We recently passed the one year mark of life here in Copenhagen. Baring lay-offs, we have a mandatory two-year assignment. But given Paul’s ship cycle, and what he needs to do for and with his team, we’re looking down the barrel of being here at least three years. … Can you tell by my metaphor how I am feeling about this?

For a long time I thought I would get used to being in Denmark. I was eager to live abroad, and I knew from experience that I like learning and living in cultures that are not my own. Plus, my graduate school was very international, and I enjoyed that mixed-culture experience very much. So I’ve been surprised at my inability to adjust to life abroad.

For the past year I’ve been on the “accentuate the positive” bandwagon most days– listing all the things I like about living here and trying to embrace the bits that I enjoy. But the reality is, while I like living outside of the U.S., DK is not the best fit for me.

February in northern winters is by far the hardest month. So much so that at my Seattle college our advisors told the freshmen to “never change your boyfriend, your haircut, or your major in February.” Nonetheless, February is when it struck me that maybe I am not going to come to terms with it. Maybe this is never going to fit right, to become my community, to feel like home.

I was listening to a story on This American Life recently in which the narrator was describing a heated debate between two political opponents. He noticed that the only time the crowd seemed to be experiencing something as a joint experience was when photos of the war were put up on a screen. When that happened stillness filled the room. What he said about this still space was this:

“Forget all the arguments. Let’s just sit by this lake, and try to figure out its name.”

At first I didn’t understand why this phrase was capturing my heart. Then Jena pointed out that the whole story was using the language of struggle and that I have been living in midst of two great struggles: the struggle to live cross-culturally; and the struggle to live with chronic pain. For a long time I’ve thought that there were only two choices about how to respond to these struggles: “Stand and Fight,” or “Lay Down and Die.” But what if there is a third way? What if it involves sitting in the place where stillness pools. What if it involves turning around, looking into the face of loneliness, and saying, “Okay, so you’re here now. Have a seat.” What if it involves—not a frantic search for meaning—but just sitting on a park bench and waiting to see what happens. What if? What if?

I want to step out of the struggle. I want to stop trying to like it here. I want to stop trying to be brave about being in pain. I want to step out of the energy of the struggle, sit by the lake, and see if it will tell me its name.

I enjoy the architecture of holy spaces: churches, abbeys, monasteries, temples of all types. Europe suits such a fancy, and lets me see a wide variety of structures meant to honor something – though what they honor is sometimes a bit off from the original goal. This week we are on holiday at Børnholm: Denmark’s only rocky island! (Sometimes the Danglish on signs can be quite amusing. My favorite so far is “Feminism Squats my Heart”…but I digress.) Børnholm has proven to be far more charming than its English tourism by-line. It’s a pretty leafy island in the Baltic Sea, with fine sandy beaches, clear water, and pretty woods through which to bike. In addition to home brewed brown ale (quite nice) and smoked herring (not so nice), Bornholm’s claim to fame includes several Rundekirks – round stone churches white washed to a gleaming brilliance. We were lucky enough to visit a couple of these unique bulwarks, which have served as a combination places-of-worship-cum-look-out-towers since the early 1100’s.

I was particularly struck by Nylars Kirke, the smallest and least significant of the bunch. It’s stolid bulk and cool interior is just the type of space that appeals to me – old, earth-rooted, and simple. I was compelled to touch things there. I ran my fingers along the rim of the grey stone of the baptismal fount, planted firm in the center of the building; placed my palms on the stout center column and felt the wisdom held in its age; ran my hands along the curving outer walls to feel the warmth of the sun-kissed wash and the underlying chill of the hewed stones.

These are the kind of places that speak of home to me—these simple rooms with history in their walls, with time poured into their mortar. It is in these nearly abandoned places, anchored deep in the unwinding days of time, where I my footing can be found.

This morning dawned grey and homesick. I still don’t have internet at the house, so I can’t email, Skype, or IM any one. The boy still has not dropped us a single line of email. And in the past few days I’ve managed to:

-hold up an entire line of after-work shoppers at the grocery store while the cashier walked all the way across the store to weigh my produce. Apparently the process is weigh, sticker, then check out.

-step up to the bakery counter to be served without realizing that people were milling around in there because they were on a take-a-number system, which I had completely circumvented.

-spend thirty minutes in front of the self check-out machine at the library while I looked up every word on every function key in my Danish-English pocket dictionary. (Eden then came to my rescue and figured it out in about ten seconds.)

-get stopped by a young man wearing camo and carrying a rifle because I tried to tour the Rosenberg Slot (palace) by entering the “military only” gate.

I know these are small infractions, and that one is expected to make many silly mistakes when moving across cultures. Still, it wore me down a bit, and the kids and I were ready for one day when we didn’t have to feel like Mr. Bean.

So, I called Jen, who immediately made me feel better by telling me how she once bought a lovely green table cloth in Japan, only to get home and find out that she was the proud owner of a very large piece of nori. Then I holed up and spent the day listening to This American Life (here’s the most hilarious opening story ever); making one of our precious boxes of Annie’s macaroni and cheese; and watching the kids make crafts out of all our empty produce cartons. (I’m only buying the pre-packaged produce because I still can’t figure out the weighing-and-sticker machine!) Here’s to a little slice of home….

Last night, I created this dish, and it turned out so yummy I thought I’d share it. Using the prosciutto eliminates the need for multiple spices.(Ours was leftover from making pizza.) It only took twenty minutes to get the thing simmering and it’s kind about how much of this or that you might have on hand. A satisfying winter meal.

Sloppy Split Pea Soup

4-6 thin slices of prosciutto

olive oil

4 med shallots, diced

2 stalks celery, chopped

4 med carrots, diced

1 thin skinned potato, sliced thin

4 cloves garlic, crushed

4 cups dried yellow split peas, sorted

8 cups stock plus enough water to bring the soup to desired consistency

balsamic vinegar

romano or parmesan cheese

Pour a pass of olive oil into a medium-ish sauce pan over med-high heat. Tear up the prosciutto and lightly sauté so that it wilts slightly and releases some flavor into the olive oil. Add about 50 ml of water (be careful – it will splatter) and stir occasionally to steam out more flavor from the meat. Add shallots, celery, carrots, potato and garlic. Cook for about 5 minutes. Add split peas and water. Bring to a boil, reduce and simmer for 30-40 minutes. (Longer if you like your split peas cooked down more.) About 10 minutes before serving, add several nice sloppy pours of balsamic vinegar or other red wine vinegar to the pot and adjust salt/pepper. Nice with some shaved romano or similar. Yum!

In spite of the propensity to break out into occasional tears, we are actually happy to have arrived here six hours ago with eight duffle bags, two children, and one silly dog in tow. We are here for at least three years, surrounding ourselves with words we do not know, cobblestone streets which insist on tying themselves in un-navigable knots, and not a small amount of pickled fish.

Oh, and pastries. Don’t forget the pastries.

Paul has a new job at Microsoft in Vaedbeck, just north of the city. All the fun ex-pats work there and his boss Clara is carefully headhunting more. We will be surrounded by intelligence, wit, and people with a variety of lovely accents—basically graduate school revisited. (Oh, how we keep trying to grasp at our youth!) We have a few days to muck about together, and then Paul takes the train to work, where he will eat warm bread and Danish butter everyday at staff breakfast. I believe there is something called “Cake Thursday” as well, so obviously it’s a very hard life. Meanwhile the girls and I will figure out the multiple train systems on our own and complete our most important tour of Danish bakeries. (Vil du ha caffe, ou vil du ha tae?)
We came to this country to live deliberately: to shop less, to own less, to leave a smaller footprint. We want to stop being unilingual. (Q: What do you call someone who only speaks one language? A: An American) We want to give our children a global perspective—even if it is all still Western—and to let our own adult selves be shaped by things we do not know.

Well, that, and the six weeks of vacation.

While we are here we will live in an urban flat that costs roughly the equivalent our six bedrooms Seattle mortgage. With this price, we secure a third room–for writing, and hosting, and maybe, someday, even for our lost boy. So if you have a yearning for pickled herring, windmills, and baked goods involving almond paste– you should come see us. After all, this is a nation where people believe in spreading chocolate on their morning toasts and drinking beer by noon. No wonder it’s considered “the happiest place on earth.” Go on…buy your ticket. We’ll be waiting.

A month ago, Lynette accused us of “slipping away under the cover of night.” She was right, that was what we were planning on—in part because we don’t like big to-do’s, and a goodbye party where all our various worlds collide seemd overwhelming. And frankly, I just don’t like goodbyes. Lynette, however, is ridiculously rich in practical wisdom, so instead of moving in the cover of darkness, we planned a series of small goodbyes–dinners, coffees, and cocktails (especially cocktails.)—and these allowed us to say our thank yous and farewells.

All of this has left me quite tear-sodden. At one point, Katie K, my favorite neighbor, found me crying in the driveway. Why? Because I had to say goodbye to Sean—the cashier at my local grocery store. I know. It seems silly, but this is how we live. I seek out Sean’s line at the grocery store every week. Over time we’ve bemoaned the agony of first-time home buying (a condo purchased with his partner); made plans for a language learning CD (“Chinese the Gay Way”); and celebrated his one year sobriety anniversary. This is how we’ve built our life here in Seattle—by bonding with the grocery clerk, making friends with the neighbor, taking in stray boys and stray dogs. So when it comes to leaving, there is reall stuff, real people to leave—and that is far more difficult than selling a car or packing up a living room.

So I cry–because I won’t be able to sip chai with Jen, or have knit-and-tonic nights with Katie. I cry because I’ll no longer share a big old house with a gaggle of roommates. I cry because I’m ill at ease leaving our newly-legally-adult/quasi-grownup, ( I know Josh and Tonya will have his back, but come on–how’s a boy supposed to survive without unlimited internet and a fridge full of dairy products? ) I cry because I’m ripping my children out of their darling local elementary school, and prying them out of the arms of their sibling best-friends, Noah and Claire, and schlepping them a world away from Rosie, who Eden met the day before kindergarten and they are friends still yet. Not to mention what I’m doing my parents, who retired a year ago planning on full-time grandparent duty and are now wondering what they will do with all that time on their hands.

Then again, children adapt, and friendships survive long distance, and teenagers, well, they get “left” all the time at colleges and boarding schools and…I don’t know, boot camp? (Oh lord, don’t let him sign up for boot camp!) These are not reasons not to go. Ahead of us lies a wonderful adventure. If only I could stop blowing my nose and live into it!

In the midst of all the goodbye’s came many lovely gifts. The Uber-Family took photos of the four kids one day and presented us with an album the next. Rosie’s family threw a goodbye party for all the schoolyard chums. My folks dedicated many hours of grandchild tending while we sorted and packed. And Lynette helped her sweet Pascal make us bookmarks that say, “I will hold your place for you!” (This being exactly the kind of sentiment you would expect from a family who’s liscense plates read YOU MATTER and CONNECT.)
All of these gift are so tender and meaningful. They made us realize that, people like us—and that as much as we are connected to them, they are bonded to us. I really can’t explain how meaningful that is. Everytime I think about it, I’m back to the cry.

Just before we left, Katie read me a poem. It is one her father knows by heart, and she says the last stanza reminds her of our home. I think her reading this to me, after our storytelling-hours, is one of the nicest thing anyone has ever offered me. In reading me this poem, Katie proclaimed that the life Paul and I had hoped for had actually come true. So, when I cry a little too much, I read this poem. It gives me hope that we can again find our way to that magic place.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

A Prayer for My Daughter
William Butler Yeats

Want to read more about the beginning of our immigrant journey? Start here, then move on to this and this
.

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This is a place for melancholy songs

The sea stretches
long and grey and even
the seabirds alone on their rocks,
each an island unto themselves.

I feel I am trying
to memorize the landscape,
embed it rebar-deep within the ground of my knowing
until it feels familiar, like home
or at least,
until it makes firm the quicksand of foreign soil
so my children won’t feel the shifting
so they can land firm off the horse.

At home, our wisteria is two years young.
She stretches her thin tips
to finger the bare edges of her over-long trellis.

Here, the wisteria is old
like wisdom, she climbs easily up
two, three, four stories
protecting those who dwell inside
from the wearing winds of age
and change

Only one house stands out
amongst the others,
not for its beauty but
but for its size,
its inappropriate smoothness,
the monstrous heave of its bulk.

Echoing its neighbors, yet
the unbroken stucco,
the brazen two car garage
the freestanding ball hoop lying tipped behind the automatic gate
screams of young money.

The Land Rover drives by,
far to wide for these cobbled streets,
enters the third door I had not seen
which opens by unseen hand
with a whir and a click.
This, too much of the future
on a shore inhabited for five thousand years.

In thinking about our move I found myself saying “But we won’t be immigrants there, not really.” Then I was struck by the implicit racism in my own thinking – I had only been categorizing people of colors as ‘immigrants.’ Everyone else had some sort of special ‘I belong’ status in my mind. But we will, in fact, be seen as immigrants in our new home, our whiteness for the first time not granting us the immediate status of belonging. I’m curious as to what that will be like, so here I will record that story.
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On the quest to have one’s own identity while still pursuing cultural harmony:

I could tell right away they were not Danes. Most obvious, of course, was that they had dark skin – a rarity in this platinum blonde nation. She was ‘eating American,’ that is, picking up pieces of her too-chewy cinnamon bun with her fingers. He was pouring ketchup on his eggs. Neither had rye bread, cold sausage, or cheese on their plates. When they spoke British accents emerged, confirming my suspicions.

This is how people see me here. Small tell-tale habits give away my otherness, even when my mouth stays silent. I will never truly fit in.

And why should that be my goal? True, I want to shed my ‘ugly American-ness,’ but I still want to celebrate my unique otherness—as should we all.

Being here has made me aware of how much time I do spend trying to fit in. I’d like to think it is because I want to avoid giving offense. But the truth is I do it at home too, so I know it is not really about deferring to an unknown culture.

This morning I queued to the right on the stairs, ate my pastry with a fork, thought about growing my hair out long – maybe even ceasing to dye it red. Then I realized; I was in immediate danger of losing myself to a false image. I made a conscious decision to be gleeful, but polite, about not fitting in.

“Please don’t let me be ordinary,” my mother used to sing to me from The Fantasticks. It is true that from a young age I have never wanted to be ordinary, have never felt like one of the group. My intutive pull has always been towards the other, the fringe, the outsider.

Still, I’ve always wanted my uniqueness to be from clever choice, not from alien necessity. Here, where one of the national values is “equality through conformity,” I am nervous of being “the immigrant”—of sticking out due to my ignorance of the social norms—this social awkwardness feeling very different from my state-side approach of making a conscious choice to subvert the commercial monotony of the crowd. I don’t want to be different here out of mere social awkwardness. But then again, even moving here will be from choice, from some vaguely daring internal sense of adventure. So I guess on days when my ego needs the tiniest bit of a boost, I can chalked my cultural awkwardness up to cunning personal choice. When I need a shot in the arm to get out and get past all of the unknowns, I can look at my choice to dwell abroad, to be the cultural other, and say like Peter Pan, “Oh, for the cleverness of me.”

Paul has an interview for a job here, and we are ever so close to relocating. Although, one does have to wonder at the wisdom of a chatterbox like me immigrating to a country where it’s rude to make small talk with strangers! I’ve already offended a woman by cooing at her ugly-cute mutt, and alienated another by commenting on her terrific orange eyeglasses. Sigh. It will certainly be hard for me to curb the urge to talk to every child and elderly person in site. It could only be worse for my soulmate Jen, who regularly accosts strangers at Trade Joe’s in order to tell their fortunes and issue blessings.

Copenhagen is not one of those world-class stunners of a city. Foregoing flash, this small wonder has cornered the market on charm. From what we have seen so far it’s squat and well kept—a low-rise city with darling balconies jutting out everywhere. I can’t shake the impression of an old maiden aunt who’s kept her self quite well. Reserved preservation seems to be the key here. Unlike our car crazy city, Copenhagen seems to be populated almost entirely of bicycles. Already I’ve seen a woman riding her bike in a skirt, stockings, high heals, and a fur coat. The only thing cuter than the bikes are all the babies in old-fashioned prams making there way down the strassa. Since only the dog would acquiesce to riding in a pram, I’m dreaming instead of an Electra cruiser with wicker basket and an efficient little bell. (Eden’s only requirement for her new bike is the “dinger bell” – Cate insists on streamers.)

We’ve checked into the vintage Hellerup Park Hotel. Our small room with the yellow curtains is the epitome of Denmark’s national goal of being hyggelig (who-gull-ie), or “cozy.” I once heard travel guru Rick Steves say, “You’ll rarely see Danes sitting down without a candle between them.” This is true even in our tiny rented room – a candle waits for us on the side table. Everyone is helpful and polite, and I think our dinner waitress might just be in love – Paul miscalculated the exchange rate and gave her a $25 dollar tip!

This week’s theme at Mama Says Om is “decision.” We happen to be standing on the edge of a pretty big decision. We are looking at some employment opportunities overseas. This comes up every six months or so, and up until now there’s not been a very good fit. But something new is on the horizon and we’re wondering if it might be for us.

There’s a kind of artwork that I do which I tend to think of as “art as spiritual journey.” These pieces are more craft and meditation than they are actual “art.” (Whatever that means.) I often find that they solidify a concept I’m trying to get my head around, or point me in a direction that I didn’t know I was longing for. Working on this piece for Mama Says Om helped me feel like the possibility of relocating was real, was firm. The collage embodied a concept in a way that my mental imagination alone could not. Now I feel like if we pursue this as an option it’s less ethereal — there’s something solid to stand on, and that is making me feel less afraid of the exploration.

To make this collage I used a piece of stationary with a travel theme as a background and applied a map from a European tour book. The birds are a stamp I carved out of a wine cork. The big red “you are here” arrow was cut out of electrical tape and the letters are stickers that I cut up so they didn’t look quite as scrapbook-y. Small pricing tags from an office supply store detail out the verb “to decide.” More stickers on the bottom spell out what I’d have to do if I moved out of familiar surrounds. The sentence in handwriting says “I have a fork” in Danish — the only thing I remember from the round of language lessons I took a year ago. (Actually, that’s not true. I also remember the word for apron and the word for living room … I’m sure those three things will take me a L-O-N-G way!)

Mama Says Om is a great experiment to help creative mom’s hold on to their art-and-soul. You can play too! Just check the weekly theme, and write, photograph, paint, collage, or whatever your way to a post on the topic. Then link to Mama Says Om to inspire and be inspired. Mama Says Om is brought to you by the wondergals at Elaine and Krystyn.

Ps. Here’s some links to other art-as-meditation projects that I’ve done in the past. A little note for context…I am an ordained minister and work with artists who are trying to find a new way to practice old faiths, as well as with interfaith communities, and with women who are trying to access the feminine divine. I teach workshops on art-based meditative practices. Contact me if your interested in booking me for a conference or retreat. moi at magpie dash girl dot com.

Other Stuff
spring equinox
dia de los meurtos: derrida (by Lindell Alderman), altar for darfur
feminine divine,
ignatian examen high point,
ignatian examen, low point
thank you
perched
tsunami intercession
justice (by Rebecca Dallin),

The Ramadan Collection
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