true international" can dissolve into anywhere. While on the one hand, I suppose that technically rules me out, I like to think that perhaps I am indeed just such a person.
Coming back here has been a delightful homecoming if only for the dissolution of myself back into these worlds. Could I ever express the efforts I put into acquiring the speech of where I live in NY? (And still I know once in a while it slips...) What of my fears that in slipping in, I would be stuck?
But as it is, when I entered Germany, I could speak German, and so did. To the immigration official, who was quite surprised hearing me but seeing my passport. To the flight attendants and the young family sitting across the aisle from me.
I remember the first time I ever did that, on a Czech airlines, speaking Slovak to the attendants. They never did know. When I got back from Russia and switched over Russian to Slovak again, it was merely a couple months of people thinking I was Ukrainian instead.
When I first returned to the place I was born a few years back, the very most gratifying part of that trip was being welcomed home by everyone once they realised who I was, or told "once from here, always from here."
Now in this other homecoming, I think Monday presented the greatest such gratification. I bought a painting at a kiosk in the Tatras, at the first mountain my sister and I climbed. Poor man. He is now under the firm understanding that she and I are actually Slovaks, born here but moved to the States around the time of the revolution, along with even our grandmother!! He was so delighted that our parents taught us Slovak and that we would still come back to our homeland. And we were delighted by our ability to dissolve back into this world.
I confess I am--as I was informed on Sunday by an old friend--"feistily independent," and that I am wont not to accept the kind meant advise especially from close family. But I recall--always have--my father saying when I was but a young child to make sure I really lived where I found myself and didn't wast the time I had there. I have always tried to find the best way to live that.
For the longest time I tried to find that one place to be home. We are taught that growing up, no matter what public school in what country you attend, or how many such different ones. Each teach that all you want and all you should want is to belong. But I really love now how that can be for more than the one, how we don't have to live divided or continually conflicted. It may be oddly limiting on some levels, but there is a plane of reality that allows for a broader world, a world where opposites can live side by side without war. I love that my life can encompass all of these worlds without the annihilation of any other one. (And that statement comes from one who tried to annihilate one of her worlds to fit the other, once upon a time)
I love the fact, as my sister put it, that our being American as well makes our being Slovak that much more impressive and generally awesome.
Coming back here has been a delightful homecoming if only for the dissolution of myself back into these worlds. Could I ever express the efforts I put into acquiring the speech of where I live in NY? (And still I know once in a while it slips...) What of my fears that in slipping in, I would be stuck?
But as it is, when I entered Germany, I could speak German, and so did. To the immigration official, who was quite surprised hearing me but seeing my passport. To the flight attendants and the young family sitting across the aisle from me.
I remember the first time I ever did that, on a Czech airlines, speaking Slovak to the attendants. They never did know. When I got back from Russia and switched over Russian to Slovak again, it was merely a couple months of people thinking I was Ukrainian instead.
When I first returned to the place I was born a few years back, the very most gratifying part of that trip was being welcomed home by everyone once they realised who I was, or told "once from here, always from here."
Now in this other homecoming, I think Monday presented the greatest such gratification. I bought a painting at a kiosk in the Tatras, at the first mountain my sister and I climbed. Poor man. He is now under the firm understanding that she and I are actually Slovaks, born here but moved to the States around the time of the revolution, along with even our grandmother!! He was so delighted that our parents taught us Slovak and that we would still come back to our homeland. And we were delighted by our ability to dissolve back into this world.
I confess I am--as I was informed on Sunday by an old friend--"feistily independent," and that I am wont not to accept the kind meant advise especially from close family. But I recall--always have--my father saying when I was but a young child to make sure I really lived where I found myself and didn't wast the time I had there. I have always tried to find the best way to live that.
For the longest time I tried to find that one place to be home. We are taught that growing up, no matter what public school in what country you attend, or how many such different ones. Each teach that all you want and all you should want is to belong. But I really love now how that can be for more than the one, how we don't have to live divided or continually conflicted. It may be oddly limiting on some levels, but there is a plane of reality that allows for a broader world, a world where opposites can live side by side without war. I love that my life can encompass all of these worlds without the annihilation of any other one. (And that statement comes from one who tried to annihilate one of her worlds to fit the other, once upon a time)
I love the fact, as my sister put it, that our being American as well makes our being Slovak that much more impressive and generally awesome.
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
First Train Musings...
Our train rolls out of the city, matchboxes and trees and village houses peeling away from us, the stepped hills sliding softly by like green waves. And the train chuckles and sings to us. I have missed these trains. My sister and I, each with a notebook and pen, smile contentedly--not at each other, but from the deep gratification of contentment, of "this is the way it is meant to be." Together, training through to the mountains in this country we love. "Krajina moja srce," (country of my heart) as a fotobook of it I have at home says. Though, I think, it is not the only country of my heart.
I love watching the houses and flats as we pass by; buildings whose faces I would know in the dark like a lover; their lines, curves, and textures just right. Just right like being on a train at all. Weekends in highschool, taking the train country to country, home to home, german to slovak to german again. My world. A familiar world. In dreams I often wander and grow lost on a train, but the lostness is beautiful to me; the lostness I carry back out of my dreams with me, into the whole of my life. "To live without roads is one way not to be lost." (naomi shihab nye)
Once I tried to make sense of my world by mapping it out like the metro. Places I have lived or studied and the paths I moved on between them--marked time. Languages in subtext. They were to o equal for a painless answer. I am a child of many worlds, a voice of many tongues. I then decided that the map of me lies in the people I have met and known. My story, dissolved across the world into other lives and tales.
Just the other day, I returned to the church my family engaged in here, expecting to find three or four friends and instead, there was a convergence of time and people I know even from the very earliest memories of this place and people of my later years here came. It was like pieces of my life for a moment brought together. Such a lovely surprise.
How to describe to you my city? The last summer I spent here is five years gone. Gone Perhaps "ago" is better here, for I think of that summer still. Living in Slovakia. Working in Vienna. Making radio programmes. Writing intensely and trying to "find myself;" find how my selves from all thse different worlds were supposed to be one person living in peace when the worlds themselves don't get along; exist as polar opposites. Remember travelling by bus across the continent, ferrying across the Channel (white cliffs of Dover rising!), travelling to London for interviews. Remember the hot summer days when the air itself sizzled on the black cobbles of the city (Bratislava, not London), and burned my soles as I spent hours alone downtown, meandering through galleries, reading in the University Library, documenting in pictures I've since lost that world I loved. I love.
The buildings of downtown, old next to new. Old even to the time of the Roamns and before--Celtic farms once--new to very current and noisy, sweaty construction that smells like cold water somehow. A growing city. Moving and morphing. Do you know how many names and in how many languages this city has been called?
Shades of fading paint, peeling through to cement peeling through to old brick--layers and layers. The old old wall of the Old City, one length still standing. Remaining destruction from Napoleon--even to a cannonball still wedged into the tower of our Old Town Hall.
Art everywhere. Grafitti on most every surface (though usually, respectfully kept off the Old Town district buildings). Fascinating art installations--a display of Slovak wines through cask art. Who knew? Statues--Sir Roland. George and the Dragon. Hans Christian Anderson. Hviezdoslav. Famous poets and political saviours.The fomentors of Slovak national identity (which is relatively new and an ancient land. I grew up in the shaping and making of the nation itself.) One summer, enormous fotoraphs from around the world hanging like sheets around one of the squares. I wished then they were my fotos. I wished the resolution of my camera was good enough for such blowups. One summer I paced around searching for art institutes to which I could apply for study.
The old wall of the Old City heading around to the last remaining old gate--Michalska Brana--St Michael's Gate. My favourite part of the city. You pass through the arched gate under a beautiful copper topped tower and enter the Old City--opening before you is a cobbled streed lined up and down each side with cafes. People spill out like flowers from a basket, littering the chairs and tables with their colours and their lovely varied words. At night it is most beautiufl to me. Van Goh's painting of a city street of cafes by night always makes me thinkof this street. It captures just the right atmosphere, vibrancy, and glow.
From nearly every point in the city you can see the castle rising high on the hill, its largest tower facing west to Vienna. Crown jewels were once held there, in the time of teh Austro-Hungarian empire. Empress Maria Theresa (mother of Marie Antoinette) would come and hold court there, so the houses of the nobility drape the surrounding hills. The empress was so fat that she rode a horse everywhere, so when you are in the castle you will note how wide, deep, and flat the stairs are for the sake of that unfortunate creature.
Across the way is St Martin's Cathedral, where through history many Hungarian kings and queens were crowned. One of the villages where my family lived was most often Hungarian, so there all the statues and inscriptions are in that language.
I remember when the first shopping mall came to the country, a chink the dam. Now we have many, nestled new into the old. I took my youngest sister (whom I'm now travelling with!) there for her first salon haircut. We went after to the lake next door, rented a paddle boat, and jumped off in the middle of the lake. Our clothes so heavy clinbing back aboard was nearly impossible, and her newly styled hair washed flat... but our dripping and laughing moment was perfect.
We have another lake with crystaline waters to which she and I biked nearly ever day one exquisite summer I was home from university. 7 km. This week we plan to bus to that village and then walk out there as we no longer have our bikes here. But we want "our" lake. Apples and cheese and water and sun.
There are several mountain ranges in this country, and one is beginning to grow in the distance now. Beautiful. I forgot how blue the green here is, and in these hills and mountains and across the whole of this little country are over 180 castles and castle ruins.
Nature is iportant here. Even in the city, most everyone has a garden plot outside the city limits. No yards, just gardens. Land that is beautiful and will nourish you.
I love teh poppies here. The further we go today, the more I see them. So red and delicate. When we had to say goodbye to friends moving away, it helped heal our grief to stand in a field of poppies--a field of bleeding red--the visualisation of our hurt like a balm, soothing us.
In the near distance right now are some smaller moutnains that I would almost swear I climbed a few years ago! No way to know, though. I didn't even know then wehre I was.
It's funny the way things affect you. When we were young, my olders sister and I lived to read. Books, and certainly english ones, were ahrd to find, so we read everything we could get our hands on--reading, as a result, things far too old for us. For instance, storeis of war and desolation and rape (which we couldn't understand except that it was dreadful) and pillage and torture in Europe. Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and book excerpts were especially good for that.
When we moved here, those storeis ripe in our heads, and our parents' american-instilled fear of anything communitst filling our world, we made contingency plans. How to escape when war started, when the new country collapsed, when nazis or communists took over again. We gave our parents up for loss--with their terrible language acquirement and heavy accents, they could never hid, blend in, or escape. Taken away, tortured, and killed But we would survive. We mapped our various escape routs out of the country--over thsoe mountains, through that river, and then... We covered who and how we would be responsible for "the children," (our siblings). I made them practise scaling walls and walking fences, and tried to teach them the art of dodging bullets (though, in retrospect, I realise mudballs shoot very differently than bullets and shrapnel.) In my dreams our parents secured us in an orphanage right before being taken away from us.
It didn't help those wild and rather uneducated speculations in that time that the government here was, in fact, still sorting itself out and rather unstable, relatively speaking. At elections iwthin our first year, there was widespread concern over a coup, we were given to understand. Many expatriots had their bags packed and emergency exits and rendezvous planned out. I remember climbing up my apple tree in the orchard of our first house wondering what morning would bring the night of elections. Fortunately, it brought none of those negatives.
It also didn't help that within our first year and a half there also occured the impeachment process of Clinton (causing our vulnerable and imaginative minds to disbelieve our parents' claims that the USA was safe and stable) and the nearby war in Yugoslavia. By the time of the bombing in Kosovo, we had friends there who were hiding in basements and shelters. Friends who didn't evacuate and we stopped hearing news from. Our house constantly shook as bomber jets from a nearby base in Hungary flew over our hosue on their way to unlaod issiles (on our friends!) and traffice was stopped in the streets from long lines of tanks filing by, achingly slow, along with supply trucks and red cross vehicles.
it is so funny in this odd way to recall all those fears.
Political scientits talk of how soccer united Germany after the wall fell, off if not for taht, what would have happened, who knows. Here, we ahd a similar experience when the Slovak hockey team won its first gold medal. Of course, we had played long and won games before, but not as Slovakia separate from Czech Republic. it was the single nation of Slovakia's first win, and the country went crazy. We all went crazy. It was really the first display of nationalism by the new country, according to everyone. Even to the 1800s, the Slovak language wasn't considered much more than peasant speak as opposed to a national language. Ludovit Stur was one of those behind the birth of Slovaki nationalism through the language. I think that is something very special about my experiences, something difficult I wouldn't trade, and something of the bond I share to this place; that I was shaped into my person with teh shaping of this place into a nation.
I was thinking again now of Bratislava, and of the peeling pain, and the old with the new, and even of teh buildings you still find bullet holes riddling the walls of. And I think, one of the reasons I love that place so much is its story. Hours of reading its history, years of walking through its history in the streets, and a life that is part of its history, however unrecognised. I love how my story is wrapped into its larger one. I love the way that its deep history enriches my life even now, when I live so far away from it.
I don't know that I would ever again live in this place; I have too much of too many other places in me so that this one always has and always will be just a little two small to fit right--but I love that it has a place in me.
One of the lovely things about here is the code of courtesty. It has always been awkward to mein the States how you are in waiting rooms, for instance. Here, you say good morning or day to everyone before sitting down. Here also, on the train, before entering a compartment (if you need a visual here, recall the Hogwarts Express and how Harry and co are alwas in their own compartments), you ask for permission by those already in there.
This one woman who just sat down in ours saw me writing here and complimented me on "what lovely handwriting you have." I am quite delighted by this (though my sister says it has, in fact, gotten worse!)
I was thinking how long has passed since last I wondered here. 10 years now since I was up in the peaks of the Tatras. 7 years since last I travelled deep into the heart of the country, up towards Poland and east towards the Ukraine. This, I believe, is poetry. That last summer, I stayed with some14 others in the Fatra mountains (smaller, rounder mountain range) at a chata (pronounce the "ch" like a voiceless "k") (chata's are like a rustic cabin or cottage). One afternoon one of the girls and I took a long walk, losing ourselves deep in the fields picking wild blueberries and mushrooms, and then looking out for bears as we found our way slowly back through the black forests, our mouths blue and happy. The mountains themselves were shades of blue and the fields bright green and the valley golden and deep green. Beautiful. I think there is a degree to which this place is like the Sea; it gets into your veins and runs through you so you can never forget it; never quite catch your breath from wonder when you're by it.
I love watching the houses and flats as we pass by; buildings whose faces I would know in the dark like a lover; their lines, curves, and textures just right. Just right like being on a train at all. Weekends in highschool, taking the train country to country, home to home, german to slovak to german again. My world. A familiar world. In dreams I often wander and grow lost on a train, but the lostness is beautiful to me; the lostness I carry back out of my dreams with me, into the whole of my life. "To live without roads is one way not to be lost." (naomi shihab nye)
Once I tried to make sense of my world by mapping it out like the metro. Places I have lived or studied and the paths I moved on between them--marked time. Languages in subtext. They were to o equal for a painless answer. I am a child of many worlds, a voice of many tongues. I then decided that the map of me lies in the people I have met and known. My story, dissolved across the world into other lives and tales.
Just the other day, I returned to the church my family engaged in here, expecting to find three or four friends and instead, there was a convergence of time and people I know even from the very earliest memories of this place and people of my later years here came. It was like pieces of my life for a moment brought together. Such a lovely surprise.
How to describe to you my city? The last summer I spent here is five years gone. Gone Perhaps "ago" is better here, for I think of that summer still. Living in Slovakia. Working in Vienna. Making radio programmes. Writing intensely and trying to "find myself;" find how my selves from all thse different worlds were supposed to be one person living in peace when the worlds themselves don't get along; exist as polar opposites. Remember travelling by bus across the continent, ferrying across the Channel (white cliffs of Dover rising!), travelling to London for interviews. Remember the hot summer days when the air itself sizzled on the black cobbles of the city (Bratislava, not London), and burned my soles as I spent hours alone downtown, meandering through galleries, reading in the University Library, documenting in pictures I've since lost that world I loved. I love.
The buildings of downtown, old next to new. Old even to the time of the Roamns and before--Celtic farms once--new to very current and noisy, sweaty construction that smells like cold water somehow. A growing city. Moving and morphing. Do you know how many names and in how many languages this city has been called?
Shades of fading paint, peeling through to cement peeling through to old brick--layers and layers. The old old wall of the Old City, one length still standing. Remaining destruction from Napoleon--even to a cannonball still wedged into the tower of our Old Town Hall.
Art everywhere. Grafitti on most every surface (though usually, respectfully kept off the Old Town district buildings). Fascinating art installations--a display of Slovak wines through cask art. Who knew? Statues--Sir Roland. George and the Dragon. Hans Christian Anderson. Hviezdoslav. Famous poets and political saviours.The fomentors of Slovak national identity (which is relatively new and an ancient land. I grew up in the shaping and making of the nation itself.) One summer, enormous fotoraphs from around the world hanging like sheets around one of the squares. I wished then they were my fotos. I wished the resolution of my camera was good enough for such blowups. One summer I paced around searching for art institutes to which I could apply for study.
The old wall of the Old City heading around to the last remaining old gate--Michalska Brana--St Michael's Gate. My favourite part of the city. You pass through the arched gate under a beautiful copper topped tower and enter the Old City--opening before you is a cobbled streed lined up and down each side with cafes. People spill out like flowers from a basket, littering the chairs and tables with their colours and their lovely varied words. At night it is most beautiufl to me. Van Goh's painting of a city street of cafes by night always makes me thinkof this street. It captures just the right atmosphere, vibrancy, and glow.
From nearly every point in the city you can see the castle rising high on the hill, its largest tower facing west to Vienna. Crown jewels were once held there, in the time of teh Austro-Hungarian empire. Empress Maria Theresa (mother of Marie Antoinette) would come and hold court there, so the houses of the nobility drape the surrounding hills. The empress was so fat that she rode a horse everywhere, so when you are in the castle you will note how wide, deep, and flat the stairs are for the sake of that unfortunate creature.
Across the way is St Martin's Cathedral, where through history many Hungarian kings and queens were crowned. One of the villages where my family lived was most often Hungarian, so there all the statues and inscriptions are in that language.
I remember when the first shopping mall came to the country, a chink the dam. Now we have many, nestled new into the old. I took my youngest sister (whom I'm now travelling with!) there for her first salon haircut. We went after to the lake next door, rented a paddle boat, and jumped off in the middle of the lake. Our clothes so heavy clinbing back aboard was nearly impossible, and her newly styled hair washed flat... but our dripping and laughing moment was perfect.
We have another lake with crystaline waters to which she and I biked nearly ever day one exquisite summer I was home from university. 7 km. This week we plan to bus to that village and then walk out there as we no longer have our bikes here. But we want "our" lake. Apples and cheese and water and sun.
There are several mountain ranges in this country, and one is beginning to grow in the distance now. Beautiful. I forgot how blue the green here is, and in these hills and mountains and across the whole of this little country are over 180 castles and castle ruins.
Nature is iportant here. Even in the city, most everyone has a garden plot outside the city limits. No yards, just gardens. Land that is beautiful and will nourish you.
I love teh poppies here. The further we go today, the more I see them. So red and delicate. When we had to say goodbye to friends moving away, it helped heal our grief to stand in a field of poppies--a field of bleeding red--the visualisation of our hurt like a balm, soothing us.
In the near distance right now are some smaller moutnains that I would almost swear I climbed a few years ago! No way to know, though. I didn't even know then wehre I was.
It's funny the way things affect you. When we were young, my olders sister and I lived to read. Books, and certainly english ones, were ahrd to find, so we read everything we could get our hands on--reading, as a result, things far too old for us. For instance, storeis of war and desolation and rape (which we couldn't understand except that it was dreadful) and pillage and torture in Europe. Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and book excerpts were especially good for that.
When we moved here, those storeis ripe in our heads, and our parents' american-instilled fear of anything communitst filling our world, we made contingency plans. How to escape when war started, when the new country collapsed, when nazis or communists took over again. We gave our parents up for loss--with their terrible language acquirement and heavy accents, they could never hid, blend in, or escape. Taken away, tortured, and killed But we would survive. We mapped our various escape routs out of the country--over thsoe mountains, through that river, and then... We covered who and how we would be responsible for "the children," (our siblings). I made them practise scaling walls and walking fences, and tried to teach them the art of dodging bullets (though, in retrospect, I realise mudballs shoot very differently than bullets and shrapnel.) In my dreams our parents secured us in an orphanage right before being taken away from us.
It didn't help those wild and rather uneducated speculations in that time that the government here was, in fact, still sorting itself out and rather unstable, relatively speaking. At elections iwthin our first year, there was widespread concern over a coup, we were given to understand. Many expatriots had their bags packed and emergency exits and rendezvous planned out. I remember climbing up my apple tree in the orchard of our first house wondering what morning would bring the night of elections. Fortunately, it brought none of those negatives.
It also didn't help that within our first year and a half there also occured the impeachment process of Clinton (causing our vulnerable and imaginative minds to disbelieve our parents' claims that the USA was safe and stable) and the nearby war in Yugoslavia. By the time of the bombing in Kosovo, we had friends there who were hiding in basements and shelters. Friends who didn't evacuate and we stopped hearing news from. Our house constantly shook as bomber jets from a nearby base in Hungary flew over our hosue on their way to unlaod issiles (on our friends!) and traffice was stopped in the streets from long lines of tanks filing by, achingly slow, along with supply trucks and red cross vehicles.
it is so funny in this odd way to recall all those fears.
Political scientits talk of how soccer united Germany after the wall fell, off if not for taht, what would have happened, who knows. Here, we ahd a similar experience when the Slovak hockey team won its first gold medal. Of course, we had played long and won games before, but not as Slovakia separate from Czech Republic. it was the single nation of Slovakia's first win, and the country went crazy. We all went crazy. It was really the first display of nationalism by the new country, according to everyone. Even to the 1800s, the Slovak language wasn't considered much more than peasant speak as opposed to a national language. Ludovit Stur was one of those behind the birth of Slovaki nationalism through the language. I think that is something very special about my experiences, something difficult I wouldn't trade, and something of the bond I share to this place; that I was shaped into my person with teh shaping of this place into a nation.
I was thinking again now of Bratislava, and of the peeling pain, and the old with the new, and even of teh buildings you still find bullet holes riddling the walls of. And I think, one of the reasons I love that place so much is its story. Hours of reading its history, years of walking through its history in the streets, and a life that is part of its history, however unrecognised. I love how my story is wrapped into its larger one. I love the way that its deep history enriches my life even now, when I live so far away from it.
I don't know that I would ever again live in this place; I have too much of too many other places in me so that this one always has and always will be just a little two small to fit right--but I love that it has a place in me.
One of the lovely things about here is the code of courtesty. It has always been awkward to mein the States how you are in waiting rooms, for instance. Here, you say good morning or day to everyone before sitting down. Here also, on the train, before entering a compartment (if you need a visual here, recall the Hogwarts Express and how Harry and co are alwas in their own compartments), you ask for permission by those already in there.
This one woman who just sat down in ours saw me writing here and complimented me on "what lovely handwriting you have." I am quite delighted by this (though my sister says it has, in fact, gotten worse!)
I was thinking how long has passed since last I wondered here. 10 years now since I was up in the peaks of the Tatras. 7 years since last I travelled deep into the heart of the country, up towards Poland and east towards the Ukraine. This, I believe, is poetry. That last summer, I stayed with some14 others in the Fatra mountains (smaller, rounder mountain range) at a chata (pronounce the "ch" like a voiceless "k") (chata's are like a rustic cabin or cottage). One afternoon one of the girls and I took a long walk, losing ourselves deep in the fields picking wild blueberries and mushrooms, and then looking out for bears as we found our way slowly back through the black forests, our mouths blue and happy. The mountains themselves were shades of blue and the fields bright green and the valley golden and deep green. Beautiful. I think there is a degree to which this place is like the Sea; it gets into your veins and runs through you so you can never forget it; never quite catch your breath from wonder when you're by it.
Sunday, 17 June 2012
Explorations.
I spent the afternoon downtown today with my sister and some friends of hers who followed her here from Italy. It was neat, wandering around and taking so many pictures. Very hot, though. 37 degrees (C)! We walked and walked and walked. We went around downtown city area Bratislava, played in the Presidential Palace gardens, and climbed up into the Bratislava Castle. We snacked on a Botel (hotel that is a boat) on the Danube and later (though before a lovely evening meal on one of the Squares), my sister and I grocery shopped.
It is absurd how happy shopping here again makes me. Everything is in the proper aisle, making sense. I used to wander lost in US stores, unable to find flour or paper products or the slightest thing, because the stores are organised differently; a different pattern of logic and association.
Place matters.
Tomorrow we run away to the mountains. I haven't climbed the mountains in 10 years; far too long. The sea, I think, runs more strongly in me than the mountains, but I can hardly bear flat lands for very long. I need the mountains--at least rolling hills--around me, visible somewhere on the periphery. And tomorrow we train out and climb up and stay over and our bags of chocolate and smoked cheese and apples and crackers are packed, waiting for us. My train ticket whispers to me from my pocket, eager to go.
I won't be online again for that until Tuesday, but I'm sure I shall have lots of stories to tell then!
It is absurd how happy shopping here again makes me. Everything is in the proper aisle, making sense. I used to wander lost in US stores, unable to find flour or paper products or the slightest thing, because the stores are organised differently; a different pattern of logic and association.
Place matters.
Tomorrow we run away to the mountains. I haven't climbed the mountains in 10 years; far too long. The sea, I think, runs more strongly in me than the mountains, but I can hardly bear flat lands for very long. I need the mountains--at least rolling hills--around me, visible somewhere on the periphery. And tomorrow we train out and climb up and stay over and our bags of chocolate and smoked cheese and apples and crackers are packed, waiting for us. My train ticket whispers to me from my pocket, eager to go.
I won't be online again for that until Tuesday, but I'm sure I shall have lots of stories to tell then!
Home
I have arrived. It is like waking up from a dream; I think a shadow of myself has been living here these last four and a half years, and now my Stateside self is a shadow and this is real again. The only real, though not.
It is funny; I think one of the most courageous things that I can do is to go home. When three years ago I went back to my first home, I practically had to be forced off the plane. They didn't want to fly away with me still on there, for some reason. But the question of "how will this be home now?" is a terrifying one to come face to answer with.
Arriving in JFK was fine. Boarding the plane to here the other night made me cry. It was not supposed to be practically 5 years before coming back. I have never been away this long before; I have never had to experience coming back with this quality of foreignness to it--not coming back here, to this place, where even my family is now gone from. Where I have changed so much since. Trepidation, and overwhelming and conflicting emotions. Happy and sorrowful.
I wondered what amazing rush of emotions I would see when first setting foot back in Austria again; at the airport where so many many years ago now my family first came through to see three strangers who led us across the border to our new world. I wondered what swell of feeling would rise up in me at the sight of the two castles, the tower, and the colourful highrises of Petrzalka coming into view across the fields and the Danube. There was not even a border to slow down through this time; just the sudden change in language on signs to indicate you moved from West to East. Ah the EU.
But there was nothing really; nothing sensational at all, that is. Just this odd feeling like I was simply come back to this country from a day trip jaunt to Vienna. Like I had never left. The only thing to indicate that I was not here the day before my arrival was this slight sensation of internal displacement--the fact that I am not fully in tune with the rythmms of this place right now, and worse; the fact that I knew it would be so and minded it much less than I had thought I would.
Wandering through the city was bliss. So much exactly as I had left it. And finding all these things I hadn't even remembered would have been lost--the use of centigrade again (so much sense!!), the naturalness of public transportation, the counting of coins. I miss the krown.
It is funny how place is place. I don't know why I grew up with the belief that place could be lost when you leave it. It stays, and morphs in shape a little, but remains its self.
In the airport on my way, I was trying to word out my definition of home a little bit, and I found the words for it. For people like myself, who have many homes, what we come to associate with home is a sense of security and belonging; of peace and contenement, because we wander all our homes with this sense of displacement; of not fully belonging, and of knowing we do not wish to fully belong because that would lose us our other homes. Yet we long for that wholeness. Most other people are able to simply have home be the one place where they are familiar with intimately; the one set of customs and moral values and history and geography and cultural innanities. But ours are many, and varied, and create unending tumultousness in our lives; conflict and an eternal yearning.
So for me, home is not a place, and it is not people, and it is not "finding myself." But it is a carving out of space around myself where I am fully able to be me--all of me (the me of each different country and culture and history)--where I am able to create my own contentment because I am whole instead of pieces. Home is a circle of self-create peace, even in the middle of the eternal longing.
And that is how I know I will be able to leave here again and still be alright; because I can carry all of my worlds with me, and because that is what I wish to do the most.
But for now, it is beautiful and wonderful to be back in this particular place with its wonderful unique texture, and to dissolve myself back into this world so that no one who has not known me knows I am not what I seem; knows that theirs is not the tongue or way in which I only or most often move. This is happiness.
It is funny; I think one of the most courageous things that I can do is to go home. When three years ago I went back to my first home, I practically had to be forced off the plane. They didn't want to fly away with me still on there, for some reason. But the question of "how will this be home now?" is a terrifying one to come face to answer with.
Arriving in JFK was fine. Boarding the plane to here the other night made me cry. It was not supposed to be practically 5 years before coming back. I have never been away this long before; I have never had to experience coming back with this quality of foreignness to it--not coming back here, to this place, where even my family is now gone from. Where I have changed so much since. Trepidation, and overwhelming and conflicting emotions. Happy and sorrowful.
I wondered what amazing rush of emotions I would see when first setting foot back in Austria again; at the airport where so many many years ago now my family first came through to see three strangers who led us across the border to our new world. I wondered what swell of feeling would rise up in me at the sight of the two castles, the tower, and the colourful highrises of Petrzalka coming into view across the fields and the Danube. There was not even a border to slow down through this time; just the sudden change in language on signs to indicate you moved from West to East. Ah the EU.
But there was nothing really; nothing sensational at all, that is. Just this odd feeling like I was simply come back to this country from a day trip jaunt to Vienna. Like I had never left. The only thing to indicate that I was not here the day before my arrival was this slight sensation of internal displacement--the fact that I am not fully in tune with the rythmms of this place right now, and worse; the fact that I knew it would be so and minded it much less than I had thought I would.
Wandering through the city was bliss. So much exactly as I had left it. And finding all these things I hadn't even remembered would have been lost--the use of centigrade again (so much sense!!), the naturalness of public transportation, the counting of coins. I miss the krown.
It is funny how place is place. I don't know why I grew up with the belief that place could be lost when you leave it. It stays, and morphs in shape a little, but remains its self.
In the airport on my way, I was trying to word out my definition of home a little bit, and I found the words for it. For people like myself, who have many homes, what we come to associate with home is a sense of security and belonging; of peace and contenement, because we wander all our homes with this sense of displacement; of not fully belonging, and of knowing we do not wish to fully belong because that would lose us our other homes. Yet we long for that wholeness. Most other people are able to simply have home be the one place where they are familiar with intimately; the one set of customs and moral values and history and geography and cultural innanities. But ours are many, and varied, and create unending tumultousness in our lives; conflict and an eternal yearning.
So for me, home is not a place, and it is not people, and it is not "finding myself." But it is a carving out of space around myself where I am fully able to be me--all of me (the me of each different country and culture and history)--where I am able to create my own contentment because I am whole instead of pieces. Home is a circle of self-create peace, even in the middle of the eternal longing.
And that is how I know I will be able to leave here again and still be alright; because I can carry all of my worlds with me, and because that is what I wish to do the most.
But for now, it is beautiful and wonderful to be back in this particular place with its wonderful unique texture, and to dissolve myself back into this world so that no one who has not known me knows I am not what I seem; knows that theirs is not the tongue or way in which I only or most often move. This is happiness.
Thursday, 14 June 2012
Homeward Bound
This refrain "I'm going Home! I'm going Home!" has been playing itself over and again in my head today, non-stop. It doesn't matter all the other things coming into my head. It doesn't matter that I might be in conversation with someone. It plays in the background, joyfully, noisily. I'm going home!
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow I go to an early morning meeting at work, and then from there head straight to the airport. Time to go. Time to say goodbye, time to say hello. Hello world I have left behind these last five years. Hello languages I have only heard in the occasional movies, in internet radio streaming, in albums of christmas music and in my dreams.
I am so excited to walk the cobbles, to meander along the danube, to revisit old haunts. To wander lost circles of places I love. To climb up the heights of the Tatra mountains again, and to follow the trains across the borders that separate my worlds. To be baptised in the languages I have missed so long.
I keep thinking somehow this won't work out; my tickets will be wrong; I'll have jotted down the wrong date of departure; my car will break down again on the wait to the airport. Or my appendix will burst and I'll spend the whole time in a hospital somewhere--it wouldn't matter where, since the matter would be that it would not be where I want, but in a hospital at all, anywhere--instead. I check and recheck and wonder.
How shall I sleep these last few hours away?
How vividly I remember tonight my first night there, before it was Home, before it was a home. When my family one by one straggled out of our new, strange rooms with the strange mattresses on the floor, and congregated in an upstairs room at three in the morning, bedraggled and wide-awake. We sat around a table and ate the rolls, the newness of their taste filling our mouths; the newness of their taste softened by the familiarity of nutella spread on them. Nutella which I have known (though by other names) my whole life. I feel like that first night again, full of questions and anxieties, full of an odd emptiness--the vast void of the unknown when the knowing lies just out of reach--but in all of that, still I feel also of hope and excitement and wonder.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow I go to an early morning meeting at work, and then from there head straight to the airport. Time to go. Time to say goodbye, time to say hello. Hello world I have left behind these last five years. Hello languages I have only heard in the occasional movies, in internet radio streaming, in albums of christmas music and in my dreams.
I am so excited to walk the cobbles, to meander along the danube, to revisit old haunts. To wander lost circles of places I love. To climb up the heights of the Tatra mountains again, and to follow the trains across the borders that separate my worlds. To be baptised in the languages I have missed so long.
I keep thinking somehow this won't work out; my tickets will be wrong; I'll have jotted down the wrong date of departure; my car will break down again on the wait to the airport. Or my appendix will burst and I'll spend the whole time in a hospital somewhere--it wouldn't matter where, since the matter would be that it would not be where I want, but in a hospital at all, anywhere--instead. I check and recheck and wonder.
How shall I sleep these last few hours away?
How vividly I remember tonight my first night there, before it was Home, before it was a home. When my family one by one straggled out of our new, strange rooms with the strange mattresses on the floor, and congregated in an upstairs room at three in the morning, bedraggled and wide-awake. We sat around a table and ate the rolls, the newness of their taste filling our mouths; the newness of their taste softened by the familiarity of nutella spread on them. Nutella which I have known (though by other names) my whole life. I feel like that first night again, full of questions and anxieties, full of an odd emptiness--the vast void of the unknown when the knowing lies just out of reach--but in all of that, still I feel also of hope and excitement and wonder.
Wednesday, 13 June 2012
Other-Worldly Encounters
I confessed at work today that for me, people are a matter of life or death. I think more particularly, though, I simply could never live without the possibility of strangers. It is what I love most about living in cities; the constant surround of faces you have yet to meet, of people whose each and every world is a universe unexplored, full of fascination and wonder. I could wander in strangers forever and not feel more at home than with a thousand faces I do not know; do not know yet.
When I flew up to Sacramento, California the other week, I chatted briefly with the man working one of the shops. We spoke of weather, of what brought him to that place (he was not a local), of where he would rather live and why. And I asked him if this was not where he wanted to be, what kept him there?
I love the endless questions you can ask the stranger, and how the answers colour the world a little more fully.
When I picked up a rental car recently, the manager sent me to meet the car agent. She introduced herself, and I heard in her immediately an echo of me. While talking over the car and making sure it had no dents I need worry about, we talked over the world. We had both lived at some point in Eastern Europe, and it was just beautiful, that moment of meeting someone with whom you share a whole other world--a language group neither of you currently speak in, but both dream in. Food and the lilt on your tongue that taste the same. And she, looking at me, said, "and of course, you are an artist." I did not disagree. It is one of my many me's.
I think if the world doesn't hold those moments, when strangers are kindred, when people carry worlds like a narnian wardrobe door, when one foreign being can see your own being and be seen in return--truly seen--then it would be so much meaninglessness to me. So cliched and wearied.
In a day and a half I'll be in an airport again, moving back into other worlds--places and people alike--and I can hardly wait for all those beautiful encounters.w
When I flew up to Sacramento, California the other week, I chatted briefly with the man working one of the shops. We spoke of weather, of what brought him to that place (he was not a local), of where he would rather live and why. And I asked him if this was not where he wanted to be, what kept him there?
I love the endless questions you can ask the stranger, and how the answers colour the world a little more fully.
When I picked up a rental car recently, the manager sent me to meet the car agent. She introduced herself, and I heard in her immediately an echo of me. While talking over the car and making sure it had no dents I need worry about, we talked over the world. We had both lived at some point in Eastern Europe, and it was just beautiful, that moment of meeting someone with whom you share a whole other world--a language group neither of you currently speak in, but both dream in. Food and the lilt on your tongue that taste the same. And she, looking at me, said, "and of course, you are an artist." I did not disagree. It is one of my many me's.
I think if the world doesn't hold those moments, when strangers are kindred, when people carry worlds like a narnian wardrobe door, when one foreign being can see your own being and be seen in return--truly seen--then it would be so much meaninglessness to me. So cliched and wearied.
In a day and a half I'll be in an airport again, moving back into other worlds--places and people alike--and I can hardly wait for all those beautiful encounters.w
Tuesday, 12 June 2012
The Thing About Travel
I love travel. It is not the over-all "grand adventure" of travel which touches my soul, though, but rather; the many little moments which make it up. The overall adventure often overwhelms me in its thought and tires me in its actuality. But the moments of it come as solid little gemstones I collect carefully and treasure--not to hoard, but to love; that is, to share and to admire and to allow their beauty to enrich the world I bring them into.
As I write this (first on paper, in fact), I sit on an old lobstering dock, which now houses a charming fresh lobster restaurant. "Lobster in the rough," a woman told of it. I have no recollection of actually eating lobster before this. Now I shall have fresh lobster and mussels with a side of corn, sitting at a wooden table the colour of honey, watching the fishing boats, as the cool breeze plays with my hat and teases my hair. I am content.
These boats look like those of my childhood, and the crush and hush of the water is the undercurrent of all my early memories. (Note I do not say "formative" memories. I like to believe that every moment of my life is formative to all the rest of it.)
Only a week ago, I was just returned from a trip to the Pacific coast. Now I have spent my morning on the East coast. Literally. And I remember, this is the world I love. The world of moments which we ourselves determine how to string together, to weave into our story.
As I write this (first on paper, in fact), I sit on an old lobstering dock, which now houses a charming fresh lobster restaurant. "Lobster in the rough," a woman told of it. I have no recollection of actually eating lobster before this. Now I shall have fresh lobster and mussels with a side of corn, sitting at a wooden table the colour of honey, watching the fishing boats, as the cool breeze plays with my hat and teases my hair. I am content.
These boats look like those of my childhood, and the crush and hush of the water is the undercurrent of all my early memories. (Note I do not say "formative" memories. I like to believe that every moment of my life is formative to all the rest of it.)
Only a week ago, I was just returned from a trip to the Pacific coast. Now I have spent my morning on the East coast. Literally. And I remember, this is the world I love. The world of moments which we ourselves determine how to string together, to weave into our story.
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