I’ve just gone through silent hysteria, and after showering and ensconcing the feet in my blessed ugg-boots, I’m onto phase two: morose melancholy. Holidays will do that to you. The ending of holidays, that is.
No, there’s more to it than that.
The holiday: a blissful three days in the arms of the elements of nature – fire, earth, air, water – and nothing else. A beautifully sleepy and magical town called Denmark, 4 1/2hrs south of Perth, where ancient forest meets the majesty of the Southern Ocean. A chalet constructed by hand out of its surrounds, with water in front, and karri trees and granite boulders behind. No phone, no tv, no internet, no neighbours. No stress. My lovely man, and I.
We climbed granite rocks as old as time and let the wind blow through our being, hugged trees, and hiked hours through bushland to stand at the top of a rocky cliff to feel the power of the ocean converging from around two bends in the coast. We spent evenings watching the log fire instead of the tv, listening to each other instead of an electronic stranger, and listening to the birds sing the day to rest.
The hysteria: set in as soon as I hit the city limits. My Denmark vibration was gone. Cars were driving aggressively all around me. Traffic lights. Grey asphalt everywhere. No trees. Ugly ugly ugly.
I don’t know exactly what set me off, but it took all I had to stop myself collapsing into tears. I couldn’t breathe. Fight or flight kicked in, without my command.
So now, as has become my way, I’m trying to make sense of it. I’m poking it with the “why?” and a bit of the old “how?” for good measure.
Denmark really is a place of magic. I don’t mean the flippantly used idea of ‘magic’, I mean real ancient down to your balls magic. Magic vibration. You can feel it among the forests of karri trees, and emanating from the granite boulders when you touch them. You can smell it in the leaf litter, and the salt spray of the ocean. It’s a hum that works to renew every fibre of your being; immersion in something altogether magical - an imprint of magic incarnate.
In contrast, the city is a man-made environment; the antithesis of nature. The smells are vile, the sounds grate. The hum toxic and foreign.
This toxic hum affects us and we don’t realise it – we acclimatise. We make do. We escape it in our heads, online, watching movies, holed up with friends pretending it doesn’t exist, but it’s always there, and it affects us like a mobile phone in a low-signal area – our batteries deplete quicker.
We speak of going on holidays to ‘recharge’. Is this perhaps a subconscious awareness of how depleting the toxic vibration of the city is?
Personally, I’m now more aware that I have to recharge in nature; in the same vibration from which I was made. Nothing else will help me hold on to my sanity.
