Originally Published on Fulbridge
I placed my hand on the bark. I dipped the white tips of my
tennis shoes into the wet dirt. I closed my eyes and inhaled the fresh
scent of South Bohemia. I stacked my spine straight like the trunk of the tree,
and with each breath I pictured my branches reaching out. I pictured myself
blooming, while at the same time my roots settled in and held tight to the
soggy earth.
I was trying to connect with the land. I was attempting to
arrive and to be present in Vimperk, Czech Republic, where I had been living for the past half year.
I had arrived here six months before as a happy-go-lucky English Teaching
Assistant, ready to revel in the differences and fully integrate myself into a
new culture. But recently, living as a foreigner in this small town was
beginning to get the best of me.
Months before, in November, I had attended the Maturitní Ples, a large ball celebrating
the oldest students who would be taking their final exams in May. I watched as
the teachers spoke eagerly to one another across the table while I sat quietly
at the end drinking my beer. A live band played on the stage and green and
purple lights illuminated the large ball room. Three small blue tickets lay
before me as I excitedly waited for the raffle to begin. The music stopped and
everyone returned to their seats; I sat up in my chair and tried to see the
prizes being paraded into the crowded ballroom. Two men hobbled in carrying
something obviously very big and very heavy. My colleague turned around. “It’s
a boar,” she said pointing. I stood up. What I saw was not only a boar with an
apple in its mouth, but also dead pheasants and bags of potatoes. Afterwards, a
woman at the next table walked around flaunting her prizes, two dead pheasants
hanging limply from around her neck like a feather boa. I heard the other
teachers chuckling and I became aware that my mouth was hanging wide open as I
watched her. It was shocking differences like this one that I initially
revelled in, but that were now friendly reminders that I was still a gawking
outsider and not a part of their community.
I looked down on the town from where I stood. I could see
the red roofs in the spaces between the pine needles, the dark coal smoke
slithering up to the sky. I had hiked into the middle of the Šumava forest and
come to this tree. I wanted to be more like this tree. I wanted to be able to
unapologetically stand my ground and to be accepted as a part of their forest.
I had tried to achieve this over the last six months,
adapting to their culture in little ways. I ate with a knife and a fork now,
using the knife to scoop food onto my fork until my plate was wiped clean. I
took my shoes off and put slippers on before entering a house and saved my big
toothy grin that ended in two deep dimples for special occasions: smiling is an
American's dead giveaway. Yet I can never seem to completely remove the
"Made in America" sign apparently ablaze on my forehead. Once, while
waiting for my mother to arrive from Colorado, I decided to wait at a Costa
Coffee near the arrival gates. I approached the familiar circular Costa Coffee
sign, which displayed three coffee beans seemingly huddled together for an
important meeting in the middle. The bartender was a tall, young Czech with
almond eyes that practically melted into his dark brown smock. “Cappuccino,
prosím," I said it the same way I always do: my tongue riding the wave of
notes, bellowing the "o," lightly tripping over the "n" and
singing prosím at the end like a sweet ringing bell. The accuracy has even
surprised me at times and always leads the barista to believe that I am Czech.
It's in these cafés, amongst strangers, where I usually find the most solace.
“Malé nebo velké?" he inquired. "Velky prosím." As he
reached for the bigger paper cup he asked something I had never heard before,
something I hadn't practiced in my Czech lessons. Shame-faced, I asked him to
repeat it in English. "For here or to go?" he asked. Apparently the
“for here” size was an enormous white mug, so I sat sipping my oversized-coffee
like the American I undeniably was.
I pushed my toes a little further into the mossy soil. I wanted to feel connected to this community, but I still
didn't quite know how. I closed my eyes. I
began to envision the roots beneath my feet, that had been dancing and
entangling for hundreds of years; reaching out and telling a whole story of
their own. I thought how deep they ran and where they might end. They grounded
this tree and allowed it to survive, even in the hardest of times. I breathed more slowly, clearing my mind. This is why I
had initially hiked up into the forest, to find a quiet place to meditate.
I thought back to when I had first learned
meditation: I was four years old and sitting cross-legged on my grandmother’s
floor. She sat across from me, her long brown hair so long it tickled the tips
of her knees. Her dainty fingers fell open like a flower, adorned with silver
rings. I had been playing in her activity room on a small trampoline she had,
and this was her attempt to calm me down, which was something I struggled with
as a four-year-old. A big purple Buddha sat in the corner behind her, giving me
a big encouraging smile as I tried to "breath slowly" and "calm
down.” I thought of her words while I stood at this tree: “When we are having a
hard time,” she would say, “we
can always breathe our troubles away.”
This
reminded me of something my colleague Jarka, a fellow English teacher,
once told me. When she is having a hard time, she cooks her grandmother's
blueberry dumpling recipe. As a girl, she would spend her summers at her
grandmother's cottage with all her cousins. They always looked forward to times
at their babička's house because she would make these sweet dumplings. Jarka
told me this over lunch when the school cafeteria so happened to be serving
them. Our plates were stacked high with round white dumplings, dusted with
powdered sugar and filled with warm blueberries. I pictured my young colleague
and her cousins, crowded around a big wooden table in a traditional Czech
cabin, the bright green Šumava hills right outside the window, with blueberry
blue smiles and white powdered lips. Her grandmother had long passed but she
often found comfort in preparing her recipe. “These always remind me of my
happy childhood summers,” she told me and popped a bite into her mouth.
So
here I stood, meditating as I had been taught to do 5,641 miles away in
Boulder. I thought again of my desires to fit in and my frustrations that I
still didn't feel like a member of their community. I intended to release them
with each exhalation. I inhaled the flora, and as I released my breath what
left my body instead was laughter as the irony, so sweet and so simple, struck
me.
I am not Czech. No
amount of meditating was going to fix that: in fact meditating was the biggest
testimonial against it. The beauty was in accepting that no amount of sweet
dumplings would fix it either: that is somebody else's beautiful story.
My
thoughts returned to the roots miles beneath the mossy green South Bohemian
soil. In the beginning, I had thought being a teacher here was all about
reveling in the differences. But they are unwavering: they are the pheasants
around their necks and the words we don't understand. Something more lies
beyond them. It is here we can find the answers to why they love sweet
dumplings and to why the strange American goes off into the woods by herself.
Here we discover the childhoods and the grandmothers we've all had. Beneath the
surface, we can find our common humanity, running deep like the roots of this
tree. Standing there, I thought: how often we fail to look beneath the surface,
disregarding others for their differences; how rarely we consider their roots;
and how scarcely we even begin to ponder our own.
Zdroj: http://casakgool.blogspot.cz/2016/09/seznamte-se-s-teal.html |
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