Balm for my soul

You get a strange feeling when you’re about to leave a place, I told him, like you’ll not only miss the people you love but you’ll miss the person you are now at this time and this place, because you’ll never be this way ever again.

Azar Nafisi – Reading Lolita in Tehran

Travelling, living in a foreign place is a bittersweet experience. A mix of constant leaving, returning, arriving – all the while changing. Loving a place and its people yet longing for another. After five months on the other side of the world, it’s time to go home and spent some time with the people I love. Leaving behind a place and people I learned to love. I’m trying to be in the moment, to accept Aznar Nafisi’s “strange feeling” and enjoy all of it.

I leave you with a poem that I wrote – in bits and pieces – over the course of the last five month. I hope you enjoy it.

Balm for my Soul

People barefoot in the store

Watching surfers at the beach

The old man reading his paper 

saying hi when passing by

Easy like Sunday morning

Coffee in my finders-keepers-cup

A long long boardwalk walk run 

The quiet water and the gentle breeze

Balm for my soul

Nothing that can’t be cured

With the ocean and the rising sun

Boy in my class asking will you be back

Toothless grin, yes 

Spring break here we come

Colleagues checking you out 

“Ein Fell aus weicher Wut” 

On the patio laughing loud

Threesomes and anagrams

Balm for my soul

Land of the Long White Cloud

Pale green slopes speckled with white baby sheep

Yellow heather hiding in brown thorny shrubs

Purple wildflowers

Proclaiming spring

Grey streams rolling over rough rocky beds

Feeding deep icy blue lakes

Silver ferns and lush green palms 

Swaying in the crisp blue alpine air

Balm for my soul

Blue mountain range in the distance 

Powdered by white fresh snow

Black tree silhouettes

Hugged by ominous clouds

Endless shades of grey

In the quiet of the silvery morning light

The last drop of fiery red 

Making this land

Blush humbly in the rising sun

Balm for my soul

Queen of danger

Partner in crime

Together on a Manly mission

To live intensely excessively or die

Über sieben bridges

Running, walking, talking this town

Thinking with your fingers

Sculptures by the Sea

Bondi babes forever

Balm for my soul

Sky on fire

Red flames licking the burning sun

Hazy eerie orange daze 

A beautiful kind of pain

Running tripping falling and repeat

Falling

Leaving

The golden sand for white winter snow

My sacred solitude for all that is mine

Balm for my soul