Cherry Blossom Tattoo - as promised

Poetry: Dark Angel

Dark Angel

Who were you?

Just some figment of my imagination?

I don’t know.

If only,

If only I knew.

It was as though the shadows from the deepest corners of my soul

Came to life

To walk the earth,

Just for some brief time,

Became flesh,

Became warm skin, and bones, and lips, and hair.

Sometimes I think

I fell in love with my own creation,

Only saw what I wanted to see.

Who were you?

What did I see in you?

Was it even real?

Or was it altogether different?

Did you show me something of you,

No one had ever seen?

Not even you.

So that in the end we were

Two dark angels meeting in the night.

Nothing left now

But the whisper of wings,

Receding in the distance.

Spring blossoming

Ah, I love coming home! I've always blamed being a Cancerian, but I just am a bit of a home maker. Wherever I've lived, I've made the place my own. It speaks of me more than I ever do in words - that's unless I'm writing. It's my harbour, my haven, the place I return to to recuperate and rest.

It's all the more beautiful to have returned back here in the spring time. Nature seems to have advanced in leaps and bounds since we left a couple of weeks ago. With the arrival of spring sunshine, my internal sunshine seems to have firmly taken hold inside me. Thank goodness! I had some fear that returning would bring back some of the pain I left loitering here those few weeks ago, but somehow that's not happened. I've not had the slightest inclination to play poker and that raw feeling in my chest seems to have dissipated at last. I test myself of course - to check if it's quite real. I do the difficult things like read his old messages, listen to his voice recordings. For the first time I actually felt nothing much. Time to move on.

Perhaps quite fittingly I had my Cherry Blossom Tattoo done yesterday. 3 hours of solid work have left a beautifully gnarled branch grow up my entire left side with dark pink blossom blooming and petals falling. It is fantastic work, I never dared to hope it would come out so well, despite the comprehensive collage I'd left the artist with for her design. It's so stunning I can't help sneaking peeks at it whenever I go past a mirror, never mind it still being covered in cling film. So why the Cherry Blossom? On a simple level: I just fell in love with it. I'd played with a girl with the most delicate feminine tattoos and been inspired to have more myself. On the hunt for flowery tattoo motives, I found it - the most amazing image of a woman's body half covered in cherry blossom. Only after that did I read about its two-fold meaning. In Japanese tradition, the Cherry Blossom stands symbolic for life and its transient and finite nature. A cherry tree flowers briefly with vigour and beauty for a mere few short weeks. Everything ends, everything changes. It reads as an encouragement to me to savour those precious moments and it also reminds me that moments of pain also end, as surely as the petals must fall. In Chinese herbal lore (although I only ever seem to find this fact on tattoo websites), the cherry blossom is apparently a symbol of feminine beauty, power and sexuality. Well, let that be an unsubstantiated reference, but there is something in the darkness of the wood against my pale skin and the pink-red tone of the delicate blossom that expresses that state of being just the One Girl perfectly: sexual, sensual, loving, fierce. Perhaps all the more so, as I remember the pain and the blood that magicked this beauty onto my body. I won't forget this in a hurry.

PS: Yes, you will get a photo - when it's healed!

Germany - fleeting family meetings and encounters with German police

With all the myths about German efficiency, you would have thought that the German leg of our journey would have been a fairly smooth one. You would also be very much mistaken.
It all started to get excessively eventful when we came off the ferry that ships the train across from Danish Zealand to the North German coast. The delay just crept up and up and up and making our connection in Hamburg became a very questionable prospect. But we were lucky and nudged into Hamburg with just minutes to spare. I flew down the stairs to the platform, just as the connecting train drew in perfectly on time. A quick glance at the departure board told me it was actually 20 minutes late. This didn't quite compute, but hell I was just glad I was on it. We'd just settled in our seats when the excessively jolly conductor informed us that a lorry had just crashed into a railway bridge en route and that we would be delayed for at least 30 minutes. 30 minutes soon became 80 minutes and we eventually crawled into my home town at a quarter to one in the morning. It was a school night for my family, so we took a taxi to my sister's place and snook into a sleeping house to find a lovely note, much gorgeous food and a freshly made bed. I grumble about family at times, but at moments like that I love them without an ounce of reserve!
When we awoke the next morning everyone was already gone for work and school. I can only imagine how much restraint it must have cost my 9 year old nephew to see our shoes and not wake us. At least we saw my sister briefly, as she popped back from work to take us to the station for a midday train. I only see my folks a few times each year, so passing through like this, barely touching, felt strange, but was also an interlude of warmth and comfort that leaves me with a warm glow. After all, hero stories are best shared around the hearth and a good adventurer will value her welcome.

Denmark!

After 22 hours of near continuous train travel we have traversed the entire length of Sweden and made it to Copenhagen! Signal failure shortly before Malmo temporarily threatened all our carefully coordinated plans, but in the end we even managed to squeeze onto the competely oversubscribed onward train to Hamburg.

Around us is a babble of different European languages. Across from us an Italian gentleman and a French couple, a Dutch guy further down, snippets of Liverpudlian drifting down the aisle. Before you ask: no, I don't think that's a recognised European language. Plenty of Danish people of course and, needless to say, the omnipresent German pensioner, never far from any tourist destination and instantly recognisable from their own brand of frumpy waterproof, known in my and other German families fittingly as the "anorak". And then there's us of course, thinking of ourselves as arrogantly unclassifiable and having descended into our private brand of Deutschlish, as we sometimes do.

I'm uncertain whether this melange played out on trains all over Europe will aid intra-European relations, as everyone exchanges their heroic travel stories in accented English or stir old prejudices as they fight over the remaining seats. Fact is, we've got a seat. But then, being German, apparently I've got a reputation to lose.

Lapland to England by any means

130 km of cross country skiing later and we'd done it! The adventure was over. We had sore legs, I was sporting the kinds of bruises I'd be afraid to show even in an S&M setting, but we were still in one piece and proud of what we'd accomplished. So when the little old hut warden told us that a volcano had errupted in Iceland, we found that nothing more than a rather quirky piece of news. After all, we'd hiked in that part of Iceland and seen the heat leak out of it's multi-coloured earth firsthand. Even the fact that a few airports in Northern Sweden had closed didn't worry us unduly. After all, we were flying back from Stockholm, 1000 km further south. Little were we to know that in the following 72 hours the airspace over most of Northern Europe would be closed.

So here we are, once more on a sleeper train from Lapland and at the beginning of an epic train journey that will cover around 2000 miles and as many as 6 European countries. Lapland to England by train, or so we hope. That this is even possible is only down to my husband's impressive knowledge of European railways and our combined ingenuity with the online booking systems of Swedish railways, Deutsche Bahn, SNCF and Eurostar. We spent almost 3 hours on a computer in a local library desperately trying to grab the last available tickets while the overloaded booking systems groaned and crashed under the strain. The town of Lulea may have little to offer to a Metropolitan European otherwise, but it's shiny new cultural centre was an absolute godsent today. I felt that emotional surge of victory when we had eventually done it and put our impossible itinary together. My joy may yet be premature, but here it is:

Lulea in Northern Sweden (Sat, 16.32) to Gothenburg (Sun, 10.52);
Gothenburg (Sun, 11.32) to Copenhagen in Denmark (Sun, 15:00);
Copenhagen (Sun, 15.45) to Hamburg (Sun, 20.16);
Hamburg (Sun, 20.46) to my German home town, where we crash out for the night. We leave there at 12.44 on Monday to get to Brussels at 16.35. That should give us just enough time to collect the Eurostar tickets we were lucky enough to get via SNCF from the Rail Europe booking office. These were pretty much the last and only Eurostar tickets out of Belgium that day. They'll eventually get us to London (via France for country number 5) First Class at 21.33 on Monday night.

This epic adventure is costing us (or hopefully our travel insurance) around 1000 GBP in train fares, so just a little more than the 60 pounds we'd originally paid for the two flights. If this was a wise move only time will tell. Just at the moment it looks as though air travel will still be affected for several days. I swear if this thing clears by Monday night, I'll be glad for people stuck all over Europe but wishing we'd just stayed put in Stockholm. For now all I can do is hope that all our many connections work out, that there are no delays anywhere along the way and that we manage to squeeze onto those couple of trains for whom reservations were no longer available. Up to now we're managing to regard this as a different part of the same adventure - Phileas Fogg style!

However, when the train stopped 10 minutes out of Lulea and the Swedish announcement spoke of difficulties, I didn't find the whole thing so entertaining anymore. But hey, we're moving again and only 15 minutes late so far, something we're hoping to make up over night. So wish us luck! I will keep you posted.

Healing Swedish style

Three days in the wilderness and we are temporarily back in signal range. How do I express the sum total of those 3 days of experiences?
On the one hand there is falling flat on my face, seriously bruising a rib and developing the biggest blisters my heels have ever seen, all within the first two hours of our 7 day ski tour. Let's not forget the bone crunching descents and being buried in a snow drift to my waist, skis and all. But then there's also the amazing scenery. I'm at a loss to understand how there can be so many shades of white, how the endless rolling hills can be both so bleak and so beautiful. The clouds that somehow are always low around here seem to play endless games with the light. I'm forever expecting snow to be unleashed from those dramatic skies, but it seems simply Lapland's version of good weather. However, the best part of the day are the evenings, crawling into the hut for the night, when all the exertion stops for a while and there is little to do but enjoy the warmth of the woodburning stove and devour the ludicrously tasty dried food.
All of this seems to have the most soothing effect on my state of mind, the exertion as much as the rest. I came here last year at this time in so much pain over my fertility test results and left feeling clearer and more settled. This year I'm feeling it, too. Everything falls away, there's just me, my body and this landscape, as if nothing else existed and I guess in that moment it doesn't. The past settles back comfortably where it belongs and concerns for the future beyond the next hut seem irrelevant. Thank you Sweden!