Well. What to say. I’ve lived a whole year
in this first month away.
Sweden
I’m so glad I spent the first two weeks
with my amazing mother, exploring the country to develop a sense of place, and
get acquainted with the local trees and birds. Our road trip took us the
distance of a crazy 3000 km. From the rolling hills of the countryside coast we
zoomed onwards through the endless birch and pine forests, past large inland
waters and picturesque lakeside villages. We familiarized ourselves with the
typical Falufärg red cottages, loppis
signs (garage sales), and roadside ralaros (wilgenroosje/fireweed). We
practiced our first Swedish, paid our first kronor, and traced our whole journey
on our collection of roadmaps in red marker (a very satisfying pastime). The
trip ultimately led us to the Jämtland
Triangeln nearby Åre, a three-day trek across
three large mountain stations (all outfitted with gorgeous saunas with a
mountain view and populated solely by Swedish hiker families). There, finally,
we could slow down and properly introduce ourselves to Sweden. We had already
entered Samiland at this point, so for three days we walked amongst the
reindeer herds. Back in the mountains after so long, we both felt electrical, so
alive, so recharged! The crisp mountain air, the quiet grandeur of the scenery,
the powerful presence of the snowy giants, and achy muscles at the end of the
day, Woeii! Surely this is where people were meant to dwell!
At the end of these first two weeks I step
onto the train platform in Karlskrona, the setting of my incipient life. (Karlskrona
turns out to be a World Heritage Site, that’s
the level of beauty I’m dealing with here on a daily basis.) These first few
days only a handful of fellow students are in town, and I mostly keep to
myself, running necessary errands. I gingerly cherish these few blank slate
days, the silence before the storm. I remember those days from way in the
beginning in California: a mind empty enough to take notice of its
surroundings. I know that within no time, a new social fabric will start
forming around me like a sticky spider web, and my mind will become tenaciously
populated with new people and all the intricacies surrounding them.
Spacemaking and timelessness
While soloing my first days here, I do
prepare the space for the arrival of this new life and its agents. Since I’m
one of the first two Mustards to arrive (our house is called the Mustard House),
and since I’m in a sense a ‘house prefect’, being the official tenant on the
lease, I’m in the favorable position of having a big influence in setting the
first ‘vibe’ in the house. I resolve to be my favorite self here these first
days, because with that I create the living environment I feel best and safest
in. A great first idea comes to mind: I set up my tent in the living room and
camp in it, since we’ve agreed we’ll only divide rooms once everyone is here.
Not only is living room camping one of my favorite things, it’s also quirky
enough that I’d only do it around people I feel comfortable with. If that tent
is the first thing they see when they arrive, I’ll have set a standard that
makes me feel great, and will start us
off with a wide margin for silly playfulness. Spacemaking y’all.
Sure enough, there I hear the thunder in
the distance: the new life roars into being with my housemates and fellow
students swarming in on the eve of our first week together. One after the
other, we pick them up from the train station with our growing group of
housemates, until we are complete: 6 Mustards in total. I am ready, and gladly push
off from the safe shore into the unknown sea. I have nothing holding me back
this time around and came with nothing but very promising premonitions about
the year ahead. The period that follows is difficult to describe. Time fell
away in it. I’m only now starting to regain a sense of time as conventionally
agreed upon. If you spend every waking moment with new people, and impressions
and experiences are packed together so densely with barely space to breathe in
between, days mean nothing, weeks mean nothing. It might have been months,
years. Time as a reference loses its relevance. It was a period of complete
ecstasy, where I seemed to be living the life of my wildest dreams. Swimming in
the Baltic sea every day, my pores wide with the impulse of life, campfires on
the beach, jam sessions and potluck dinners, a hazy karaoke night, overnight
bike trips, camping on a lakeside, the most unbelievable sunsets that set the
whole sky ablaze, evenings spent with my new house mates discussing the nature
of reality, or sharing our family stories, or brushing our teeth together. It
was a total dream. Two moments stand out in this flurry of perfection that
deserve mention.
Sunrise
and the rings of Saturn
The first was an early morning, our first
day of school. I had not been able to sleep that night, and at 5:30 I give up, slip
on my morning robe, and step out of the house, barefoot. The neighborhood is
still, and the city veiled in early sea fog. I walk to the forest up the hill.
Feet on the cold wet morning grass, painfully on the pebbled forest paths. Everywhere
spider webs hang heavy with glistening dewy pearls. Birds timidly herald the
sun in this time of day that is all theirs. I make my way down the face of a
scaly rock hill, all the way to the waterside: a brackish sea arm in the
Karlskrona archipelago. Amongst the nature in that fresh dawn, I do ceremony.
When I wade into the water, I share it only with a snow-white swan family, and
the green murky water people I can sense beneath me. The surrounding wooded
islands and inlets are shrouded in fog, and fog covers the rising sun, so that
I can look right into it, a ball of light in an opaque wall. On the other side
of the sky, still high, sits the large moon, and in between these two heavenly
bodies, there is me, afloat in the water. I feel their cosmic size, and my
smallness in between them. The water is perfectly still, so that the ripples on
the water surface flow away from my body undisturbed, colored yellow, brown,
and blue in the morning sun like the rings of Saturn. It was an eternal moment of
profound mystical beauty; as if I had swum into the mists of Avalon. Some way
to start a school year.
Sunset
and the springboard
The second eternal moment came within a
week of that first morning. The whole class had come to Långö,
one of the islands of Karlskrona city. While our classmates fire the bbq and
hang out on the shore, my housemates and I swim out into the sea. The sun is
close to setting and has already spread a soft orange glow across water and
sky. We swim around the corner of the island to a cliff, facing west, its
granite wall turned to gold in the low sunlight. We clamber up the cliff, to a long
springboard jutting out a good 8 meters above the water. The first of us jumps
off, and I think to myself: ‘No way dudio, I’m staying right here.’ The second
one jumps, I begin to itch. The third one jumps and I’ve made up my mind: I’m
doing this. I inch onto the board, the setting sun is straight ahead, but I
stare down. Vertigo grips me. My new friends behind me cheer me on, but I’m
nailed to my place, shivering in the cold breeze. For a good 5 minutes (but
what is time, it feels like forever) I stand there, trying to breathe through
fear. I want to live! Be free! Brave enough to live the life I want! But I
can’t move. My supporters and me have a laughing fit about it, but meanwhile a
huge suspense has built up, that has gained enormous symbolic meaning for me. Everyone
behind me is gripped by it too. The sun is creeping closer and closer to the
horizon, it’s a total movie scene. A movie that can only end one way, because
that’s the movie I want to be in, and it’s in my hands. But I’m still not
there. Then, I hear a surging sound behind me. My new soul friends have begun
breathing into my back, making big energy waves of courage and support. Since
being here, I’ve had many throwbacks to my year in California, but the parallel
is inescapable this time. When I left California, my friends had compiled a
book for me filled with pictures and drawings and notes and letters. A physical
manifestion of the purest love. I read it on the plane back to Europe. As I was
turning my back on all of my beloved, golden state life, and heading into the
unknown, one note from a friend read: “We are the wind at your back.” It became
the mantra that tided me over that first year back in the Netherlands, where I
fed off of their love and support that had filled up my reservoirs. And now
here I stand, and my new friends, in another new life, are literally the wind
at my back. This kind of magic surpasses fear by light years. I jump.
Frames
of reference and alchemy
They call it the honeymoon phase. I burnt
up my whole serotonin supply within days, breaking through some of my system’s
early warning signals, until my body finally felt forced to pull the emergency
brake and I collapse, sick and exhausted, but so content. On that Monday (in
linear time a week into the school year), I take my queasy, stuffy body on an
evening stroll in our neighborhood woods. In that quiet moment, walking in a
pitch dark forest lit by Narnia street lanterns, I feel such deep agency over
my life. In this new land, with new people, new everything, I feel so distant
from old ‘usuals’. I feel no attachment to previous frames of reference, ideas
about who I used or didn’t use to be. In these last weeks I have already begun
redefining myself, and this current version of me, and what I presently fill my
days with, seems to be all that matters. In a stroke of inspiration, I call on
my Existence, who, back in California, had been an active ally of mine in
co-creating my life. We hadn’t talked in a while, and during that stroll I
invite him back to the drawing table, to make this life of mine what we jointly
envision for it.
Distance from old frames of reference... Many of my
classmates feel that way these days. Whether it’s the nature of the people in
our group, or the high expectations and anticipation, or by social design on
part of our amazing teaching staff (very skilled facilitators and process
designers), we have become a group of alchemists, making gold. But if you want
to make gold, your beaker can’t leak. People had barely let their parents know
they had arrived safely. People didn’t want anybody to come visit just yet. These
first, formative weeks feel precious and private. We’ve embarked on a learning
journey together that is stretching our brains to new lengths (I feel hyper
much of the time as I notice my brain work, work, work, forging new neural
pathways all over the place). But it goes well beyond brain stuff. The journey
has set all our senses asponge, and is opening the gates of our hearts. It’s
full body, full being learning. We learn about complexity and abundance. And we
experience it everywhere in our own, brand new lives. We tune into each other’s
energy levels as we learn to host circles. We learn to navigate the murky
waters of communication styles and team formation. We learn to sail the narrow
strait between power and love. We learn to share our dreams and harvest each
other’s thoughts. We learn about the Framework for Strategic Sustainable
Development and about sacred circle dances. When we go out camping together,
we’ll have a round of appreciations around the campfire. We look out at the
night sky and we learn to weave our narratives into the space-time fabric. We
learn to pull the strands of the web of life like the strings of an instrument
that sings the song of the universe. We learn to regrow the social mycelium
that our ancestors tended to but has since fallen into disrepair. We learn to look
inward to see ourselves mirrored in society, and how to take our steps towards
healing it, and leading it forward. The future is rising.
