We arrived four hours later, Megan taking a bus to her & Priya's flat, me to mine & Brooke's. I walked to the apartment where my teaching director and her husband lived, had dinner, got my keys from them, and then wheeled my suitcase through the snow to my building across the street. I entered the lobby and walked to my door on the first level, flipping to the right key...raised my hand to open the lock and stopped short. The lock was gone, an empty hole all that remained. In the darkness I looked up and saw crime scene tape criss-crossing the doorway with instructions to call the police department and not enter. I literally felt like I was in a Law & Order episode. I wasn't sure whether to cry from exhaustion and back away from the door as instructed or whip out my camera and start photographing something I'll probably never experience again.
Lest you wonder, as I did in that moment, who had been murdered in our flat over Christmas, it was simply that winter reared her head. A window left open a crack wouldn't ordinarily have been such a problem but Ostrava had experienced near record breaking cold and our heat was turned down, causing a pipe under the window to freeze and then burst, flooding and spraying at least 50 years of gritty black radiator gunk all over the place. It seriously stank to high heaven. Messy, inconvenient, costly, thankfully not flooding anyone else. But honestly, that wasn't what bothered me. In fact, it potentially made for a fantastic story and I figured it would be a great one for the book someday. What I struggled with were reactions that bubbled in the ensuing days...I probably would have been able to laugh it off had it not been for that.
"Crazy American girls," some said. "Who leaves in winter with the heat turned off?!" "But it wasn't like that," I wanted to protest. It's my blog so I can set the record straight and say that in truth, it was not off, just low, and if the window was open at all it was seriously barely open, and it wasn't like Brooke and I had wanted to spend a couple nights sleeping on a kitchen bench waiting for the men in haz-mat suits to give us the all-clear. We'd never lived with radiators -- the house I grew up in had walls ten inches thick and triple-glazed windows and was so energy efficient that we heated rooms simply by turning the lights on and off. But I didn't say any of that, I just apologized and tried to be gracious and understanding. I didn't feel like there was space for a different conversation, and all things considered I wasn't sure how to make the space myself. And besides, that all sort of side-steps the point.
A few years later I met a woman who'd heard the locals' side of the story and laughingly relayed it to me as such. I ground my teeth a bit and called her a mean name in my head but a grace also occurred to me in that moment, I'd been so busy trying to be open to the new around me that it never occured to me the locals experienced a certain culture shock of their own in having me there and they might not have known it. When we're the main cheese most of what's around us is familiar, or at least our tacit knowledge trumps, lulling us into a deceit of ease and located normalcy. And for the most part, we tend to think we're the main cheese, regardless of where we are and who we're with. All I could do was wait and deal with the moment. Which we did.
They say that when you move abroad there's a honeymoon period where everything is great for about 3-4 months. Then, what was new and exciting becomes just frustrating and irritating and from there you start working your way to a new kind of good. It didn't go quite that way for me -- for me, it was hard from day one and I just slowly moved through it. Cultural navigation had only a little to do with it. Having been through the previous year, I was far from expecting a large Czech city to provide the solace and renewal I needed. Mine was an internal process of adjustment that occurred in a foreign country, supported by a small circle of incredible women who loved me deeply in shared experience, buttressed by the long-distance care of family and friends far away, given local color and interest by good Czech people with whom life intersected for a brief while. It couldn't occur anywhere else or in any other way. And I felt a fundamental ok-ness regardless of what was happening around me. Which, truthfully, was much good.
I tell that story partly for the fun and memory of it but also because I was thinking about it when I awoke this morning and it's not entirely unrelated to other things I'm thinking a lot about right now. You've seen in the last 3 posts that my mind has very much been in another part of the world, one that is new for me, one that is also 'a place where peace is not the frozen silence' ... related to issues that I have worked nearby in different ways over the years and can't stop thinking about ... where my understanding is experiential and storied ... where alteration comes only in time, being in and seeing as much as we can of what's actual and hoping for better, all in the same moments. By the time I came home from the Czech Republic in July 2002 I was good, and I was better for it. Those months made for a difficult time. I would do some things differently now but I don't have that choice for the past and it's a past that I would never give up, a time that I innately knew would move in beauty....a movement that I carry in me still, unto the ends of the earth.
So I crawled out of bed and found my old journal to see where my thoughts were on this day back then, after I found my flat a disaster, wanting the mess to go away and for people to be more...well, more of whatever all I needed them to be at the time. I'm not entirely sure whether the words would be what I'd turn to today, but there is surely still a resonance with what I inscribed in my journal ten years last night, January 6, 2002, as I settled even then, as I try now, into what I was chosing, dealt with what I wasn't chosing, words that helped me to meet the now-ness that is life at its widths, be that relaxed or strained:
Peace is the centre of the atom, the core
of quiet within the storm. It is not
a cessation, a nothingness; more
the lightening in reverse is what
reveals the light. It is the law that binds
the atom's structure, ordering the dance
of proton and electron, and that finds
within the midst of flame and wind, the glance
in the still eye of the vast hurricane.
Peace is not placidity: peace is
the power to endure the megatron of pain
with joy, the silent thunder of release,
the ordering of love. Peace is the atom's start,
the primal image: God within the heart.
-- Madeline L'Engle
©2012 Mindy Danylak (for all original content; not including Madeline L'Engle poem)
