There it was, in an upper corner stuck to the inside of the window of the bus, just above the entrance door and a collection of miniature buses positioned on the doorpost. A little emblem with the familiar three crosses on top of each other, a church by a canal and above it embroidered lettering, spelling “Amsterdam”.
I had just found my seat in the bus that would take me from Athens, to Patras, the harbour city where I would embark on the boat to Italy the next day. From there, I was planning to travel through Europe by train. I wanted to see Bologna and Venice and Vienna and Prague and Strasbourg and Paris and London. In a way, I never wanted to return to the Netherlands again, nor to the place from where I had left by plane, Amsterdam.
My goal was a big blur. I was hoping I would figure it out along my way. I hoped travelling would help me to learn how to trust people again, how to feel safe with them again, how to connect to them. To stop floating within the world, but instead to build connections and eventually a community around me. I longed for adventure as much as I longed for home. I longed to be able to travel with a home to return to. But for now, I was on the run and I knew it.
And yet, here it was, in a long-distance bus in Greece, “Amsterdam”. Somehow it comforted me, as if there was a destiny laid out for me, as if, after a period of wandering and not-knowing, something good would be waiting for me in Amsterdam. I was longing for a place where I would make sense, where my attempts, whether failed or successful, would be seen and dressed in love, a place to find belonging and the beginning of something new.
As I was dreaming of Amsterdam, through a mist of rain, I could see the mountains of the Peloponnese pass by, on the other side the Street of Corinth. Patras welcomed me with even more rain and a moment of pure magic. While I crossed the main square on my way to the hotel, big puppets announcing the upcoming carnival, the sun came out. The devils must have been enjoying a fair up in heaven, because I was treated to a double rainbow in the middle of the sun and the rain and the puppets. I didn’t know what was going on. I felt as if God existed after all and the whole world had turned into a stage where just about anything would be possible.
And so, maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised anymore, when a bit later I sat down in a restaurant, only to find the beer on tap came from my home region in the deep south of the Netherlands. But it touched me. It confirmed all the feelings of purpose I had had that day, whether real or imagined. And I dreamed back to the area around Maastricht, sandwiched in between Belgium and Germany, close to Aachen and Liège.
I dreamed back to the soil there, how much I loved it, the smell of it, the ochre colours, a fertile mix of sand and clay. I thought of the green hills soothing me on long walks for as long as I could remember, brooks running along, the trees filled with mistletoes like witch’s brooms. I pictured the century old castles built from local yellow chalk stone, the timber framed houses and red brick carré farms. At every crossroads a little cross or a small chapel to light a candle.
I loved the autumn colours there, the reds and yellows and oranges, so warm and earthy. I loved running into squirrels, a pheasant rushing through the forest, a skylark ascending in his song. I loved collecting chestnuts and baking vla, flat tarts of leavened dough filled with rice pudding or plums or apple or cherries or gooseberries and cinnamon. Here, my feeling home had started. It was not, however, the home I longed to return to.
As I travelled on from Patras through Italy to Vienna and later to France, I continued to struggle to trust people, to trust myself. I felt inexperienced, not knowing what to expect, what was expected of me. But some moments, it was as if things fell into place. The people that made me feel beautiful, the people that gave me their trust, the people who recognized my integrity, the people who made me feel welcome and want to travel, the man welcoming me to the ferry, the woman in the bookshop in Ancona, they all asked me for one thing, for me to smile to them.
This was the home I wanted to return to, the place where my smile came from, like the source of a brook, a place inside myself, a feeling that I had known from very young. For me, it was both my most familiar home and my greatest adventure. It was a place that made me feel so safe that I would travel anywhere, feeling anything, being free, the whole world filled with love.
The people who gave me their trust and longed for me to smile made me feel safe again with my own home and adventure inside myself. They showed me how beautiful it was to them, how much value it had and how much good it would bring me. And I realized that, if indeed in Amsterdam I would find feelings of making sense and belonging, they would be grounded in trust and longing, so much of it, that I would finally stop resisting and surrender to this place inside myself, my own source of love, for it to flow and just let myself be.
Leave a Reply