It is the fifth month in the embrace of our beloved house and garden. Beyond several inner and very many outer works—beyond installing the solar panels, fully renewing the garden and restoring its fertility. Beyond building raised beds and creating a vegetable garden expanded toward self-sufficiency. Beyond the harvests, the preserving, the gathering-in, filling the freezers for winter meals, the drying, stacking our own firewood in storage. Looking back, it is an astonishing amount of invested work—because we did as much as we could ourselves. There is still a great deal to do, but the time has come for a short breath. Today, for the first time, we lit the tiled stove. It burned down five or six hours ago, and yet it is still embracing us with its gentle warmth. My beloved has kneaded the sourdough bread for tomorrow morning, and after I finish this writing, while watching a lecture or listening to music, we will sit down to shell walnuts. A Chekhovian idyll in the evening.
It is so exciting to observe how the different threads of our lives weave into one another. Lightness and heaviness, success and failure, certainty and uncertainty, knowing and not-knowing, joy and dejection, abundance and scarcity, faith and emptiness all flow into each other. They receive separate labels only so that the mind can interpret the diversity of experience. This too is part of the preparation the moment is constantly teaching us. A physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual training. For a new world whose preface humanity has already begun to read. I believe only certain parts of this “plan” are optional, but the full transformation is highly likely. In the last period of our time abroad, it was astonishing to see how some scenarios unfolded with almost surgical precision. And these processes have accelerated enormously, leaving little room for escape.
I am still a child of the old school, and I trust that I have enough understanding and awareness to see the connections that the events of the world reveal. That is why there is preparation. But this is not only a logical conclusion based on the experiences of my life—it comes from much deeper and leads toward what is not yet visible. The moment urges us to take stock. It unmistakably shows what it is time to finally lay down. What I am ready for can no longer be postponed with a light rescheduling. I feel that whoever does not begin this inner transformation of consciousness now will not be able to adapt to what is coming.
There is beauty in this. For it encourages a kind of growth that, if we are honest, we usually tend to push “to later.” We can look at what is happening now in many ways, and it is worth continually changing the angle of our attention. Where there is great tension, that is where it is wise to work. Our attachment to a perspective that causes difficulty leaves no room for adaptation. The more freely we move within our inner world, the more lightly we can pass through the unconventional period ahead of us. And then we can clearly live, in relation to whatever happens, this understanding: this too is only an experience.
With love,
Your traveling companion
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