Kafka said something in the lines of: “When you live you don’t write.” I picked up that sentence in my last year of high school. Somewhere in between a lot of books I didn’t feel like reading. I certainly didn’t feel like reading Kafka, but since I heard that phrase I sympathized with him, nonetheless. Ever since I find it has never lost it’s accuracy, that phrase.
A lot happens, my life lately in my surroundings in my head, in just one day. So many impressions and conversations and thoughts and ideas pass me by. And I do not have the time nor energy to write all of them down. I live, so I don’t write. Kafka is right, still.
And then I realised I can be everything at once. I don’t have to choose this side of me or the other. I do not have to choose between expeditions or long silk dresses. All I have to do is replace “or” with “and”. I can cycle over the mountain pass in pouring rain and wear a silk dress in the evening. I can be masculine in one moment and feminine in the other. I can eat only meet and carrots for days and drink champagne on the top of the mountain. I can sleep wild in the bushes with dirty hands and spend the night in a hotel. Maybe not at the same time, and yet these different sides can all exist in me, next to each other. And not agains one another.
I guess that’s me. Roughing it one day to play the princess the next. And it feels very liberating finally getting to accept all of it. All of me.
And maybe that’s also how I’ll write from now on. Sure I’d like to write down a coherent story about this hike or that mountain, that encounter or this other day. But maybe I’ll do that later. When I am somewhere in one place. For now there are too many revelations to stick to one, through the 813 words of one article.
Late mornings I am making my way up the mountain. Late because I had another coffee with a few lovely cyclists I met, just when I thought there where only retired people around. They showed up, as usual just at the right time. That’s why now the sun is already burning hot, even though the wind blows icy and only gets colder the higher I get. I decided to leave my phone in the valley with my bike. Around me there is just peace and quiet, except from this one song on replay in my head. Over and over the same few phrases pass through my brain and I wonder when it will finally stop. My admiration for the wildflowers is as endless as the mountain peaks around me. First there are purple pink bushes growing next to my path. Wild thyme between the grass. Blue dots, yellow ones, a million shades of green. And the rivers rush down over the rocks. Sometime I hear their roaring loud and violently sometimes it’s just a gentle dripping melody through the moss.
A lot of snow still covers the slopes. And some patches of the floor are still brown and muddy. It must have been only a few days since they got exposed to the sunlight again, after the long winter. And even though that soil is frozen for so long and even though the weather is still harsh up here even in June, I can already see the first little living-beings fighting their way through the mud. Those plants, they grow through all that frost and rocks and snow. Through burning sun and violent storms. Do they ever complain? Do you ever hear them whisper: “No I can’t grow this season, if I where down in the valley, yes, but up here where I am it is impossible…” Do you hear them complaining about the harsh conditions around them?
No you don’t. They grow, regardless. Maybe it’s easier to grow where the conditions are favourable. And yet these plants up here are as strong as any plant can be. Because they grow exactly where it is the most difficult to do so.
There is no excuse not to grow.
I remember that when I run back down from the peak, crossing a snowfield. I am scared of avalanches and scared to sink in, as I did before up to my knees. A bath in the lake, that is still completely frozen allows me to recenter into myself. And suddenly I notice, the song in my head is gone. At it’s place is now a lot of free space, some peaceful quiet and a lot of loving inspiration.
Thanks for stopping by, have a lovely Thursday!
All photos and words are owned by ©kesityu taken and written by myself.