Where the wind always blows

I have so much noise in my head that I have really struggled to get my backside back into this chair to share my words with you. When my thoughts and emotions are such a dappled pallette of colors and shades and light, it is difficult to find a theme. Somehow I have a need to draw one or two strands out of the entangled spagetti mess at a time and examine them before I can articulate.

I have to wait for that process to happen, thank God I am not professional writer! In any case, it all came together today in the middle of an energetic cheering crowd of 15 000, a football match here in Aachen, and I felt I could pick up my flow again.

I have been happy to be in Germany and have been having an enjoyable time with the students; it has not been stressful as so many before me reported. I am experiencing a lot of new things, and each day is an unknown,a mini adventure, even more so that usual as my inner landscape is also in constant flux. 

There is a large part of me that does not want to be away from home and feels really ungrounded. I feel like a balloon bouncing up and down, finding my centre and losing it, finding my centre and losing it, on average 15 times a day.

Happy to be in a country where the church bells are ringing all around. That and the sound of the cartyres on the asphalt in the rain are soothing and so deeply familiar from my previous life, that ocassionally I can take a deep breath. I am dreaming of the loved one often and wake up before dawn full of his stories and the lines on his face, and sometimes with tears, and this also makes me miss home. I am actually so blessed to have this intimacy, but also I am having a hard time keeping myslef rooted and letting my eyes perceive the different hues of this very moment.

How can a love be so fundamentally grounding and excrutiatingly uprooting at the same time?

We visited Cologne yesterday. The cathedral is a magnificent structure out of limestone and sandstone, the second highest spires in the the world, after the single spire of the Minster in Ulm. Or as I fondly call it, the Monster. I had the privilege to experience it again just a couple of months ago, a place I have deeply enjoyed since I first visited in 1997. In 1880 this cathedral in Cologne was the tallest structure in the world, crystalline white and visible for many miles around; an important place of pilgrimage, holding relics of the holy three kings.

It was hit in the war, but unlike the rest of Cologne, it was not wiped out. The story goes that the bomber pilots used it as a navigational marker. The facade is now quite blackened, due to the bombing and the acid rain, and there is a constant process of restoration in process. The cathedral has had a master builder since around 1240 when construction began, and it was somehow comforting to know that the current chief engineer is a woman!

I only spent a few minutes inside; my geologist friends with firm faith only in rocks, were waiting patiently outside on the square where the wind always blows, eager to show me their favourite Vietanamese watering hole. In those few short minutes, I sensed the centuries of worship that went before me. I sensed the faithful and also the doubters laying their sorrows and difficulties before God, finding a voice for their pleas, as well as their gratitude.

As I lit a candle on that ground, I joined those legions finding expression to their humanity and found there a moment of peace.