Where Have I Been?
Standing on a frozen lake, looking through a hole in the ice to the black water below. Lake Storsjön, near Östersund, Sweden
Where have I been?
The short answer: Sweden.
The medium-length answer: I was starting to feel claustrophobic in our tiny Greek village. So I closed the blog and took a break from the podcast in order to travel abroad.
The long answer: 2022 marked the seven-year anniversary of my moving to Greece, and the bureaucracy, the chaos, the socially-accepted disregard for Nature…it was really wearing me down. Greece, for all its mystery and magic, is blessed with a clusterfuck of a government and a generation (or two) who still think it’s acceptable to throw their plastic and electronic trash down the side of a mountain. Add to that the two years of on-again-off-again lock-downs — where texting the police was compulsory if I wanted to go for a walk (or I’d risk fines of up to 500 euros) — and my nervous system needed a break.
I love Greece; I hope that is obvious by now. But like any good relationship, sometimes taking some space to establish better boundaries is vital. I needed to get a new perspective. I’d been folding in on myself steadily over the past few years, and the longer we stayed in the village, the more afraid I was of disappearing completely inside a hole.
Since I have the right as a European Citizen to travel freely in the EU, my partner and I looked around Europe and wondered, “What is the polar opposite to Greece?” Somewhere organized. Peaceful. Environmentally conscious….cold?
The obvious answer: Sweden. A country with Allemansrätten — the Right of Public Access. With social and environmental policies that are light-years ahead of their Mediterranean fellows. With a reputation for open-mindedness, healthy boundaries, and health-conscious living. And since our day jobs are remote (I have my own business as a VA and my partner is a 3D artist), I shut down my blog, we packed up a suitcase, and jumped on a plane.
My partner and I started in southern Sweden and Airbnb hopped up the country. A little ways into our trip, I had a dream about a mountain (most of the Sweden we’d seen was flat…). I was standing on the shore of what I thought was the sea, and I heard myself say, “My body wants to be in Greece, but my mind wants to be in Sweden.” A few weeks later, after arriving in the town of Östersund, I found the exact mountain from my dream in a photograph. It was taken from the shore of Lake Storsjön, on the other side of the island, Frösön, where we were staying.
It was a clear message: your mind needs to stay here for a little while.
So I did. And it was exactly what I needed — the chance to travel to new landscapes, to push my body’s comfort zone (subarctic anyone?), to connect with warm-hearted people, to be walking-distance to everything, to challenge myself by living with housemates, to not understand the language, to go for a hike on the mountain or ride a bike without being chased by a dog, to rely on the hospitality of strangers, to have a shower indoors instead of going outdoors to a detached, unheated bathroom…things that I’m sure I could have found in another part of Greece, but that needed to come from somewhere wholly “other.”
Mostly, I needed the chance to be a foreigner again. Because in Greece, I’m not really a foreigner, but I’m not a native, either. As I’ve spoken about on the podcast, this puts me in a weird liminal state where I don’t really know if I belong here. And the constant balancing is exhausting; I really needed to tip over the threshold and just be somewhere else for a while.
I will admit: I ran away from Greece to the land of the midnight sun with rose-colored glasses, hoping for some peace and a new perspective. I got both of those things, and so much more. In short, my experience in Sweden was wonderful.
And yet…
Here I am, back in Greece again. We returned today; I just can’t seem to stay away. When I’m not here, I ache for the land. The trees. The mountains. The food. I want to be among the Pomegranate and Bay and Olive. I want to walk along the coast at night and be hot. I want more than 4 hours of sunlight in winter and to eat vegetables that were harvested that morning, just a few miles from my door, instead of shipped in plastic from abroad.
Am I in Greece to stay? Probably. But something I’ve re-membered about myself during my time in Sweden is that I truly love to travel. I’ve missed the adventurous person I was eight years ago, the one who had lived all over the USA, had moved alone to Greece, had gone camping and hiking, had started a blog and a podcast about this beautiful landscape.
I’m going to be adventuring around Greece for the remainder of this summer and into early autumn. I’ll be going to a few islands, the Peloponnese, Athens, and hosting some friends up here in the village for some local excursions around Makedonia. Of course, I’ll be posting here and on the blog about the journey, sharing with you photos and stories from those excursions.
I’m also going to be restarting the podcast, but with a video twist (so keep your eyes peeled on my YouTube channel to get some Greek herbal action. ;-)
I’m also hoping along the way to gain more clarity about “what’s next.” Will we stay the winter in the village? Relocate to another area of Greece? Maybe return to Sweden for a few months? We’ll see…
I turned 39 last week, so maybe these past few years’ crisis of identity is normal. Maybe I needed to go away and come apart, so I could piece myself together again as I get closer to completing another decade of my life.
For now, it just feels good to be in the process of re-membering myself. And to be home.