Tag: rocks

Hiking myself free

It’s mid of April 2022 and I’ve reached the eastern nipple of the Peleponnese. Most people call them fingers or feet, but I’m preferring nipples. There had been a time, some years ago when I called most things nipple. Maybe it’s a residue of this nipple quirk left in my head…

The last few days, it has been very stormy and today it’s even crazier. I spent the night behind a beach, in a place protected by a big rock formation. In the morning, I took the drive to the Geopark of Agios Nikolaos, and here the wind is even stronger.

This wind is not the only stormy thing I’m dealing with: my mind is very stormy as well. I’ve been not very motivated for the last few days and I’m feeling kind of down for no special reason I know. I’ve been meditating and practicing the acceptance of my state of mind, but in the morning I got an alarming message from Germany about the health situation of one of my close family members. This message added some whirl to the wind in my head and heart. It leaves me like a sailor in the dense fog of life. Standing in the crow’s nest. Thinking and evaluating if my future me might cope with the challenges to come instead of sailing in this particular moment with what is happening now. I’m asking myself questions like “should I go back to Germany?”, “what will happen next?”, “what if…?”, …

In times like these, it’s the best for me to go outside and do something interesting, but not too challenging. In the best case, it’s something beautiful. Something that keeps me going without much potential to be negatively exciting.

The hike from the Geopark to Ekklisia Agios Georgios is exactly that. It’s super beautiful and the narrow path is interesting but easy to do. I’m hiking between the sea and the mountain. The mountain is protecting me from the wind and the whirlwind inside of my head loses his negative and destructive power. The sun of spring is getting me really warm and after an hour, I’m enjoying all this. I’m welcoming and congratulating a big part of me for making it back from the future into the present. It feels very relieving. I’m still not very positive or happy, but that’s fine. I escaped the black hole, that had me in its gravity field.

I think there is a big power in walking. Maybe it’s because that’s what nature made us: awesome walking machines. Especially walking through nature has so much calm, satisfaction and a kind of wisdom in it.

On a stone planet in Croatia and about “feeling driven”

    Now I’m on this hill on a Croatian peninsula right next to the Mediterranean Sea looking at the sea, the mountains, the sky and the sun and feeling like on another planet.
    The track to get here was really cool and offroady and leed to this wonderful place where I think barely anybody goes.
    The sun is shining on the sky is bright. No human made sounds and it’s hard to see anything human made apart from my stuff, Rosinante and myself. Just the sun, the wind and some insects swirling around.

    When I continued my journey this morning, I said to myself that at the next beautiful, remote spot I will stay a bit and live the emptiness of this place and pause. Until now the feeling of being less driven is the biggest change of my mind.

    It’s difficult to explain what I mean by that. Of course many people know about the benefits to do only one thing at a time, to focus on this thing and being aware of it. And I’m a big fan of this too.
    What I mean goes in the same direction but is more about how the perception of the things that I’m doing is changing while I’m doing them.
    After some weeks that I spent with less and less obligations and now that my calendar has no entries apart from birthdates it feels like I have more energy to recognise more about myself.

    For example I have been optimizing something about the diesel heater of Rosinante the other day. I really enjoy this kind of stuff. I love it. And this is important to get: I find it realy exciting and I enjoy doing it.
    After some time I recognized that I was getting faster and kind of impatient. Some how this thing that I love did become more of a burdan then a thing that I enjoy doing. It felt like something else is waiting in some kind of waiting line in my head and tries to get my attention. But I don’t even know what’s on this weird penetrant waiting line and I’m pretty sure that I did not create it. When I started feeling this waiting line suddenly my mind seemed to come up with all sorts of things and put them all on it’s crazy waiting line.
    At those moments I started to feel driven in the past and this could lead to a growing feeling of indisposition and stress. Now this happens only rarely. Most of the time when I’m recognizing the growing waiting line, I stop doing what I’m doing and enter something like a inner monologue.
    Why I’m going faster? Why is the perception of what I’m doing changing? Why am I enjoying my current activity less and less? Does this has to happen?

    In the past weeks I experienced many many of these moments disregarding what I was doing. And I still don’t know why this happens and to be honest: It’s not important to me that I’m understanding why this happens. I’m grateful that I seem to have learned being aware of myself, my mind and the rest of me over the last years and I’m grateful about this new life and what it will trigger in me.
    And when I recognize that I enjoy the thing that I’m doing less and that I start to go faster and something inside of me makes up a waiting line I stop and pause. After a brief moment it feels different again: the enjoyment is back. And if it’s not, I do something different or pause longer.

    In my believing all of this is applicable to many, many small things I’m doing and what is more, for the big things in my life, too.

    For me this process of recognising and changing my mind is absolutely awesome and one of the best things I learned in my life.

    One could say: for you having no appointments etc right now it’s easy to do it this way but if you have a thousand things to do: work, family, friends, household, illness, Covid, money… then it’s not easy. And I think that’s right. Then it’s not that easy. BUT it’s still possible, I’m sure.

    Big rocks, rare footprints and geography

    After Christmas I went to a very special holidays to the Teutoburg Forest and Sauerland with a very special friend and we had much fun visiting friends, special sites, nature and cooking outside.

    We found some weird footprints in the forests and even weirder holes or something like that in some rocks. Interesting… 🤔

    The big rocks made me curious about how rocks and mountain are formed etc. There are some pretty interesting and good videos on the YouTube channel of CrashCourse about these topics.