Tag Archives: Nature

On My Mind

Cancelled

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There were enough signs that aligned (or didn’t) that we knew before we admitted we knew: We would not be travelling to Peru as we planned. It was 4am when we first broached the subject and 11am when we made the decision. We’d booked the trip six months earlier and had talked about it for at least six months before that. But the universe just didn’t turn the way we needed it to turn.

We cried, realizing we were giving up on a dream. There will be other dreams, of course, but dreams are the things that grab hold of us and that’s what makes them so hard to let go.

Over the subsequent days, I realized that I was still sad. I woke up in the mornings wishing I were still asleep, not ready to face yet another day here, when everything I had been looking forward to was somewhere else.

We’ve gone out every day and watched spring coming into full force. I’ve cooked some nice things.

My favourite area in Weimar is the forest close to our flat and I brought my journal there one day. It helps me breathe a little more easily.

When life doesn’t go according to plan, it provides us all sorts of opportunities to realign and readjust. This is a chance to look at my own behaviour and actions in the face of a disappointment and behave differently next time. That’s real life, and there will be a great deal more of it that does not go according to plan.

It its own messy way, that’s what makes it beautiful.

Germany

Spring Cleaning

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After multiple days this week of riding to work when the weather was a very fresh -10°C, the thermometer reached 13° yesterday and was even slightly warmer today. Suddenly, there’s spring, or at least the beginnings of it. The warmth and slightly overcast sky made for excellent weather to engage in the spring cleaning task that I enjoy more than I would like to admit: cleaning my bike.

Please understand, there are right and wrong ways to clean a bike and I’m fairly certain that I do everything pretty close to the wrong way. There are tools one can buy, of course, and the toothbrush method probably does a bit of harm alongside the good, but it works for me. We have a stand that I could use to save myself the bending and crouching, but that involves taking the other bike off the stand, where it lives during the winter, and securing the heavier bike that is ridden daily. Q-tips are probably not a recommended tool by any bike shop, but they are remarkably effective, even if I’m constantly wishing they could do the job just a little bit better. The chain would be cleaner given the proper tool, but there we are again with the tools.

It’s fair to say I do a mediocre job with my sponges and dish cloth, but the bike rides much more smoothly when I’m done. And my back recovers after a bit of stretching. It’s remarkable how much grime accumulates in the winter. I clean my bike much more regularly in warm weather, which is probably why the first spring cleaning is always such a shock. But it’s also the cleaning that is the most immediately noticeable.

Just like the first little flowers.

Germany

January

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I like to think of January here as an apology for November. November is dark, damp, cold, and gray – oppressively, endlessly, hopelessly gray. December is brighter because of the lights at the Christmas market and the crispness that sharpens in the air as fall unfurls itself as winter.

And then there’s January, our month of big skies, fresh cold, and spectacular sunsets. Watching night fall is watching an artist at work.

Accustomed to this in January, we were surprised by the days of fog that limited visibility just to the end of the courtyard. The world melted away into white, into gray, and January gave us November vibes.

But the air was full of crystals, and the crystals created their own art.

I was surprised by the brightness of the kitchen this morning and looked up to see the half-moon that had created a reflection of window panes on the floor. The sky was newly clear and I could see the sun beginning to rise as I rode my bike through cold that crackled, everything still covered in last night’s frost. This was January as we know it, coming back after a short rest.

I was glad to welcome her.