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Values.

I feel it in my bones.


My hands cannot hold the pen steadily anymore like they once held the woman I love, without a tremble, without a single stir. As dark-rimmed as my eyeglasses may be, as much as the lenses resemble the bottom sides of an empty bottle drunk dry, I cannot see any further than I did yesterday. And tomorrow shows no promise because none were ever made, no vows to bind. I have lived to see too many decades of diminishment, too few of vitality. Too short have my travels been, and I am left wondering if the bakery in Austria still stands on its root of stone. If the oven still burns a fire inside.

Yet, her radiant smile lights up my days of old. Young travellers make my heart grow, filled with joy. My hands unsteady work their ways through the garden that has been growing in my backyard, green and promising new life, year after year. My own travels may have been short but there were plenty, plenty of them, full of vitality. They say age does not come alone. They are right. Age brings wisdom, respect and values.

Yesterday was a day for me that I will remember for the rest of my life. I met God in person. He was a small, gray-haired man with black-rimmed bottle-bottom glasses, wearing an old pullover and a smile. Apparently God lives in a small cottage surrounded by the thickest of woods, inprenetable even. He drives a white Impreza, has the most detailed frontyard I have ever seen with a tiny pond for four goldfish and a cage for a blue bird. A caged bird is the epitome of melancholy and blue is its color.

God's backayard holds a view over the sea, a field of oysters. Trees with grapefruit, two rowing boats on their stomachs, colors and a trampoline, which reads 'No adults'. My father was jumping on a trampoline once, he looked silly. And the garden ruling the backayrd is small, fenced but green as the leaves of trees in springtime. Not all herbs are named because they have names of their own.

He had stories for every situation. Stories about Austrian bakeries, how wood pidgeons have been hunted, what a terrible work it is to harvest oysters, what is beautiful.

I have never felt so uncertain about my values on life. Ambitions getting overruled by simplicity. Development on paper stampeding development in thought. My thought stream and the warmongery between my aspirations and my dreams, between my reasons for being happy. I occasionally feel like I've made mistake setting out on my travels. I feel like left everything I would have been good at and replaced it with the harshness of the world. Men without fingers begging me for money, children living an indent in a wall, people losing their jobs, their homes, their lives to earthquakes. I occasionally wonder was it worth leaving for all of this?

God, a hostelkeeper living just outside of Russell, a town of a thousand people, asked me if I had ever rolled in snow after sauna. I said yes, yes I have. He laughed the heartiest laugh I have ever heard.