The life of dreams

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.