Tulip Red 2 16-9

start blooming: my move to the Netherlands

by europemusingstravel

There’s something about an airport curb that brings a swell of feelings. A simple ledge of concrete, so laden with emotion, family and friends on one side, the sweeping unknown on the other. It’s a hinge, a precipice, the smallest and most terrifying cliff you’ve ever summited. It’s dizzying, the intake of breath, the slick palms, the vertigo experienced from so enormous a height. Will it take you home? Will it take you away? Will it take you to a new home? Will it ever let you return? Anxiety, excitement, joy, sadness, and fear all meet at this crossing, bouncing back and forth with every footstep, sloshing around in the gutters of our souls, splashing onto anyone who may pass. A few tiny, terrifying inches, a waterfall of sensations.

Four months ago, I stepped onto my own airport curb.

At the start of 2022, with a new job opportunity, I packed my bags and boarded a plane with my cat Pepper in one hand and my passport in the other, bound for the Netherlands. I had only been to the Netherlands once before, almost five years ago, for a total of less than forty-eight hours, and had never been to the city I was to now call home. 

In the months leading up to my move, I had been filled with excitement, anticipation for a new adventure, joy for a new experience, new career, new chapter of my life. This was to be my fresh start, my first big life turning point since college, my rebirth after my pandemic hibernation. Yet in the week before my flight, the excitement turned to sadness as I began to cling to all that I was leaving behind, all that I loved at home, all my friends, all my family, all my favorite places. Mingled with the stress of packing and paperwork, and with fresh warm holiday memories dancing at my heart, my soul was feeling crushed and was scrambling to dig my fingers back into the Californian dirt, root down deep, and refuse to be moved. 

So when I stepped onto my airport curb, tears filled with all my own anxieties, dreads, and sorrows rushed down to join the flowing waterway of emotion that ran beneath that tiny concrete cliff. Behind me was everything I knew, I loved, that would offer me home and safe haven. Instead, I climbed that cliff face, the most distressing climb, to walk towards a complete unknown, to start from scratch, to plunge into the mysterious dark unknown and fight for a new light.

The Netherlands is both everything I expected and nothing like it at all. As with every move – especially international, and during a global pandemic – nothing was smooth sailing, and it has only been recently that I have finally felt prepared to call the Netherlands home, for however long it should be.

My first month was spent in lockdown as January dealt with the leftover holiday caseloads. Shops were closed, streets were quiet, people were home. Despite having dealt with this for months on and off in California, suddenly I felt more isolated than ever, across the world from my support systems, struggling to get connected to anyone or anything as my international phone bill racked up, timezones played havoc with my routine, and my internet remained a distant dream due to supply chain delays that held my new modem in limbo. 

With no other options, I sat and read and listened to the winter birds call from outside my window. I heard the rat-a-tat chatter of the occasional passing stranger, speaking in the Dutch language I had yet to grow accustomed to. I listened to the squeak of bicycle wheels from delivery personnel on the street below. In the evening, I watched the streetlights flicker on, illuminating the white striped brick of classic Dutch design. I saw my neighbors dancing and laughing through their illuminated windows, sharing meals, watching TV, displaying the “open curtain” culture that pervades the Netherlands. I was alone in my head, but there was still a world around me, a world I needed to discover and learn about and understand.

There had been many many frustrations moving here – bank account delays, local phone contract derailments, language barriers, transportation confusion, and other agonizing logistics that made me tired, made me want to stay home, made me want to pack back up and move back home. At every turn, I felt like I was getting stone-walled out of this country, that it was rejecting me like a failed organ transplant. It had already chewed me up and now it wanted to spit me back out. This Californian wasn’t ready to be planted in new soil.

After all these obstacles, I wasn’t motivated to venture out, to explore, to try to assimilate into my new home. It didn’t want me, so why should I want it? But I had a signed job contract and a one-year lease to hold me here. I needed to make the most of it. So baby step by baby step, I emerged. Just as pandemic restrictions loosened, so did I, forcing myself into uncomfortable situations in order to learn. Like a fawn stumbles until it learns to walk, I too hobbled and stumbled, crippled with two pandemic years of forgotten social skills and street-smart set-backs. 

For my first two months, I was reliant solely on the approximately two hundred Euro in cash that I had brought with me, as I found out none of my cards worked upon arrival. Even after learning basic foods in the Dutch language, I still managed to buy ten packets of gravy instead of veggie stock cubes. Even four months in, I still haven’t been able to properly say ‘goodbye’ to anyone in Dutch except to thank them profusely, and further to that, I have yet to learn the distinction between the three forms of ‘thank you’. It took me a month to find the communal trash receptacle for cardboard. I have only recently managed to learn what almost all the symbols on my oven mean.

Safe to say, on this side of that airport curb, I have tripped and stumbled and fallen many many times.

Yet, I have picked myself up. I have reached desperately for sunshine.

I found the English section of the local bookstore. I have finally memorized my Dutch address, phone number, and debit pin. I have met my neighbors and even borrowed tools from them. I have found favorite take-out spots for both Indian and Thai food. I got a personalized transportation card and have already memorized my local metro map and tram stops. I have managed to learn the difference between gravy and veggie stock.

And I have also had some amazing experiences.

Every morning, I pass a Dutch windmill from the 1800s and get to enjoy the peace of perfectly manicured Dutch nature. I have stumbled upon open air markets with hundreds of stalls, fresh local fish flying overhead as they’re tossed to customers, huge bouquets of flowers bundled in brown paper for pennies, and Dutch barrel organs playing boisterous music for miles around. I have kayaked in canals and then sat on their edges drinking Dutch beer, only to get sunburned as the day passed by. I have sailed down the biggest port in Europe, the Dutch Hook of Holland, and climbed the tallest bell tower in the Netherlands. I have partied on a canal boat, decked out in orange, for the Dutch King’s Day. I have made American jokes that have confused Dutchies, and I have learned that “helaas, pindakaas” means “unfortunately, peanut butter” but also “that’s too bad”. I have eaten warm Dutch stroopwafel and Hema hot dogs and bitterballen and frikandel and raw herring, and I have only disliked one of them (guess). I have bought fresh local flowers for my home every week that I’ve been able to. And I have smelled the infamous Dutch tulips in their colorful, majestic beauty in the gardens of Keukenhof and the infinite fields beyond.

It took me up until now to start blooming, four long months before I felt I could call the Netherlands a home. Like the Dutch tulip, I couldn’t grow overnight. It took effort and time and a lot of water and tears and a lot of sunshine and love from friends and family afar. Because even at the scariest cliff, the hardest concrete curb, with a bit of water and light, weeds and plants and even flowers will grow. April and May are tulip season in the Netherlands, and I believe I have come to bloom right alongside them. The only difference is, I hope to keep blooming for many months more.

ocean wide v1

in pursuit of newness

by inspirationmusingsoutdoors

Have you ever noticed the salt? The way it sticks to the inside of your nose, tickles your throat as it finds its way to your lungs, gently burrows in with each inhale, bringing the sea with it. Or the tides? How they roll so gently, a sheet of white pillowy foam, then pull back and roar, crashing with white teeth, before subsiding again, tucked in to sleep for a moment more. The way they lull you into their rhythm, the to-and-fro, the give and take, the living pulse of the planet, pulling and pushing, until your own body begins to move in sync, breathing to the beat of this watery drum, tugged with the power of the ocean. Have you ever noticed how the sea calls you home? Drawing your feet beneath the sand, stealing your air to the coastal winds, finding its way to your very core.

Time passes. You breathe. The tide pulls. The sea calls you home.

I’ve just returned from two days disconnected, out in “the wilderness” as my friends would say, hiking, camping, and just generally exploring a new part of the California coastline that I’d never experienced before. And while I could wax lyrically about the majesty of the coastal redwoods, the serene tranquility of a rocky beach at dawn, the crystal blueness of the Pacific waters, or the orchestral melodies of flocks of birds from day into night, the idea that keeps ringing in me clearly, next to thoughts of relaxation and underrated local parks, is newness.

To be honest, I’m not even sure “newness” is a word, although the auto-spell check of my word processor has yet to horrify me with any squiggly red underline or exclamation point of grammatical terror at it, but it feels like the right encapsulation of the feeling I believe we are all in desperate need of, whether we know it or not. Newness, as I see it, is a full-body feeling of something new, something not yet tried or experienced before, something inspiring in contrast to a life of current routine and familiar comfort. Say it enough times, and it might sound like a nonsensical babble, but cling to this idea with me for a moment.

We’ve been living in a pandemic for over a year at this point. No matter where you are in the world, I would hazard a bet that you’ve read or heard about or even thought about COVID at least once every day for the last year. That’s a long time. That’s a lot of stress and pressure and sorrow and a whole bucket of complex emotions and feelings and experiences. The pandemic has changed the way we do life, changed our routines, changed our interactions, changed our relationships, changed almost everything. And while across the world, we’ve experienced many vastly different national responses to the pandemic, and I can only speak to the US response, we’ve all experienced it in one form or another. Am I starting to sound like every opinion article you’ve read in the last few months? Bare with me a moment more. 

For many of us, this meant choosing safety and security above all else. Protect yourself, your family, your local community. Stay home, stay safe. Shop local, don’t travel, stay at least six feet apart in an airy backyard if you even dare visit someone outside of your bubble. In the face of stress and uncertainty, we dove into new routines, replacing commutes with morning walks and at-home workouts, replacing talkative lunch hours with lunchtime TV or midday reading, replacing happy hours and evenings out with zoom (insert collective groan). We clung to these new routines as a sense of stability in the face of overwhelming forces: a mysterious invisible disease, high-flying emotional stress, and even a collective eye-opening to pervasive social and cultural inequality.

Think back to the beginning with me. Yes, there was extremely high anxiety about pretty much everything. It doesn’t take much for many of us to think back to how dark those early days were. Quiet freeways. Empty supermarket shelves. Bad news on bad news on bad news. But, do you remember what tiny sparks of joy you forced yourself to find during those initial months? The creative renaissance of new recipes you attempted in your kitchen, the odd and obscure new hobbies you invested in, the new corners of your neighborhood you explored on your daily walks.

Did you notice something? All of those things were new. New recipes. New hobbies. New neighborhood corners. Yes, they were tentative footsteps in a pool none of us were willing to jump into, because who knew when and where COVID might get you, but they were the moments that brought us some trickle of happiness or enjoyment in a flood of shitty news. And in the face of such a terrible state of things, to bring us all the way back up to even joyful levels, even if just for a moment or two, says a lot.

Now, a year on, a lot of those initial coping mechanisms and small jolts of joy have faded in their impact, just as a lot of the overwhelming stress has subdued to somewhat more manageable levels – a treacherous roller coaster that feels like it’s smoothing out to a bumpy car ride. So how do you find new joy when we are–yes, still–in a pandemic?

The idea of newness, this full-body enveloping feeling of something novel and different, came to me as I sat on Van Damme Beach, a few miles south of coastal Mendocino, knowing by my watch that the sun was rising, even if I couldn’t see it behind the thick marine fog layer that surrounded the isolated cove. I was alone with my thoughts and my self, only interrupted by the occasional squawk of a seagull fluffing its feathers in the ripple of the tide. The sand was rough and frigid beneath my feet, the driftwood I sat on smooth from years of use, the air clogged with the salty freshness of the sea mingled with the fog.

I have sat on a beach like this almost every day during this pandemic. Each morning, as part of my own familiar and comforting routine, I walk along the beach around the corner from my apartment, enjoying the peaceful tranquility of quiet waves before the world wakes up. My beach, as I like to think of it during the empty early dawn hours, is also often clouded with marine fog at dawn, covered with cold coarse sand, and plagued by seagulls at all hours of the day. So why on earth did my moment on Van Damme beach feel so strikingly different, so invigorating, so life-giving, compared to my own beach only a few hours south of it?

This is newness. This full-body sensation of something different. Something fresh. Something new. Sure, I was still smelling the salty air of the Pacific ocean, but this was new salty air. Sure, I was still feeling sand between my toes, but this was new sand. Sure, I was still listening to seagulls squawk and fight over morsels of who-knows-what, and they may have even been the same seagulls from my own beach, but their sound carried differently in this new beach with new morsels to fight over and new things to squawk about.

The joy we experience when we pick up a new craft, try a new take-out restaurant, or attempt a new workout, can sometimes be tinted with hesitation or a resistance to change. Sometimes, we don’t even like them and we get frustrated and turn away quickly, returning swiftly to what we know. We like our routines, our familiar comforts. They are safe and secure. We know they won’t hurt us. We know we don’t hate them. But it’s time for us to turn from soothing to exciting, from comfortable to new. The joyful reward we can experience when taking new risks and trying new things far outweighs the dull monotony of routine. It not only nudges us out of our safety zone, it invigorates us.

When we embrace a thirst for something new and can indulge in a full-body new sensation, titillating every single sense we have, that newness can bring us true unencumbered and exuberant joy. When we stop shying away from the things that scare us or even take the things we’re familiar with and put them in a new light, we can find absolute awe and wonder. Newness is a state of inspiration, a true breath of fresh new air, an eye-opening freedom to experience joy.

I didn’t go sky-diving or hop on a plane to a foreign land. I went as far as a half-tank of gas in my car would allow me to go. Beaches and dawn mornings are familiar to me and I experienced them in a new place. I let every sense tingle me inside and out. I leaned into the full immersion of something familiar but something also so wonderfully new. And the joy I experienced from that hour on Van Damme beach was an hour I would not give up for the world.

Be restless, stay restless, and embrace the newness, my friends.