It was a day to remember and it remains one as I take this moment to reflect. It felt a long path had led here and yet, in the ecstatic nowness of it, I was not dwelling on that path. Layered up to an expeditionary degree in jumper, coat and gloves with boots donned I had set out into the deep Berlin winter night. It has been snowing for a few days now continuously; the world has been transformed and made enchanted beyond recognition. The magic of life is shining out anew as the familiar fades in the fantastically dark and illuminated night.
As I left my street, I chose in an instant to head off at a right angle from my destination towards a park a few blocks away. This time, unlike previous trips to the supermarket, I was prepared. In the newly snow heaped urban wild I set out for an adventure. With each step across Warschauer Strasse the suchness of the moment grew, and with it the faintly dawning sense that I was stepping once more into a new chapter. My relationship with Hannah was entering a new phase, one of life commitment. As I walked along my heart was struck by a newly familiar sight; children riding snow sleighs pulled along by their parents. I felt an insight into this, the magic of the child’s life and the care of the journey weathered adult willing to pull them along on this cold night.
Today I got lost on familiar streets and I fell in love with it. I want this love of life, of adventure, to flow into every part of my world. Today I confronted my fears about brokeness and money to really embrace where I was. To be fuelled, to live a life so rich in joy and insight that I could be a person worthy of finding wealth and worldly value in what I offer. I welcome change to wash over me like the snow transforming the trees outside our windows into a quiet winter wonderland. As I plod along a growing sense in all my Englishness that I really was in the East. In the flurry of the snow memories stirred of a boyhood fascination with the battle of Berlin and the war in the east. It felt to me for the first time palpable that Armies had once marched from here into that deep cold Russian tundra . From which a few years later armies would return flooding this city like the snow itself.
As I passed along thickly snow padded pavements the roads and the rules of the world began to disappear. The machines, the trams and traffic grew slower and slower as mankind was honourably subdued by nature. Something deep and rhythmic in the seasons of life was restored. And then, quite suddenly my faith in the benevolence of coincidences was affirmed. Lifting my gaze from the strange orange and purple hues of store lights on the snow in front of me I stumbled across a flower shop. Considering for a moment in the snow, I seized the opportunity to bring fresh roses into my home after negotiating with the asian shopkeep through the glass with finger pointing and not a single comprehensible word exchanged.
As I sit now at my kitchen table with this white rose in front of me, I know that this will be a day to remember.
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