Eden’s reaction when I told her they have to switch schools again because we couldn’t find a permanent apartment in our current neighborhood:

“I HATE God! Why God, why? Why would you make things work like this?!?!?!” (continued sobbing) “I would LITERALLY rather cut off my hands…cut off my ARMS than have to switch schools again.” (This went on for 20 minutes while we walked home from school.)

And here’s the email I sent Paul yesterday:

“It’s 6:35am and I am already prepared to beat the children.”

I love single parenting.

“Lie back, daughter, let your head be tipped back
in the cup of my hand.
Gently, I will hold you.
Spread your arms wide, lie out on the stream and look high at the gulls.

Phillip Booth, Words of Mouth

Eden models the braided hat mommy finally finished.

It is zero degrees Celsius today, freezing point.

At 7:40am the taxi driver buzzes our front door, and Cate skips downstairs, bundled in long johns, a turtleneck, a hooded sweater, a fleece jacket layered into a ski jacket, a knit hat with earflaps and a pair of gloves. Ironically, she wears neither her rain boots nor her snow boots, opting instead for her brand new “professional sports” shoes – glorified sneakers that may or may not be waterproof.

Eden and I leave for our 15 minute walk to her school a few minutes later. We too are clad against the weather. Eden points out that in Denmark, you could wear a neon t-shirt covered with puff paint and sequins and it would not even matter, because all anyone ever sees is your coat. (Thankfully, I have a large collection of vintage outerwear – not that a true Dane would ever be seen in any of them. Not a single one is black.)

The streets have thin sheet of black ice, which reminds Eden of the time she and Rosie slid around on black ice in front of her old school. (She is ever so knowledgeable about its dangers.)

Our sidewalks here are crystalline now, powdered with something that falls between snow and hail. Eden is captivated by the swirling ice patterns on the car hoods – for some reason the ice has frozen itself into a peacock fan on each one. By the time we get to school the church bells are ringing-out 8am, and we are rosy-cheeked from the weather.

It was sunny on the way to the skole, but as I walk back home the clouds roll in. By the time I hit the front door, hail is coming down in angled sheets.

Now, after a long cold day, it’s 18:00. The Mediterranean White Bean Soup is on the stove, the pull apart rolls are in the oven, and everyone is reading in the living room. Outside the window, in the light of the streetlamp, I can see that the snow is blowing exactly parallel to the streets, and I am glad to be inside surrounded by warmth.

…and here’s a funny photo to warm the cockles of your heart :-).

It’s official, every single thing in our pre-furnished temporary digs was purchased at IKEA. Some of the mugs even have stickers on them still. I feel like we are living in one of the show rooms!

I’m padding around in my mukluks and French apron, wiping off the Danish-modern dinette set and generally feeling pretty at home. (Of course, this after I’d once again sobbed my heart out over leaving one of our own behind.)

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.

Today the grey arrived at Copenhagen, like a shade snapped down over a window. It brought this prose/poem with it.

__________________________________________________________

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.

Immigrant Diaries is a new category at Magpie Girl. Here you will find our adventures in Denmark. We move to Copenhagen with the New Year.

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.
___________________________________________________________________________

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.”

Well friends, 9.5 hours after take off and we are in Denmark.

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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