The ascetic isolated summer retreat club

I don’t know where to begin. With what I learned perhaps? But is that interesting or even feasible in my attempt to inspire you? Or shall I simply write a bit about what life means in the countryside of Hungary?

‘We will never be able to understand a plant unless we understood what the world is’

– Emanuele Coccia

In return for something we received a huge wid carp, caught by Kati’s husband. I am very glad with such exchanges as one fish last many meals.

Walking through the forest, opening to spring season, I marvelled at its beauty while my own garden musters the power and potential to feed.

Many weeks ago I wrote a few pages, not that I had something worthwhile to say but I only wanted to give the photos of the things that gave me so much joy this summer a place. I feel such a desire to go through these photos, mostly for my own creative self. It is as if without pasting the photos on my album hovering somewhere invisibly in the air, I am blocked to capture further beauty. Yet, I discarded the written words and started over.

The start of a new season means unearthing previous season best carrots and beets to start the production of seeds. I’d worked out well.

My Dutch isn’t that smooth anymore, after many years of mainly talking English, but a 100% better than Hungarian (when I want to say something quick in Hungarian it comes out in Spanish). What I like in the Netherlands is that I can go by bicycle to get what I need and effortlessly arrange it all by myself. I just like the fact that I can talk. Just talk. That without hesitation say what pops up. That I can listen to other people which is sometimes plain eavesdropping and hilarious, especially that what student girls in the bookshop discuss. This is something that is not possible in Hungary.

Three three week old kittens are in the nest and cat mom ought it time to make a new batch. Soon five more will be added to the extended family. For the first time in my life could I study the behavior of a female cat and that was… to say the least, a very interesting discovery.

I enjoy listening to my 17 years young cousin, a Dutch Venezuelan beauty who can see through the grip of society she lives in. ‘We eat poisonous stuff only to get into the hospital where the medicines will make you better, the hospital being the best business of all’. She didn’t say it exactly in these words and she might have picked it up from my sister but I was stunned. Was I so smart at age 17?

Sometimes Geo and I look at each other, how we are dressed and when one laughs at the other hilarious combination, we take a look at our own and laugh even harder (I am dressed for the occasion).

When a car stops in front of our window and when a person walks past, we hurry to the window to see who it might be. One of the humorous sights we had to giggle about when we came to Hungary, together with people leaning on their fence to watch the street life. The only street life we have is a tractor now and then. Or, speeding cars towards a dead end street, sending our young beloved cat to a senseless premature death. In an instant I get a sense of what it is to loose a beloved by a bullet. A lifeless heap of blood stained matter so loved and so treasured, taken by someone who did not care. Sadness takes over and an image in my mind, of the cat I accompanied just a few minutes ago, breathless in a puddle of blood.

Geo and I miss out on a lot by not being able to talk fluently Hungarian. Each time I am back in the Netherlands, back in my hometown, I realize I am illiterate. I am not a traveler passing through, I am analphabetic. Against my own conviction and to my amazement I have let the subject drop almost completely. Almost as Vladimir said: I am not going through the ordeal of learning a new language at my age.’ Slightly more remote than Vladimir’s situation, we live far away from anything that can be called society. We can not practice with people because they are not there. Our chances are shopkeepers, who on their turn often don’t feel like acting painstakingly slow as a substitute teacher, and swiftly change to German. Instead, what has improved is my German.

And it does feel awkward to not say what I want, short small words of friendliness. All I am left with is smiles and gestures, the basics and a shrug of the shoulders. All I am left with is a garden, a forest, a loving and beloved husband, cats and an ever in size decreasing kitchen, more hectares than our hands can cope with and woods until the border with Croatia.

‘Your Dutch is so good!’ tells the neighbor boy of 8 when in the Netherlands. ‘She is born here, she is the daughter of Wijn!’ replies his mom. Learning a language which I can not practice makes it very hard to keep any sense of dedication. Instead I learned knitting because the practiced I can wear. The learning of growing food is feeding me and the time spend on looking on maps is leading me to spots I like to sleep.

Like my cousin said so wisely, ‘I don’t follow what is going on in the world. I need only to know when a war is in my country, not somewhere where I don’t live.’ Our choice for Hungary was based on the Covid regulations back then. Spain being strict, Hungary taking it as how we formed our opinion about it. The country may have problems but the foundation appears to be in tact.

The streets that have visible life going on are away from us. The towns that have shops and services is 45 minutes by car. None of which is anything more than rustic. Budapest is 2.5 hours by car and still, there we don’t have what we can only experience in our hometowns: a sense of belonging. Yet Budapest does deliver in terms of talking and feeling more in touch with others.

Budapest (partly because of Szandra) sees us coming back to the same Pakistani restaurant and convenience store. There, we are by now embraced by our Indian friends and chai’s, right into the heart of the Kashmiri street (where, to our excitement, a sort of concert is being held).

What we have here is our choice, an openness unrivaled to almost impossible in the Netherlands. Though trash removal is still something I can’t get used to, we do have liberty to live much more natural. We have inky black night skies with uncountable sparkling stars. Sounds coming from marten in search for a nest to fill with offspring and filth. Deer barking through rutting season and perhaps even jackals crying to one another. Pieces of hide on trodden deer paths, never a carcass as everything is eaten by the teeming wildlife we hardly get to see in the day. I could call it freedom, freedom from rules and regulations. Freedom form signboards and forbiddings.

Pouch Málaga is finished and ready. Again, I am pleased with the result, as well as with the dye that comes from calendula flowers from the garden. Málaga € 25

Living away from convenient bakeries means baking sourdough bread, sweet and hearty cakes or cookies. All that we want is made by me. Preparing salads takes a lot of time. Making noodles is not less work either. Preparing lunch, in fact, is the task of the day. Much of what I need I pull out of the garden, snap off from a plant and gather here and there. Cats become part of the garden, from one to four, to nine back to four. Life is controlled by life itself. Not by advertisements, not by too many desires, not by a whole bunch of rules.

Pouch Hollow Rock was first a coaster but I was not happy with it so I took it apart and started anew. Now I am satisfied with the black walnut dyed zipper pouch. Pouch Hollow Rock € 20

I do not experience it in Hungary, but when I am visiting the Netherlands, every day, a light yet almost unnoticeable headache throbs in the side of my head. I am away from my vegetable garden and rely on the supermarket for everything. Eggs are called free range. Berries come from South Africa. Bread is stuffed with unnaturalness noted down by certain numbers. Cheese has coloration. Much contains palm oil (and not the red African one which is delicious). It indeed is a wondrous world of easiness and I have plenty of time left over to do other things than the usual gathering, rinsing, preparing and cooking. No need to feed sourdough starters, to renew water for sprouts, to dry herbs, to chop wood, to crack nuts shells, to collect fruits from bushes, to mill grains. I am now social. Every day I visit people and talk. I probably talk resembling a narcissist. Though I try not to.

Okra and soybeans have become my new favorites this season, reasonable well growth makes the gardener in me want much more of it.

A garden, I never knew, is a symphony of chores. One of growing, collecting, saving, spreading, caring, sharing, hoping, seeing and at last, tasting and nourishing. When the sun shines the melody of work calls and at leisurely pace I run trough the premises, garden and kitchen. I stop often, not being able to ignore the beauty surrounding me. I have a lot more flowers now, some from Sandra, some from Marita, others from Claudia. The sea of beauty is overwhelming and I might not always know it but we’ve paradise found.

In Hungary we don’t lock our doors at night. On a visit, my dad barricaded the door with a wooden pole when he was here, to make sure no one would come at night. My sister Charlotte hesitantly kept the door unlocked at my insistence. Charlotte is as worried as I was in Bosnia about meeting a bear, yet Hungary doesn’t host bears and I feel very at ease in our forests. Days are without seeing much life but deer, spiders and the buzzing coil of insects. No one comes at night. It is quieter than any camp spot almost anywhere else.

Fenugreek, when dried, is another tasty ingredient to sourdough breads.

True to a retreat, we have spa’s. Or should I say outdoor showers with well water? Luxury for me is olive soap from Syria, my African washcloth and near 40 degrees Celcius to enjoy.

The retreat setting where we grow vegetables and fruits, roots and herbs has another big downside however. Hungarian food is among the worst of where I have ever been and nothing tastes as good and real as my own grown food. How ever much unaware I might be of certain paradoxes of vegetables (because we really aren’t taught about food in the correct way, nor are we in relationships. It dawns on me that we are actually taught more nonsense than sense in our school system, but that’s another topic). The downside of living in an islolated ascetic retreat is that it makes us attached to the goodness it delivers. The effort – appreciation ratio is high. It is comparable to cycling the Andes or Sahara: yes, it is hard but going by car would take all the pleasure out of it.

Pouch Summer is still available, made from a leather jacket found in the forest. Pouch Summer € 28

A garden simply is grown out of appetite. It starts with something else but it really keeps growing by what the rancher likes to eat. It’s anticipating weather conditions and infestations. Cats like to use it as a toilet and love helping to dig, especially when the seeds are just being placed into the soil. The desire to grow more and better with greater variety keeps chasing me, like a hungry kitten. They on their turn do their job in following me through the garden to eat the fat larvea that I dig up. My garden is pestered with chafer grub and ants and a lot dies prematurely. So be it.

What has become normal isn’t to eyes that hardly see modern-life sometimes useless development. What is seen by others as narrow mindedness is not more than a sense of normality that has been kept in check by the absence of abnormal circumstances. Being in the Netherlands has lovely benefits, like two fantastic female neighbors, immaculate selection of fabrics versus Russian synthetics in Hungary but each time I go out to the city I cringe in aversion of what my eyes see, and return without getting what I came for. Our home, literally built with love and heart is where I long to return to. For now, that is Hungary. And food, own homegrown vegetables is an unrivaled victory to anything being sold in markets and restaurants and without it I would not want to trade it for being able to talk, to eavesdrop, to overhear, to understand and to convey my friendliness in words.

Walking with cats into the forest came quite naturally, sometimes all 4 walk along. It fills me with wonderment and continuous smiling.

Where many people might miss out on quietness, on being free of unnecessary stress and in need for more time off (paid) work, looking forward and counting the days to holiday and retirement, we don’t. We work in our very own retreat. A retreat where we sometimes need to seek the opposite, needed at times: social activities, some rush and after that gladly home bound.

This baby was never intentional sowed so the surprise was good, the taste however slightly less but being it a homegrown product, we savored it!

Essence is emptiness.
Everything else, accidental.

Emptiness brings peace to your loving.
Everything else, disease.

In this world of trickery emptiness
is what your soul wants.

Rumi