Bee Hives

I just let the chickens out into the garden of my latest abode here in Crassier, Switzerland.

These are words I take great pleasure in writing - I mean, chickens?

Deep into my fourteenth month of this untethered life, I am amazed and grateful and slightly awestruck.

I've been in Switzerland just over 48 hours and it's been busy, starting with a pick-up at Geneva airport on Tuesday evening by a good friend from my Costa Rican days. One of the joys of this floating year is choosing to place myself near distant friends, creating the opportunity to deepen friendships.

Along with the chickens, I have a resident housemate who is the son of the friend's friend's friend who offered me this lovely place to stay while she and her husband are in Australia for several months. As we ate the delicious local dish that Ben had specially prepared for the night of my arrival, the conversation meandered from local cuisine to local activities by way of Ovid, Constantine, ancient philosophers, wine-making, the Bible and numerous other subjects that have been lost in the pleasant glow from that evening.

Stimulating, enlightening, engaging and just plain fun. I may never leave.

The next day, following a morning of unpacking and positioning my computer on an unvarnished slab of wood by a window overlooking the garden, I was picked up by Lydia. You may remember that we crossed paths last June in Waterloo station, serendipity in every sense, thirty years after we last saw each other in Costa Rica. We pootled around nearby Nyon, my go-to place for shopping and trains, where I learned the essential places, saw the beautiful ceramics she makes in her studio and had a delicious lunch. On the way back to my village, I did a grocery shop (expensive!) while she bought rope for a swing she'd spontaneously purchased the other week. I love her creativity.

Last evening, the sun just disappearing behind the Jura mountains, I had an extraordinary moment as I settled into sleeping pigeon pose, my forehead resting lightly on my hands, while around me fourteen men and women did the same. It was like a camera shot that started with me, on a yoga mat, and then zoomed out to include the others, then the community hall, the village, and the area, and farther out until it was Switzerland, Europe and backwards even more until the whole globe was spinning in front of me.

I was awed.

Until it shattered with an unexpected act of kindness. Hinde, the yoga instructor, was moving between us, laying a hand here or gently pressing someone deeper into a pose, and at that moment she whispered in my ear, "est-ce que je peux vous toucher?"

Suddenly, I felt so alone that I wanted to weep. 

Never mind the idea of being in a yoga studio amongst people I knew or saw regularly, people I crossed paths with in the street, recognised in a café or ran into at a book launch. The simple laying-on of hands by Hinde made me yearn for physical touch, for intimacy, for affection. 

That was just a blink, though, within an hour of contentment. My walk home, along the dark (but sensibly lit) street, the Jura looming indefinably to my right with twinkling stars above, filled me again with awe and an ease at where I am now, what I'm doing, who I am.

Less than two weeks ago I finished the Portuguese Camino with a sense of satisfaction and joy. But this whole untethered experience is also a pilgrimage of sorts. It's a search for purpose and community, and I am on a track now. By keeping my mind and heart open, continuing to put one foot in front of the other without looking too far into the distant future, amazing things happen. Look at those chickens in the garden, the mountains beyond the fence line. I could never have foreseen this but how extraordinary that it has come to pass.

"I don't know where I'm going but I know how to get there."

Boyd Varty, The Lion Tracker's Guide to Life