Tag: sea

Pure love and minimalistic beach tent life (August 2022)

From the hill in the southern mountains of Bulgaria, I went to the Black Sea Coast and picked up Artha. Together we headed to a wonderful and lonely beach that Artha had visited before. And our time there was profound… Full of pure love and openness.

It felt super to meet Artha again. It was like we knew each other for years although we just had spent some hours together at the Beglika festival. The connection between us was just intense, warm, and deep.

I picked her up in a flat. A flat. That was the first time since Corfu that I was in a flat again. It felt weird. The strong walls. The distance to nature.

After a bit of offroading, we parked Rosinante and took a few kilometers walk to the beach we would call home for some days. We found an awesome spot at the beach, set up Artha’s small tent and that was everything we had to do. In addition to the tent, we only had our sleeping bags, sleeping mats, a hand full of clothes, some fruits, some nuts, and some water. And I brought my bo staff with me.

Since I saw the people camping in tents in Greece, I wanted to try it and here I was. At that lonely beach. Absolutely minimalistic. With a wonderful woman, I barely knew but at the same time, it felt like I knew her my whole life.

We had a gorgeous time together swimming naked in the ocean, meditating, doing yoga, walking, talking, and feeling. We just lived there together deeply connected, deeply loving each other. But not in the craving and sexual way. We had no sex or any contact in that direction. We just flowed with whatever was there. Life was pure, simple. We talked about everything and these conversations felt so profound and authentic… Like old friends we felt and knew what the other was about, if the other wanted some space for herself or felt like spending time together. This connection between us…

I loved her deeply and that deep love felt so different to me. It felt pure and unconditional. Like it always was there in my life and I just rediscovered it. And I felt not only giving and sharing this love in Artha’s direction. I felt that same love coming from her as well. I felt so purely loved… I don’t know… Maybe this love was just what humans are seeking: being so purely and unconditionally loved as you had been (or still are) by your mother. A love without concepts. One that is just there and will never cease. A marvelous love that feels like a companion that heals you.

Dealing with over 300 insects bites/ stitches (June 2022)

After Mount Olympus, I did another hike in that area and after some days of the mountain life, I felt like heading to the ocean again. On the way to the beach, I washed my clothes at a self-service laundry and maybe that’s where everything started to go crazy.

When I was living at the beach for one day, everything seemed to be fine. I got some mosquito stitches or bites but it did not feel like something extraordinary. The next day I started to count these bites and when I reached a count of 30 I got irritated, but not worried. The next day I counted about 80 of them and that was the point where I started thinking and getting worried. The stitches started to hurt and itch more and more and it was a real challenge to not try to scratch them out of my skin. Meditation got very interesting and challenging, by the way.

My first try to dissolve this insect situation was moving to another beach. I thought that maybe only on the one beach these insects were so strong. The crazy thing about this is, that I never found a mosquito or insect that I thought would do stitches/ bites like I got. I researched and learned a lot about mosquitos, fleas, bed bugs, and all the other friendly insects but still, I did not manage to identify one of them around me.

The next day on the next beach I counted 100 stitches on just one side of one of my forearms. I stopped counting at about 300 in total!

At that point, I got desperate and afraid of what was going on. My mind felt to be in between something. Somehow undecided or in doubt. I tried to escape the insects by moving on a mountain, but it did not help. I set up my hammock in Rosinante to have a safe place to sleep, but it did not help. Sleeping got more and more difficult, by the way, which made me more and more sensitive to everything. I searched for traces of the animals that were stinging me. Once I found one that looked like a flea but it was just a fly. All of this made me feel so desperate. It was painful in a physical and psychological way. It was occupying me. There was nothing else anymore. I was suffering.

And then I decided to go all in into this situation. It felt like accepting it but not in a passive way. I consider myself a pacifist and friend of nature but at this point, all of this stepped back. Still, I did not know what kind of insect was trying to eat me and so I just did everything I had learned during my research.

I did:

  • get a mosquito lamp
  • get a vacuum cleaner and was vacuuming Rosinante two times a day
  • get different mosquito and insect sprays
    and organic stuff like lemongrass and neem oil and used them several times a day (actually, I did not find pure neem oil and so I used dog and cat shampoo with neem oil)
  • wash all the clothes I had used again and all the covers, sleeping bag, etc.
  • put all my other clothes into the burning sunlight at least for a day
  • put my sleeping bag etc. into the burning sunlight every day
  • get different ointments and stuff like that to ease the itching
  • put on Rosinante’s heater to cook whatever was eating me inside of her

A few minutes after I put my stuff in the washing machine and turned it on, I felt kind of relieved. It was crazy. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just a mental reaction because I started to deal with the situation and that spread some hope inside of me. But to me, it felt more like a connection between the hundreds of bites/ stitches on my body and something that was feeding them broke. No matter what it meant for the insects that had been eating me, it felt very uplifting to me.

After I did all this, the number of bites did not increase anymore and the situation eased more and more. My mind relaxed with every hour. I think, that it is true what all the mindfulness and spiritual people are saying: you can deal with everything in a healthy, not stressful way. I learned a lot about this during that time.

And as I was sitting in Rosinante, feeling the relief, the calmness, the chill after the desperation I suddenly heard how a car revved up and blasted across the beach. When it passed by, I saw how two guys tried to reanimate a man lying on the bed of a pickup.

Witnessing this attempt to rescue a human life let me feel so small. It’s indescribable.

Back on the mainland of Greece, learning to fish and getting more into writing (June 2022)

Finally, in June 2022, I left Evia and hit the mainland of Greece again. After some weeks mostly in solitude, I felt like meeting some people would be nice. I looked for an easily accessible beach and found one with a great view of the mountains in the north of Evia.

On that beach, two super friendly, older Greek guys have been living for months. They had built up a little camp and one was fishing every day. They invited me to have several meals with them and it was super fun to talk with them about their perspective on Greece and how it has been and is changing.

I got to know another Greek guy who visited the beach every morning and evening. He had several fishing rods with him and showed me how to use them. For me, it was the first time using a pole and I enjoyed learning it. But at the same time, I felt very sorry for the fish. I’m mostly vegetarian but from time to time, if someone invites me, I’m eating little meat or fish. The fishing experience made me think about that again.

Most of the time, the water of the sea has been calm like in the video above. After the hiking on Evia, it was just perfect. I continued my swimming and bo staff training and got more and more into writing. I had started writing micro stories at the super nice mountain spot, I found on Evia. I just wrote whatever came into my mind and it felt very free and exciting. The joy of writing intensified over the weeks and very naturally a routine of daily writing established itself.