Hiking through villages in the south of Germany

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It’s easy to forget that I’m in Germany. Sure, the city centre has some classical architecture and I’m saying “Danke” to people in the store, but all in all things are pretty similar. The neighbourhood I’m living in could just as well be located in my home city in Sweden. At least kind of.

I guess what I’m saying is: I’m getting used to this, so when we drove an hour away from the city, out into the “fränkische schweiz”, with idyllic little villages resting in the valleys between tall mountains, I felt like I stepped into a fairytale. Driving to something like that from Sweden would be a “this is what we’re doing this summer” kinda thing, but now it was just a friday excursion. Beautiful beautiful beautiful, to bring some more breath and peace into our lives.

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And even if you’re in your home country, wherever you are, there’s probably something cool nearby. Get out, whenever you can. I mean, stick to places where there’s no people of course – but fortunately nature has a lot of space.

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Notes from my phone in the evening:
–  Let’s bring this air into the city. I breathe in here and breathe out amongst the dirty street corners. Sun and moon over empty streets. I bring with me a song of birds and waters. It’s awakening in here too, even amongst graffiti and grey.

Walking Thoughts of a Sunday Evening

I walked through the forest today, just after the sun had set, but while the sky was still clear enough that it could have been a cloudy midday. The birds were singing like crazy, as if trying to call the day back. The forest floor was covered in green leaves and white buds that made my heart hurt. Soon those flowers will bloom and it will look like it has been snowing again, until they die and leave space for summer. I looked and walked and thought that this was the saddest sadness I’d ever seen. The birds see death and think of birth, and I see birth and think of death.

Let me breathe

The world is collapsing in on me, suffocating me and pressing me down, collapsing me in on myself. I spend too much time in the presence of only my own simple being, and my latest theory, the one that I came up with on the bus on my way home, is that it’s ruining me. It’s breaking me because it’s making my world smaller. I realized that I haven’t been out of the house without reason for a long time. I make my way to school, I make my way to the bus and back from the bus and a few times every day I go out to my house, since I live in a little cabin in our backyard. And every time I go there, I take a few seconds to just stand in our garden and look up at the clouded sky. And I never realized that I need more of that, it’s droplets when I crave rivers.

Today it’s hate-weather, the type that makes my friends sigh, but I suddenly realized the freedom of it. The sky is clouded but the spring is closing in and the days aren’t as dark anymore. Small drops of rain are falling from the sky, but it’s fresh. And I suddenly realized that I need a freaking walk. I need to leave my headphones at home and just walk through the forest. And I realized that I like this weather because the world feels so empty. Empty, yet open. I need to go outside of all the things we humans have built for ourselves and I need to make the world feel like mine and let nature feel like I belong to it. I need to breathe.