kristininholland

The Crazy Dutch: December 31st

Sadie, my brother’s late dog, trembled every time she heard a bang. She would have gone berserk today if she was on a visit to the Netherlands. When we awoke this morning in The Hague, the fireworks had already started. The Dutch ignore any rules and safety standards and people of all ages and demographics shoot off fireworks throughout the day. All of these fireworks suggest celebration, but their frequency and early start is confusing, diluting the ritual of saving the fanfare for midnight to mark the changing of the year and new beginnings.

Earlier today while on a walk with a friend, I noted a few Christmas trees that had been thrown curbside. I would bet good money that these trees will not make it into the city tree recycling program, but will be pine scented kindling for bonfires in our neighborhood this evening. Two years ago when walking home from a friend’s house, we saw a rather impressive burning pile of rubbish surrounded by red-faced merry makers on a street corner at 2am without a police car in sight.

But these incidents are just small potatoes to what happens in downtown Amsterdam. Want to take your life in your own hands? Join the throngs of people from all over the world that head to this party capital for New Years and watch the fireworks stream overhead (or through the crowd toward your knee cap) in glorious chaos.

I’ll be celebrating this year in a quiet neighborhood with another family with young children, so I’m afraid I won’t have many newsworthy photos to share, but I will add, that the boys (my son and his friend down the street) are VERY excited about the bag of fireworks we brought home today for their post sunset enjoyment.

Happy New Year to all of you, wherever you may be! Enjoy the chaos!

Kristin in Holland

“Tell No One”

"Tell No One".

What an amazing poem. Re-posted from Mirror obscura 🙂

Cold

If you live in the Netherlands, you have probably opted out of reading this post; your ears are icy and red, that little toe in your right boot is going numb and your lungs are working over time processing the chilly air as you walk toward your bicycle or leave the office for the tram. Why would you also want to read about the cold?

Because there is another side to it that we forget; it pulls us into life, full force. It’s cozy here behind the computer as I type, but not 20 minutes ago, I was cycling across The Hague along a canal, the pallid sunlight making a feeble attempt to cast it’s warmth through the gray sky. As I pedaled, I watched the bike path with caution, looking for spots of ice. Finely dressed Europeans clothed in an asphalt spectrum of gray to black walked quickly down the paths, or cycled with determination through the cold. I was keenly aware that my pants were not thick enough, that my ears protested the lack of a wool beanie beneath my bicycle helmet.

I like to think that everything looks better under full sunlight: colors pop, angles are sharp, the geography is delineated. But there is a stoic romanticism to a European city beneath a gray sky, punctuated by the startling cold. You notice detail. You are aware of your body turning inward as you simultaneously breathe in the cityscape or landscape with alertness. But the only thing romantic about cold is the anticipation of warmth that will soon greet you at your indoor destination–in this case, my home.

As I unlocked the front door and entered our house, the warmth enveloped me. I immediately felt my spirits lift; any tinges of melancholy that were working their icy fingers around my thoughts were instantly banished, and I felt happy to be inside. The drastic contrast in temperature woke me up to the emotions associated with hot and cold.

On this note of emotions and temperature, I found the following article on fastcompany.com interesting. Here is an excerpt: www.fastcompany.com

In a fascinating study reported in the prestigious journal Science, psychologists uncovered a link between physical and interpersonal warmth. When people feel cold physically, they’re also more likely to perceive others as less generous and caring.

In a word, they view them as cold.

When we’re warm, on the other hand, we let our guard down and view ourselves as more similar to those around us. A forthcoming paper from researchers at UCLA even shows that brief exposure to warmer temperatures leads people to report higher job satisfaction.

Why the link between physical and mental warmth?

Psychologists argue it has to do with the way we’re built. The same area of the brain that lights up when we sense temperature–the insular cortex–is also active when we feel trust and empathy toward another person. When we experience warmth, we experience trust. And vice versa.

For now, I’m enjoying the cold because I am fortunate to have a roof over my head, heating that works and a wonderful husband to cuddle up with at night. But I’m also longing for my upbeat, friendly and loving California friends. Would they still have positive, warm and friendly personalities if they were living for extended periods of time in cold conditions? My gut tells me they would be the same, but climate does play a role in our friendliness.

Be Here Now

Be Here Now.

I read this post by Kate Johnston and felt like I was there in the moment with her. Beautifully written and thus I’m sharing it here.

Kristin

Flexing your language muscles

I go to the gym a few times a week to keep myself sane and healthy. Another benefit of going to the gym as an expat is that most of the time, the classes are taught in Dutch. Words that you might not otherwise encounter in daily conversation “buikspieren” (stomach muscles), “sleutelbeen” (collar bone), are delivered up in short instructive sentences, combined with physical movement. This combination lets the words seep into your body and brain in a way that vocabulary lists or passive conversations can’t. But lately, there have been more expats than natives in the Body Balance course and the teacher has been switching to English.

My 8:15 a.m. sloth-brain appreciates the English, but the part of me that wants to get the language acquisition part of my brain in shape feels cheated. Please speak in Dutch! I want to say. But this morning, our Body Balance instructor also had a case of sloth-brain, and admitted she was too tired to translate the whole class in English today, despite the number of expats in the room.

“It’s good for our Dutch!” I encouraged. And she set forth in her native language. My inner sloth-porcupine prickled at the switch, discouraged that it had to work harder, but by the end of the class, not only were my muscles stretched, but my mind as well.

On my way out of the gym, with another expat of French origin, one of the trainers asked us in Dutch if we had “zin” (interest) in a group training.

“Nee. Dank je wel. Ik heb zin in de bakkerij.” (No thank you. I have interest in the bakery.) I responded. The trim fitness coach with long blond hair and perfectly sculpted buikspieren laughed at my response and patted me on the arm in camaraderie. Usually, my sense of humor is lost on the Dutch, but this morning, a Dutch person not only got my sense of humor, but laughed in response! Now that is an accomplishment!

Playing God

My default place to run on a rainy morning is on the treadmill in the gym. I of course miss the feeling of the earth beneath my feet and the smell of The Hague’s urban forest where I run in friendlier weather. When I run in nature, the worries or preoccupations crowding my mind slowly release into the atmosphere, as if the leaves are not only oxygenating the air, but cleaning the clutter from my mind, creating space for grace and God to enter.

But this morning, as I look at the red blinking triangle tracking my progress around the imaginary track, my mind is in overdrive, running its non-stop commentary. It doesn’t seem to matter that I just finished a Body Balance class which ended with a short meditation; my mind wants all the attention. It wants to strategize about marketing my novel, and make a checklist for work–don’t forget you need to send that one client a confirmation of their reservation. It has taken over, already throwing me into work instead of letting me be here, in the gym, in the moment.

Sometimes I tame this mind with prayer as I run. Each lap is dedicated to a friend or family member and the red blinking light guides my thoughts to my friend: I envision him or her as happy, in perfect health, that her children are well, that she has time to read. It goes on and on with each blink of progress and then I switch to another friend as the next lap begins.

But then the view pulls my mind into other thoughts. The modern gym with walls of glass windows is located above a supermarket on the corner of a busy intersection. The treadmills lining the east-facing windows look over the street below. It is from this bird’s eye perspective that I can run and people watch at the same time. From this perspective all people become children in my eyes. The man with the large belly in a black and white striped shirt who blends into the crosswalk, the old woman with puffy white hair blowing in the rain, the young girl bicycling next to her mother in the bike path, the Muslim woman with a headscarf pulling a cart of groceries down the street, the people in the bus sitting in their seats, gazing out at the world.

From this elevated perspective, unnoticed and sequestered away behind the glass walls in the warmth of the gym, I feel an inexplicable warmth toward everyone. My judgments of others diminish. These are simply people like me–all expressions of what is possible in the world at this very moment. I wonder how it would feel to be an omnipotent presence, a God, some guiding force of the universe recognizing each and every one of these people in all of their grace and uniqueness. I try looking at each person and sending them a blessing. My head spins by the sheer number of people going by. It’s hard enough to keep up with the people just in the cross walk and on bicycles. Then the light changes and cars and buses full of people wiz by. So how would God know each and every one of us? How could he or she keep track of all of that? Just trying to track the numbers of people at this one intersection in a medium sized neighborhood in one city is mind blowing.

I think of bored math geniuses who have done the calculations to figure out just how fast Santa would have to travel across the entire world and how big his sleigh would need to be to bring every child in the world a toy on Christmas eve–and how by presenting the facts, they pronounce Santa as dead.

Such musings could also be a fatalistic blow to the concept of God as a force working in each and everyone’s lives. Take this excerpt from Teju Cole’s OPEN CITY for instance. In this part of the book, a young Nigerian doctor who lives in the U.S., is vacationing in Brussels, Belgium. He has befriended a young Muslim who is an academic and free thinker. The Muslim, named Farouq, has the following to say:

I am sure you know what Paul de Man says about insight and blindness. His theory has to do with an insight that can actually obscure others things, that can be a blindness. And the reverse, also, how what seems blind can open up possibilities. When I think about the insight that is a form of blindness, I think of rationality, of rationalism, which is blind to God and to things that God can offer human beings. This is the failure of the Enlightenment.

I’m not suggesting we all just give up rationalism to let God (or Santa for that matter) into our lives, but to say that sometimes the world isn’t rational and the things that matter most–love, attraction, kindness, compassion, serving others, faith–have nothing to do with rationality and everything to do with making the world a better place.

Many people who categorize themselves as religious describe their faith in terms of “the bedrock, backbone or foundation” of their being. I find that God for me is constant only in a sense of constant change, always evolving in expression and meaning. My mind plays at knowing God, but it is only when that mind shuts up and allows space, that I feel grace and God come through.

Green by Kristin Anderson

Have you ever seen an image that stirs you within? Reminds you of childhood, of longing, of romance, of hope, of nature, anticipation? I had such an experience when I encountered Catrin Welz-Stein’s digital artwork online, especially her painting The View. I looked at that painting and decided I had to order a poster.

Then, as I was working on the final draft of my debut novel, I imagined her beautiful image on the cover of my book. But it wasn’t quite right for my book. I needed a more contemporary version of this same piece. I needed to lift the melancholy out of the clouds and add anticipation and hope.

But that was a dream, after all. I couldn’t just contact a Swiss artist in Kuala Lumpur out of the blue and ask her if I could not only use her artwork for the cover of my book, but alter it. Could I? Well, if there’s one thing I learned from Doctor Seuss, it’s that you don’t know until you try and it never hurts to ask.

So I contacted her.

After working with her over the internet for a number of months–me sending mock-up drafts, and she providing her thoughts on composition, color, balance, we developed an idea that suited both of our needs. I called upon my husband’s graphic design skills, and got the final version approved!

I am so excited about my book launch coming up on Saturday, November 16th, 2013, when I will officially release this book into the world. Like more info? Check out my author blog: http://www.authorkristinanderson.com or Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/authorkristinanderson

Taking it with you

When we moved to the Netherlands, we shipped over 40 boxes, at least half of which were filled with books. We sold or gave away our furniture and our many U.S. appliances that would require an adaptor and converter in The Netherlands to function, and we gave away a large majority of our son’s baby clothes, books and toys to a couple that would soon have a baby of their own. Thus, in many respects, we were travelling light.

But then there’s the other baggage that sneaks onto the airplane and into the packing boxes, coming on the journey with you, even though you thought you’d left it behind.

This baggage is composed of emotions and negative beliefs, perhaps with karmic relevance, that no longer serve you; baggage that has proven time and time again to be useless; yet for some reason we still pack it along.

One thing I found in my emotional suitcase was a message that said “you can’t write. You think you’re clever and insightful, but you’re not.” It took me a few years, but I finally sent this suitcase packing. I no longer have use for such a negative belief. Humility remains important, but self-degrading thoughts like that one never proved useful.

A good way to send these negative thoughts packing is to unwind the string that keeps them in place. For example, I can think back to a boss who played yo-yo with his praise and criticisms of my writing. On one given day, he would assess my writing as close to genius, and then a few days later, ask me if I got my Bachelor’s in English out of a Crackerjacks’ box. If I had let common sense, rather than my emotions rule, I would have realized that he, not my writing abilities, was the yo-yo. If I continue to unravel the thread, I discover far more compliments than criticisms. But as master of the scale, I placed far more weight on one person’s words than was merited.

Our shower broke tonight. The whole unit came off the wall, the showerhead breaking off from the snake-like cord. I sent an email to the building manager and received a quick reply–that sort of thing is part of the furnishings, which is the renter’s responsiblity. I was thankful for the quick reply, but not so thankful with the information it brought. This gives a whole new definition to the concept of a furnished vs. unfurnished apartment. I suppose we were lucky the former tenants didn’t take the showerhead and faucets with them!

So although I’ve shed some of that useless emotional baggage, I’m still holding onto American ideas of how things should be done as well–have you EVER rented a place in the U.S. where the shower didn’t come with a, well, a shower? Mystifying idea, isn’t it?

I can always jump to the law of comparison to make this situation trivial. My friend Riette and her husband Tim traveled through Central Asia and at times, didn’t have access to a shower for ten days. I got the impression that the nature of the journey, and the local living conditions helped them cope with this rather unbearable situation for someone accustomed to westernized living conditions. I guess I’ll have to get along with a wash cloth for a few days until we can purchase and install a new shower system. And when we move, a Dutch person will say of our shower, “You can take it with you.”

Shower update: After further correspondence with the building manager and his visit to see the aforementioned shower situation, it was decided a replacement showerhead was merited after all! It was purchased with expediency and my husband installed the new set up this evening. As I showered this evening, I had the sensation of someone returning from a camping trip, realizing the luxury of hot, running water all over again. Thank God for revised opinions and expediency!

Versailles in the Summertime

Versailles in the summertime–almost sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Visiting the Palace of King Louis the XIV and the world-famous gardens surrounding this majestic estate. In many ways, it was romantic. Strolling through the gardens that seem to stretch endlessly gives you a sense of royalty.
You forget your sandals, striped sun dress and broad straw hat, and envision yourself in yards of silk with a jewel-encrusted parasol in your gloved hand. White marble statues of Greek and Roman Gods and Goddesses line the gravel paths; you are in good company. Fountains abound, each out doing the other.

But then I'm only painting half the picture; Versailles in the summertime means that you have more for company than the Gods and stately grounds–the gardens and palace are besieged and overflowing with tourists, and you are but a raindrop in the downpour of tourism, together creating a wave so thick that there is barely enough oxygen within the regal rooms of the palace to stand.

Although the garden allows for throngs of people, the palace, with its walls, closed windows and roped-off areas, despite it's grandeur and high ceilings, breeds claustrophobia. I wanted to pause and take in the beauty all around me, but I couldn't take it. Perhaps those who ride the Paris or New York subway on a regular basis could handle it better than me.

I love architecture and museums, but crowds don’t give you the space for a contemplative mind. You are all elbows, one hand holding fast to your purse or wallet, the other pulling your little one close by to protect him from being squashed. It wasn’t that bad the entire time, but some of the smaller rooms, lined with velvety wall paper, high columns bedecked with lion heads, each and every space ornately decorated, felt like collaborative tourniquets on my nature-loving mind–I just had to get out as quickly as possible. I believe that if there had only been a mere 50 people in the room instead of 150, I could have taken in all of this opulence with more grace and appreciation.

A Blast of Cold Air

A Blast of Cold Air.

The above link is to a blog called Dreaming in Arabic. I LOVE the way she writes. I just saw Invictus and feel completely energized by this beautiful story that recalls a remarkable time during the beginning of Nelson Mandela’s presidency and his focus on the national Rugby Team as a method of uniting a culturally and racially divided nation. In this context, it so nice to read Jolandi Stevens’ post about South Africa, the land of her birth. Her other posts, mainly about expat life in the UAE are also beautifully written.