The Big Move

Hello loyal readers! Yesterday I moved across the world, from Amsterdam back to California, and I decided that I’d move the location of my blog too. I’m saying goodbye to WordPress and starting up with Blogger. You can read all about what’s coming next for me at http://holesinmyrainbows.blogspot.com.

This location will stay right where it is, as well, so you can come back and read any of the old favorites whenever you want. I mean, the post about that really nasty diaper? How can you live without it?

Your interest in HIMR has been much appreciated and I look forward to keeping up the new and improved site for your enjoyment. Please keep reading and stay in touch!

Dank je wel!

ANOTHER little engine that couldn’t

Ah, Europe! The land of convenient and affordable train travel! Where you can hop on any locomotive and ride that rail from country to country and see everything you’ve ever dreamed of with total ease, freedom and, of course, speed.

This, at least, is what they tell you.

Those of you who have read my previous post about train travel know that even the European rail can let us down sometimes, but everyone says it almost never happens. And since lightning doesn’t strike twice, as they say, I was more than a little surprised – not to mention bitter – when the trains let me down again. And when I say let me down, this is what I mean:

Saturday 13 June 2009, times are approximate

9:00 am: I ride my bike to Amsterdam Centraal.

9:26 am: I am seated comfortably on a Thalys train as it pulls away from Amsterdam right on time, due to arrive in Paris Nord at 1:35 pm that afternoon. I am going to Paris to spend the weekend with my brother, sister, and brother-in-law before they come to Amsterdam. I haven’t seen them in almost 6 months.

11:30 am: The train makes a routine stop at a little station in a town on the Netherlands/Belgium border.

12:30 pm: The train is still sitting at the station. No one has given us any information.

1:30 pm: They finally make an announcement. The train cannot continue on this track and is turning back to Amsterdam. We are instructed to go outside the station, where buses will pick us up and take us to the central station in Antwerp, where we can catch another Thalys train to Paris. We herd outside, where we join a crowd of about 300 people from other trains that faced similar fates. There are no employees or officials, no buses, it’s not clear where or when they’ll be stopping at the station, and it’s very, very hot. I debate getting on a train back to Amsterdam and calling the whole thing off. If it’s anything like the last time this happened to me, it could take all day.

2:00 pm: An unmarked bus pulls up to the curb, and the crowd surges toward it. I wrestle my way through the mob and manage to get one of the last seats. There are people packed into the aisles and fighting each other as the bus pulls off toward Antwerp.

3:00 pm: The bus arrives in Antwerp. No one has told us where to go or when the train would be leaving for Paris, so I wait in a long line at the international travel desk. Once at the front, an employee tells me that the Thayls train from Antwerp will probably also be delayed for an indeterminate length of time, so we have to go to Brussels and take a Thalys from there. She gives me a new ticket.

4:00 pm: Train leaves from Antwerp to Brussels.

4:45 pm: Train arrives in Brussels, but I realize the woman at the info desk didn’t tell me which station the Thalys would be leaving from. I assume it’s Brussels Centraal, so I get off there. I can’t find the train on the departure screens, so I wait in line again at the international travel desk. I ask to confirm the Thalys train going to Paris at said time. “Yes, that train is on time,” the employee said, “but it’s not leaving from this station.” Momentary panic. Fortunately I have enough time to get to Brussels Midi before the Thalys leaves.

5:15 pm: I wait with a crowd on the platform designated for the train that will finally take us to Paris. There is already a train sitting there but no one is let on. People are confused. They make an announcement in French that our train is actually leaving from another platform, so a mad luggage-toting race down the escalator and through some corridors ensues. They let us on the correct train – people who had actually reserved this train and many who, like me, were on the final leg of a relentless chain of delays. I sit down but am soon approached by a spry French gentleman in his 60s; he insists that I stay in his seat, that he’ll stand and let me know when his legs get tired so we can switch. Things are starting to look up.

5:30 pm: The train departs. The people sitting on the aisle floor next to me – a man from Colorado with a few missing teeth, a gold chain necklace and a Loony Toons tattoo (a walking definition of white trash) and his overweight 9-year-old daughter – won’t stop talking to me.

6:15 pm: I give the seat back to the French gentleman. He lets me sit on his suitcase in the aisle. I make myself comfortable and immediately notice that the people I am sitting behind (trash from Belgium this time) are watching a movie on their laptop. I then notice that it is amateur porn. Hardcore amateur porn. In such a crowded train, with people looming over them in the aisles, they must realize they’re not the only ones who can see this woman’s elastic orifices. I mean, who does that? After the glorious grand finale, they turn off the movie and start playing solitaire.

6:45 pm: With my in-car entertainment over, I resort to my iPod and with Yann Tiersen soothing my nerves I look out and realize the beauty of the countryside between Belgium and Paris. The sun is warm and low over the hills and everything is glowing.

7:30 pm: The train arrives in Paris Nord. I take a deep breath and head for the metro.

8:00 pm: I walk up to the hostel where I am meeting my siblings and see them through the window. I jump up and down, waving wildly, and I know immediately that 11 hours of delayed train travel was worth it just to see them 2 days before I would have anyway.

But seriously, what the hell?

The Extreme Au Pair Challenge 2009

Ladies and gentlemen, my time as an au pair has officially come to an end. There have been ups and downs, blue skies and thunder storms, laughing fits and crying fits. (I’m referring to the children, of course.) Overall it’s been a truly great experience, but I can definitely say that I’ve tested my limits in more ways than one.

My beloved family has of course found a replacement au pair to bring into their home, and have asked me to spend a week with her and the kids to aid in everyone’s adjustment. She arrived today, and as it’s a Wednesday, she’s lucky enough to spend the entire day with yours truly while the parents are at work.

To give her a proper initiation into this world, I thought about giving her what I’ll call the Extreme Au Pair Challenge. She ought to know what’s in store for her, after all. Before I relinquish my bedroom, cell phone, bike keys, Rabobank account, Dutch language textbook, and position in the family, I thought I’d have her do a test run first with the following assigned tasks and high-pressure situations. This way, the family would know whether they can count on her, she’d know what she’s getting herself into, and, well, I would have a little fun.

Timed Challenges:

1. A planned route on the bakfiets that includes conquering steep hills, criss-crossing repeatedly over tramlines, dodging strategically placed pedestrians, navigating narrow lanes between traffic traveling in both directions, and negotiating sharp turns and awkward driveways.
2. Morning prep: Changing poopy diapers and helping the 3-year-old in potty training on the toilet before applying socks, shoes, sweaters, coats, hats, mittens, persuading each boy to choose only one small toy to bring to school, and strapping them both into the selected vehicle of transport–all without provocation of tears.
3. Getting both children to sleep without resorting to extra bottles of milk. Extra hugs may be administered.
4. Removing them peacefully from the playground equipment at school using negotiation only, not bribes or force.
5. Sweeping all crumbs, grains of rice, bits of play-doh, piles of sand, leaves, dead bugs, and plastic yogurt lids from the kitchen floor without disposing of any cherished toys in the process.
6. Reading Yertle the Turtle in its entirety, without skipping a line and without brushing aside earnest questions from the 3-year-old.
7. Mastering the pronunciation of Dutch words, gezellig, gelukkig, and achtentachtig.
8. Making a friend your age.

Scenarios:

1. You are preparing dinner for 5. There are 4 chicken breasts cooking fast on the skillet and no back-up food in the fridge. One kid is down the hall crying, having peed his pants and soaked his jeans, socks, shoes and the floor with urine, about to walk through the house in distress. The other kid has fallen down in the backyard, and is crying loudly over a very mild knee-scrape. The doorbell rings; it’s the grocery delivery man and his truck is holding up traffic on the street outside. Prioritize.
2. You are giving the kids a bath. One is covered in soap and crying because water got in his eyes. While dealing with this, you notice a gigantic turd float by and realize the other kid must have sneakily squeezed one out during the commotion.  The water, and the children, are now contaminated. Take the plastic toy bucket and proceed.
3. You are home alone with the kids, eating dinner together at the kitchen table. It’s a stormy night. The 3-year-old stops eating and looks behind you through the big glass doors into the dark garden and asks, “Who is that?” Investigate.
4. You’ve locked yourself out of the house with both children and no money an hour before dinner needs to be on the table. Both parents are at work and the neighbors are out of town. Frantically curse the universe and your own foolishness for several minutes, then solve.

I thought about putting her up to all this, but of course she’ll experience her own set of challenges, screw-ups and personal triumphs in good time, so I’ve decided to keep my own to myself. Maybe they can make the Extreme Au Pair Challenge a reality show on TLC or something. Instead I bought some flowers for her room, took her out to lunch, and will spend the rest of the week doing my best to make her feel welcome and prepared. She’s a very nice girl and I’m sure she’ll do a great job.

As for me, I think I’m ready to pass on the torch.

What I learned on my summer vacation. Part 2.

From Tangier we took an old, un-airconditioned bus to Chefchaouen, a small town in the Rif mountains. We slept on colorful beds on the roof of our hostel in the medina. The loud, melodic 5 am prayer woke us with a start and lulled us back to sleep. We wandered through the maze of blue-painted buildings, our path crossed every now and then by a scrawny feral cat or a group of shy, scrappy Moroccan kids with a soccer ball.

We haggled for 45 minutes with a young merchant and ultimately ended up with a big, beautiful traditionally woven blanket. After walking away and being called back at least 3 times, Jordi talked him down from 600 dirham to 175 (about 17 euros). Moroccans always say about the Dutch (in Dutch), “Kijken kijken, niet kopen,” essentially, “always looking never buying.” Their reputation for being cheap is world-renowned. But Jordi stuck to his price, and we got that blanket.

That evening, we took a bumpy 5-hour bus ride through the mountains to get to Fes and, although we arrived late, easily found a cheap room in a hotel right inside the medina. The center of Fes is a labyrinthine tangle of little, unmarked alleys and crowded market streets. A map does no good, so you have to pay a little kid to show you the way, or ask a new person for directions on every corner. After a dizzying few hours of exploring, dodging the relentless advances of vendors, we sat down for a lunch of olives, couscous and sweet mint tea. The rest of the day was spent finding ways to survive the heat and buying small treasures before indulging in big pink and green ice cream sundaes at a delightfully garishsweet shop.

In the last little stall we went in, full of painted ceramic bowls, the shop owner sold us a small carved wooden box. It’s a special Moroccan design that only the owner (and the guy who sold it) knows how to open. There’s a little key hidden inside, but you have to know where to look. We’d had about enough of the typically aggressive sale tactics, but this man was kind and tactful, so we gave him our business. Like many Moroccans we spoke to, he said over and over again, “You are welcome,” and it somehow meant more than just the stock reply to a thank-you.

We thanked him and walked off after he said “You are welcome” a few more times, and holding the secret box, locked up tight at my side, I wondered what I’d ever been so worried about.

Next time, I’ll be sure not to ask “What if?” quite so much, because the best thing I can do to calm my inner worrier is pack my bags, leave the neurotic planner in me at home, and give the world a chance to prove that it can actually be very accommodating, if you just know where to look.

What I learned on my summer vacation. Part 1.

Hi, I’m Shannon, and I’m a chronic worrier. Sometimes I think it must be in my blood, that old doubts constantly circulate in my veins until they are recycled and become new, fresh fears. Travel, not surprisingly, can exacerbate this tendency. Going new places and doing new things, while exhilarating, also comes with countless new worries built right in.

Earlier this summer, my boyfriend—an optimistic Dutch fellow who purposely avoids making concrete travel plans—and I were discussing our summer holiday. We had 10 free days in July at our disposal, but we’d gotten ahead of ourselves and started talking about August, September, and anything but the matter at hand.

“Hold on,” I said. “We have to worry about July before we do anything else.”

He stopped and stared at me. “Worry? What do we have to worry about, exactly?”

Without even realizing it, I’d used ‘worry’ as a synonym for ‘think’—and it wasn’t the first time. Somewhere along the way, amidst all the life changes, decision-making and risk-taking, I’d allowed worrying to become more than just a bad habit. It had become a state of mind.

As for July, we ultimately decided–due to the cheapest flights offered by Ryanair–on flying into Faro, Portugal, traveling over land through southern Spain and taking a boat to Morocco where we would take a flight home from Fes. We didn’t book any hostels ahead of time, didn’t research transportation between stops, and didn’t bring a guidebook. For me, this was pretty new; for my seasoned travel companion, this was nothing.

To my incessant questioning—‘What if we can’t find affordable places to stay on such short notice? What if there aren’t any buses going to that town when we need them? What if I get sick from the food and have to make the bus driver pull over in the mountains? What if someone breaks our knees and robs us and leaves us for dead in a ditch?’ (That last one was an exaggeration, I swear)—he always replied, “It’s gonna be OK, really.”

And as it turns out–surprising to all of you, I’m sure–it was.

Better yet, it was wonderful.

In sleepy Faro we explored the quiet streets, white buildings dotted with big red flowers. We took refuge from the heat on a shady cafe terrace, where a tiny, white-haired Portuguese woman brought us cold beers on a plastic tray. We sat and watched the sunset at the end of a narrow, empty pier on the peaceful harbor, little boats settling into sleep as fish leapt out of the water all around us, catching bugs and flopping back down on the surface with a lazy, muted splash. We ate a 5 euro dinner, invited by locals to join some group function under the stars, and were brought a pitcher of beer and platters of rice, salad, grilled pork, sweets and coffee. We spent a day on the beach, dozing in the sand after playing like little kids in the cool Atlantic. The next morning, we took a 4-hour bus ride to Seville, wishing we’d gotten better souvenirs than the needle-sharp sunburns on our backs.

In Seville, the capital of Andalusia, a Spanish friend of Jordi’s showed us around the city, teaching us about the Islamic and Christian architecture, and how the two existed peacefully in the area for years. We stood with little Spanish children, their backs a toasted brown from the July sun, in the cool spray of the giant fountain at Plaza Espana. We ate a late dinner of heavenly tapas–randomly ordered from a menu we couldn’t read–sitting outside at a little table in a narrow alley, ancient bricks adorned with glowing sconces lighting our meal. We drank peach juice on a dimly lit rooftop terrace, the adjacent cathedral luminous in the black sky, bats circling its tower.

In Cadiz, said to be the oldest city in Western Europe, we climbed the Torre Tavira for a 360 view of the city’s white rooftops surrounded by the bay. At dusk we swam in the cliffside pool of our hotel and dried off in the evening sun, watching the waves wash against the wall below. We walked along the stone path leading through the water toward the lighthouse and saw restless boys jumping off an old bridge into the ocean.

In Tarifa, a relaxed, eccentric surf town, we ate el secreto standing up in the corner of a small, crowded tapas bar that smelled like meat and old, wine-soaked wood. We drank a 5 euro bottle of red wine on the beach, laying in the cold sand and looking at the stars near the spot where the Atlantic meets the Mediterranean. We swam in the calm waves the next morning, enjoying one last dip before boarding the boat across the Mediterranean to Tangier.

5 Tips for the Aspiring Au Pair

Here’s a little article I wrote for Matador, an independent online travel magazine. A lot of fellow au pairs I’ve met in Amsterdam didn’t suffiently prepare for a job with a family, and found themselves in a situation they didn’t realize they’d signed up for. 5 Tips for the Aspiring Au Pair offers some advice on finding a job, and making sure you know what you’re getting into.

Late Work

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in July. I’m sitting on the waterside terrace of the café de Jaren near my home in Amsterdam, drinking bitter coffee and reading A Farewell to Arms. After spending the morning letting the rain lull me in and out of sleep, I brought my computer out with me because I need to write. I know I’ve already begun to forget too many of the details that color my experience, and if I don’t write them down, not only will my friends and family never know of them, I am likely never to think of them again.

So here I sit at this little round table next to the canal, having reluctantly closed my book and opened my computer. The sun is having a dispute with the clouds and I keep taking my jacket off, then putting it on again. It is warm, but only every other moment when the cool wind holds still and the sun has a brief chance to really touch you. The cold air feels nice after a couple weeks of hot, muggy weather that I never thought I’d experience in Holland.

A man wearing a flowered shirt smiles and quietly plays his guitar. Two old women at the table next to me drink tall glasses of cold milk and their friend, older still, drinks white wine. I’ve finished my coffee and ordered a large orange juice.

There is a small boat in the water, elaborately decorated and filled with flowers and ribbons, and inside an eccentric man with a shiny green vest and a hat plays a french horn and a tiny organ. The music lifts up and floats through the sky as he raises a small wooden clog on a fishing pole to the bridge to be filled with the spare change of onlookers. He is a regular Amsterdam attraction. Traffic rolls by behind his crowd of listeners—a man with his daughter sitting on the back of his bike, her curly hair twisting in the wind, a horse-drawn carriage carrying tourists, a woman in a leather jacket pushing a stroller. There is a quiet hum, a melody even, from the chatter on the terrace and the movement of the city steadily trickling over the canal and the street beyond it.

These are the kinds of details I want to remember from the places I go and the things I do. I have some catching up to do from the last few wonderful months and I know I need to write now, but I’m having trouble drawing my attention away from this moment to focus on moments passed.

While I sit here nagging myself the way a teacher might nag a procrastinating student, I have to acknowledge my good fortune in being so often surrounded by interesting things that I struggle to relinquish enough time to write about them. But if I succeed in said struggle (which I can’t promise), you can expect an onslaught of posts about my spring and continuing summer in Europe. Though, they probably won’t appear until the end of the month, as I leave for another trip on Friday, one that will take me over 10 days to Belgium, Portugal, Spain and Morocco.

Happy Summer!

It’s raining metaphors

My original intention for this post was to compare life to the unpredictable nature of weather.

Since Spring has arrived, the weather in Amsterdam has become much more fickle and I find I can no longer make a semi-accurate forecast by simply reading the sky when I wake up. This usually worked for me in the winter, but I have lately found myself fooled on too many occasions. Lesson: you can’t judge the day’s weather based on how the sky looks at 7 in the morning, just wear layers and shoes (as much as you may hate it) and keep your stupid plastic rain pants handy.

And there it was, finally some neat and tidy little metaphor I could use to write another long-overdue blog post and remind those who read it that I have not, in fact, lost all of my fingers in some horrible accident. As I face yet another major fork in the road of life and do little but worry about every potential decision I have to make, I can look up at the changing skies and remind myself that I can’t judge something by how it looks at first, that I just have to grab my umbrella and walk out the door. Eureka! Blog, here I come! Everybody can relax now, I finally thought of something moderately clever to bore you all with for a good 3 idle minutes of your workday.

So, thusly motivated, I sat down to write and promptly realized how tired and overused not only this metaphor is, but also the subject matter in general. It bored me too quickly to even get through the first paragraph, and I realized it’s because I was basically about to rewrite the same post I’ve already written 10 times in different ways–most of them at this time last year when I was right where I am now (minus 9 months in Europe). The formula is this: my life is about to change dramatically, I’m facing another bunch of big scary decisions, I might not choose the right ones, there’s no way to know if something will work out until after it’s too late, but I have been newly reminded by some aspect of daily life that it’s all OK, that we just have to push on and make the best decision we can at the time and hope for the best. Ta-da! Enlightening, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, these cute little metaphors leave me still facing the stormy future with no fewer worries, and no more answers. And they probably leave you rolling your eyes at your computer screen thinking “deal with it” or perhaps clicking back to YouTube or textsfromlastnight where the real action is. And no, I won’t be offended if you click that link and do not read the rest of this post. It’s an addictive site.

The point is, the weather metaphor is as exhausted as I feel with so many impending decisions looming on the  horizon yet again. But no one is going to give me the answers, or even a little sympathy, and it’s time to change my attitude, stop worrying and start doing. As my mom always says, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.” And while I think that’s bull shit, and that some weather just sucks, I admit that it’s time to hitch up my big girl panties and take the next step, whatever it turns out to be.

I just hope I wear the right jacket.

How can I put this…

Sitting in Retiro Park on my last afternoon in Madrid, all I could think about was how I wouldn’t be able to write about the city in any way that does it justice, how I wouldn’t be able to avoid a string of cliché adjectives so overused they’ve lost meaning, so I simply wouldn’t bother.

But as the street music in the park grew louder and the new April sun tightened its grip on me, I sat there soaking in the feeling you get only from the blinding energy and violent color that pump through a living city, the feeling of numbing bliss you get when traveling that convinces you for the moment that you’ll never feel it again, never be able to describe it, never truly understand what it was.

I figured this had to be worth an attempt of at least a few sentences.

So, for me, Madrid is Retiro Park – laying in the sweet, sticky grass on a Friday afternoon as a warm breeze sends a blizzard of white petals spinning and dancing through the trees. It’s a pink ice cream cone on Saturday, it’s spending a few hours letting the sun—finally free from its winter cell—heat me, cover me, wrap me up for the first time this year.

It’s standing in El Tigre, a packed, grimy tapas bar—the floor covered in wadded napkins and cigarette butts—eating hot croquetas and drinking beer amid the loud voices of hungry Spaniards just released from a week of work. My shoes stick to the floor and my shirt sticks to my back and I feel warmly welcomed to Spain.

It’s moving up the stairs of the metro station with a hot, crushing crowd of other Sunday morning shoppers on their way to El Rastro market and hearing the street music before I’ve even emerged from below ground, when all I can see is a cloudless sky and all I can hear is energy, voices, and rhythm. Seven Spanish men are there—two guitars, two accordions, a giant bass cello, a saxophone, and one just dancing, who moves and shakes as though he’d never even learned to walk before he was using his legs to dance. They play and sing and shout and sway and effortlessly fill the bodies and hearts of the crowd with a tick, an itch, a beating euphoria.

It’s laying on the little bed of our cheap 8th floor Gran Via hotel room for an evening nap, the sky turning from blue to orange to purple to black out the window as I listen to the hushed breathing of the lovely person next to me and the distant, excited clamor of the traffic below.

It’s sitting in a peaceful square in La Chueca on Sunday evening, drinking cheap cans of San Miguel on a bench as the sun sinks behind the buildings and everyone around raises their drink and bids a quiet farewell to another weekend.

It’s sitting in Retiro Park, yet again, on Sunday, that last afternoon, thinking this is too much life, too much energy and color and humanity and love to know what to do with. We lay among the giant pillars of the monument behind the lake, the sun pressing insistently on our faces, our necks, our bare feet. Blue and white boats slide across the water with each lazy stretch of an oar. People watch a big group of drummers with djembes as together they push a solid moving sound high above us all.  They pound their drums faster and louder and the beat shakes with such a force that the air itself seems to be moving, and you hear it and you feel it and everything becomes part of you and you’re blind and you’re dizzy and you’re happy and you have seen Madrid.

View from the Top

They say dreams are more vivid at high altitudes.

To me that sounds like a load of crap, but my subconscious confirmed it recently when I spent a week in the Swiss Alps. After seven months living in the center of a major European city and traveling once a month to other major European cities, I was looking forward to a week in the mountains away from concrete, traffic and metros, in a place where I could raise myself  above cluttered streets and a cluttered mind.

What I found there in those mountains – aside from the most grandiose landscape I’ve ever seen – was indeed a higher level of consciousness and a more extreme range of emotions than I’ve reached in a long time; and it left me tired, despondent and agitated. All week, instead of floating around in my usual and comfortable mass of vague ideas, questions and worries, I found myself either digging for any kind of thought at all in my hollow icy cave of a brain, or desperately trying to flee an avalanche of inexplicable anxieties.

To be clear, it was definitely a relaxing week with little cause for stress – which is perhaps why I was so unnerved by the snowball fight going on inside my head. I was in Verbier on a ski holiday with my adoptive family, and I passed the time playing in the snow, looking after the kids in our chalet, eating good food, sitting by the fire, and reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. All in all, a very nice way to spend seven days.

Though, being a California girl who’s always followed heat like a house cat moving across the carpet with the afternoon sun, I did feel out of my element in the snow. I tried snowboarding a few times on the baby slopes, and the cold, harsh reminder that I am and will forever be a big sissy hit me as hard as my ass hit the piste. Somehow I thought I’d be able to do it, but I’m just too scared to relinquish any amount of control and really go for it. I finally gave up (hating myself all the more) when the unhygienic Swiss lift operator who didn’t speak English grabbed hold of me for the third or fourth time to offer a boost on the drag lift, and I lost my balance and control and the thing ripped that plastic flying saucer from my crotch yet again. I lay there as that infuriating Swiss mountain boy stood over me shaking his shaggy head with pity that humiliates you in the way that only pity from such a lowly creature can.

We did spend one of the mornings at the village’s indoor swimming pool instead of the baby slopes, and I was able to enjoy water in the state of matter in which I feel much more comfortable, much more natural, much more – if you will – fluid. I closed my eyes, submerged myself, and there, swimming in that dingy community lap pool far past its prime, with the mountains gazing down on me like wise elders, my mind reached a quiet equilibrium. I let my body sail effortlessly through the water as my thoughts balanced calmly between the two opposing forces of all or nothing that challenged me the whole week.

That night I had a dream that looked and felt more real than the conscious world had seemed all week. I was flying. I steadily propelled myself forward using the same strength and ease with which I swim. I’d never been so convinced of coasting naturally through the clouds. When I woke up I thought how odd it is – how poetic – that somehow being higher in the physical, geographical sense means we are lifted up and pushed not only toward the sky, but toward our own elevated subconscious – that misty, clouded place that is always so far out of reach.

I appreciate the mountains for all their inspiring grandeur and humbling might, and bow to their power of challenging me physically, mentally and emotionally while on what was supposed to be a relaxing holiday; but ultimately, I think I’m better off down here, at sea level, where I can swim happily in the steady ebb and flow of my mind.