So. I have been away from my blog for a while now. A month and a half actually. How could that happen?
I arrived in Budapest on Sunday, 20 July. I had been to Budapest before, almost exactly three years before, and I like the city and absolutely adore Hungarian food and culture and history and the language and people. The original plan was to spend some time here and then to use the city as a base for travel around the central parts of Europe.
Plan. Plans can be useful but I have learned to refrain from becoming attached to them. A rapid sequence of coincidences unfolded. I no longer accept coincidence as meaningless; for me all coincidence is synchronicity, at the very least in my poetic reality (one day soon, I promise). For me 'mere' coincidence belongs to a strictly causal purely rational reality, which for me is still real and of value but to reside there exclusively is not living fully, and such meaninglessness probably relies on a belief that time marches forward only, another belief I no longer accept at the very least in my poetic reality (ironically the multidirectional nature of time is also supported in rational reality in the science of quantum physics, but I digress from my digression).
How far back shall I trace the thread? Kathmandu.
In the early days of my time in Kathmandu, I was out exploring and it began to rain. As I hurried toward shelter, another person more hurried and shrouded in a navy rain poncho passed on my right, we glanced at each other briefly and she continued a short way, then stopped and turned back toward me. We decided to have a drink together and wait for the rain to pass. She invited me to come with her to a birthday dinner that evening. A couple she had randomly encountered invited her despite not knowing the guest of honour very well themselves. It turned out the birthday girl had just finished a ten day meditation retreat at a nearby Buddhist monastery and apart from Blue Raincoat and I the thirty-odd guests were other relative strangers also from this retreat.
In such a place with such a group, it's no surprise that hearts and minds were open. I met a woman who recommended The CouchSurfing Project, in short a global community dedicated to opening their homes to travellers to promote cultural exchange and raise collective consciousness. I joined and later searched for a host in Budapest. One remarkably helpful woman, who would have hosted me but was headed to Bulgaria for three months, referred me to a friend of hers that manages a few properties in Budapest. He had a few shared rooms, but it just so happened that another friend of his was considering renting out her studio flat. The three of us met at the property, instinct presided over formality, and within a few minutes (within 36 hours of arriving) I was residing in Budapest for the next two months.
The plans had changed. From tasting Europe widely to tasting life in Hungary deeply. At this point the thread loops back to Taipei. My friend Andy suggested I pursue freedom and truth, set fire to the notion of plans, choose somewhere to be for a while, and follow my heart from the present, free from the need to keep an eye forward for approaching plans. This struck me deeply, and I very nearly cancelled my remaining flights to live in Taiwan for at least three months and study Mandarin and Traditional Chinese with Andy. But at that point in my trip, I was not ready yet. My quest has been to find, hear, follow my own voice. At the last moment, I decided I was not clear enough on the matter.
Andy and I have had a long and close friendship, and with him in particular I have always struggled to know the difference between my voice and his (or more accurately the unfairly up on a pedestal version of his voice I created and heard; I am sure this is not uncommon; and I am so pleased to have woken up from it and started hearing my dear friend at last and can and do now love him more freely). I also felt burning my plans was not really more freedom, that it was closer to trading one set of given circumstances for another, that in reality each day presents its own set of given circumstances and my task is to hear my heart, make choices and do what I do; that as each article of my plan approached I was always free to keep or change or abandon it. I take the point, that it may well feel more free and be easier to follow my heart with fewer plans to negotiate. But I also felt like it would teach me less, that for me it would be avoiding the lesson; I want to learn to take this ability into my whole life not just my travelling life (whereas for Andy, right now, I think there is no separation).
So my heart lead me to stay for a while in Budapest. I wanted to taste normal life, to taste 'living here' and also to devour as much of the life on offer here as possible, so I went about pursuing activities that could give me the feeling that I actually live in Budapest and others that could become treasured memories. I contacted my former employer in Sydney and arranged to do contract work, in essence giving me a nine to five job to go to each day. I joined the gym and took a personal trainer. And as I mentioned I took the apartment and sought to establish for the first time more connections with locals than with travellers. I enrolled in salsa dancing classes (taught exclusively in Hungarian I might add; well, except for the words in Spanish, a language I am actually far less familiar with than Hungarian I might also add), bought tickets to camp overnight at a week long international music festival on one of the islands in the Danube, and registered to run in the Budapest Half-Marathon.
And it is wonderful. Wonderful wonderful. I am happy and invigorated and physically exhausted and happy and happy and happy. But a side effect of all this activity has been less time to record my thoughts in my blog. At many points during my travels so far I have felt the inner battle between writing about my journey and actually having my journey, between taking pictures of a place and actually being present in that place. I do not complain and I do not apologise. Not having enough time to do something is a cop-out and an illusion, we are all given the same amount of time in a day it is only a matter of how we choose to spend it. And this is how I have chosen to spend my time. That said, I will try not to leave it so long next time... ;-)