And Home Again (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

My time in Melbourne has come to an end. I was there just over two weeks but it felt like months. I was going to live and work in Australia initially because someone I loved asked me to go there and because I wanted to be with him. Now that I no longer have that person in my life I know that living and working in Australia is not something I want to do. I also know that I had to go to Australia despite my loss, if only for a short time, so that my loss could become real to me. It was like going to the funeral of the relationship that has just died. I had to go to say good-bye.

Farewell Melbourne. The city from St. Kilda Pier.

When I left Michigan for Melbourne I was in shock. I had been dumped and rejected quite coldly and it was devastating. Everything I had believed to be true was false and everything I had been looking forward to for the past few months was gone. This was, and still is, a lot to take and it makes me feel light and dizzy and wonder if I’m dreaming. And so, I believe my mind went into shock to keep me moving forward, to protect me from pain that might have been too intense to handle right away.

The shock wore off quickly when I got to Melbourne. What I have lost became real to me there and grief set in. I sat in the bedroom I was renting while Melbourne’s winter gloom loomed outside and let my grief make itself known. And I cried. I sobbed and sobbed and I let the grief become part of me. I wandered and explored the city by myself and let all the aspects of my grief appear, the heartache, the loneliness, and the anger. I made the decision to return home almost immediately but I let it twist and turn in my mind for a while to give it time to separate from the grief (because let’s be honest, grief itself doesn’t always make the best decisions). I went to Australia with a sick feeling in my gut and while I have returned with my grief in tow, that sick feeling is gone and I at least feel calm and content that my purpose for being there was fulfilled and home is where I should be right now.

I keep thinking about the insect exhibit in the Melbourne Museum. There is an area dedicated to all the large, ugly, and slightly terrifying spiders that call Australia home. Next to the live tarantulas is a display of one of the largest of these beasts’ old skins. It seems tarantulas have the same habit of shedding their exoskeleton as they grow as snakes. It made me wonder if these creatures are aware of this shedding as it is taking place, if they know how hideous they look when it’s happening and if it hurts at all. I wonder if they know that they are growing and that when they finally lose that old skin they will be changed, they will be larger and stronger.

I feel like a tarantula right now. I have returned home in poor shape. I’ve lost weight and sleep and I have a bad cold. Every time I look in the mirror at the moment I’m shocked to see the person looking back at me. I don’t recognize her, she looks drained, this person, she looks pale and weary and it’s hard to believe this person is me. I look back at photos of myself taken in Moab just weeks ago when I started this blog and I also have a hard time believing the person in those photos is me. I don't feel like her anymore and the truth is I will never be her again. I’m in transition right now and I’m growing, which isn’t always a particularly pretty process and is usually quite painful, but when it’s finished the shell of who I used to be will remain and I will crawl out of it still me but changed and, hopefully, stronger.



This will be my last post on this blog. My time in Australia is done and it’s time to move on to new adventures. I have plenty more stories to tell and thoughts to share, though, so stay tuned.

NOTE: To read about what I learned last time I visited Australia read Breathe.

Why Melbourne? Why Now? (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

Total time it took to get from South Haven, Michigan to Melbourne, Australia (including time spent in airports): approximately 33 hours.

Total extra money spent to get me and my very heavy bags from South Haven, Michigan to Melbourne, Australia (including fees for changing my original flight, booking a flight from Sydney to Melbourne, and excess baggage fees): approximately 600 dollars. (Apparently you can bring your baggage with you to Australia but it will cost you).

Seeing the Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge at dawn from the plane: well, not quite priceless, given the hours, dollars, and heartache it took to get me here, but pretty spectacular nonetheless.

Sydney Opera House and Harbor Bridge

It was that moment, in fact, when it first hit me where I was and what I was doing. It was that moment, when the plane turned a little to the left and I strained to see the view out of the tiny airplane window, that this adventure I’m living became real and was no longer just a foggy dream. It was after hours and hours of sitting on a plane in the very back row; after hours of fitful sleep spent still wrestling with the decision I’d made to come to Australia despite my change in plans, I realized I had arrived and, even if it was a decision I was still unsure about, I had no choice but to go through with it. As I followed the masses through customs and the baggage claim, though, the only thought my sleep-deprived brain could manage was, what the hell am I doing here?

I have been here a little over three days now. I’m settled into a cute townhouse in a really cool neighborhood called Richmond. And, yes, I realize describing it as “really cool” sounds a little lame but when I was walking around the other day trying to get a feel for the place, all I could think is how cool it is. There are shops and trains and cafes all within a short walking distance from my house, and for a gal who grew up in a small resort town, went to college in a corn field, and then moved to another small resort town, this kind of neighborhood is, well, just plain cool. I’m excited to be here, I’m excited to be somewhere so new, so cool. Still, though, that thought keeps surfacing, keeps plaguing me; what the hell am I doing here?

I can never decide if I believe in the concepts of fate or destiny. Sometimes I think they’re just ideas dreamed up by the romantics out there and they’re happy little thoughts but not totally realistic. But there are some times, like right now, when I find myself clinging to the hope that they must exist. I still feel like my life isn’t my own at the moment, like the real me is floating over this strange life and the only place I can find footing is in the idea that there must be some reason why I have found myself in this place at this time.

So I’m wondering what do you, my lovely readers, think about the concepts of fate or destiny? Do things really happen for a reason? When your life is turned upside down and sideways and spits you out in a direction you had no intention of going in, is there a reason for it? Or is that just something we tell ourselves to cope with change?

When Plans Change (From Flower Blog Two: Stories From Down Under)

I’m a planner. I’m obsessive about organization and insist on writing everything down. I panic a little when I don’t have a plan. One of the hardest things about being this way is realizing, over and over again, that sometimes the powers that be have no regard for my plans. Really lousy things can happen; you lose your job, someone close to you dies, you love someone and he confesses he no longer loves you. It’s life and it’s not fair and there’s really no way to plan for these things. To do so would be very strange.

My Australia plans have changed before the trip even began. I was supposed to be in Sydney right now, I was supposed to leave early this week and I didn’t. I’m now leaving early next week for Melbourne. If you’re close to me or know someone close to me you know how and why this change happened. Perhaps I’ll share the very personal details of this moment with a wider audience one day. If I did that now the result would be a ranting hurtful tell-all of the very painful events that led me to this point and I don’t want to do that. So if you’re not someone close to me or someone close to someone close to me then, at the moment, these events are none of your business. I will, however, share with you the thoughts I’ve been left with in the wake of everything.

There are certain truths we accept as fact in our lives. Things we plan, things that just are. Then seemingly overnight, sometimes in an instant, they’re gone. We wake up one morning and find the truths we accepted yesterday have vanished and have been replaced with a whole new set. Suddenly life feels strange, not like your own and you don’t really know how to handle it.

I think that’s one of the most difficult aspects of grief. Of course the loss itself hurts. The spot in you that was filled by someone or something is now empty and that is a hollow aching feeling. And even if you find things to temporarily fill that hole, even if you find little ways to cope with that pain through the day, the fact remains that your life is now changed and will never be the same as it was before. Realizing this feels like the wind being knocked out of you and it makes you feel dizzy and wonder if you will ever recognize this strange new life as your own.

I don’t know yet if or when this life I’m suddenly living will feel like my own. All that is pushing me forward at the moment, all that I know to be true about my life right now is that I am, in fact, still alive. I have no choice but to keep moving forward so I don’t miss out on a single moment of this precious, often fleeting, life. I know I must wake up every morning and continue to invest myself into getting to know these new truths so I can eventually make my peace with them.


NOTE: For more of my thoughts on dealing with heartache, read One Sunset at a Time.

Where There are no Cornfields

There were times during my trip to Australia when I was struck by how much it felt like home, times when it felt so un-foreign, so normal; times when I felt like we could easily just be on a road trip somewhere in the States. There were subtle differences, of course, the driving on the wrong side of the road, the large stretches of undeveloped land that were just land and not cornfields, that it was November and Christmas and summer were approaching simultaneously. But often it all felt very familiar. Because of this I tried extra hard to take note of the things that were very unfamiliar.

There were things I wrote down, things I took photos of, and then there were the things that I didn’t record because there was no way to capture them, things that I could only savor in the moment and hope they would come back to me one day. I attended a liquor tasting recently and the smell of a certain rum triggered one of these memories.

Our first stop in Australia was Cairns, Queensland, from there we quickly headed north to The Daintree Rainforest. We drove north until we couldn’t go any farther and then we drove in. We drove into the thick of the Daintree with all the trees, frogs, birds, and bugs. And then it rained. It rained hard and often. It rained so much it felt like a Hemingway novel.

We eventually made our way out of the rainforest because we were sick of being damp and because it was just time to move on. And it was there, somewhere between tropical rainforest and tropical beaches, that I first smelled the scent of sugar cane mixed with the wet heavy air from the Daintree. It was there where you have to watch out for the cane trains, there where you can still see the steam rising from where the rainforest meets the ocean.

The smell of sugar cane, especially burning sugar cane, is sweet, deep, and earthy. It’s complex and layered and too much to take in at once. It hits you first as a dense wall and is a little startling especially when it’s something you’ve never smelled before. It burns a little and you can taste it in the back of your throat. But then you recover and you breathe it in deeply. It moves through you slowly, like molasses, and you hope you will never forget this smell and the feeling it brings; this smell that is so foreign, that smells like a place that is a world away from home.

Breathe

I was in Australia floating in the Pacific Ocean over the Great Barrier Reef with an oxygen tank strapped to my back, preparing to scuba dive for the first time and I was panicking. While the rest of the group practiced emptying water from their masks and other tasks I was hyperventilating. My mask was filling with water from tears and I was ready to jump back on the boat.

I should have expected the panic. A couple years earlier I had attempted snorkeling for the first time in Key West and it didn’t go well. I can swim and I’m comfortable in and around water; I grew up a few blocks away from Lake Michigan. But I have issues with swimming in the ocean, the vastness of it overwhelms me and the uncertainty of what is swimming around in it terrifies me. I couldn’t seem to master breathing through the snorkel on that trip, particularly while having a panic attack over being in the big scary sea. Every time I put my face in the water I lost control of my breathing and swallowed about a gallon of salt water. I had to refuse a rescue mission from the boat crew and was out of the water after only about five minutes.

This time, though, I was in Australia off the coast of Cairns, Queensland. The water was warm, still, and shockingly clear. After days of rainstorms the weather had cleared and finally presented us with a chance to see the Great Barrier Reef. I was panicking but I also didn’t want to chicken out this time.

I felt claustrophobic in the water and couldn’t train myself to breathe through the mouthpiece when I went under. The group was ready to move away from the boat and I had decided to give up when the guide grabbed my hand, told me to plug my nose with my fingers, and follow him. He didn’t give me a chance to protest and suddenly we were swimming deeper and farther away from the boat. I went through the entire dive holding my nose with one hand and maintaining a death grip on the guide’s hand with the other. Plugging my nose, though (despite the fact that I had a mask on and couldn’t breathe through my nose anyway), forced me to focus on breathing through my mouth, and taking slow deep breaths through my mouth forced me to calm down and focus on the moment. The experience was spectacular in a once-in-a-lifetime kind of way. I wrote in my journal that day, “I feel like I’ve faced and overcome a fear, the ocean still freaks me out but it was so well worth it. I truly hope we can preserve this place for future visitors…it has exceeded my expectations.”

People travel for many reasons—to sight-see, to relax, to teach, to learn—I went to Australia for all of the above, but mostly I went there to make a decision about the direction of my life at that moment. I had been living in Vail, Colorado for about two and a half years and been in my relationship for nearly three. I wasn’t particularly happy and I felt my life coming to a crossroads or, possibly, a dead end. I found myself in Australia with the intention of finding clarity and making a decision about a relationship I had been unsure about for awhile. I wrote in my journal while there, “I truly hope to be changed by this experience and that it has an impact on my life, I don’t think it’s possible for it not to.”

I gained strength and confidence in Australia. I returned from the trip and made the decision to end my relationship and move forward. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done and the aftermath of it was chaotic and challenging. More than once I considered un-doing that decision. I didn’t though. I waded through the chaos and focused on calming myself by breathing like I was under water and the peace I felt when the chaos subsided was spectacular.