Comfort’s Concession
The tapestry of being self sufficient becomes complex. There, lilac flowers hanging to dry turning deeper purple against the wooden structure that once held corn to dry, I notice a beauty I would have admired while traveling past: now it’s where I am.
Seeing, sitting from an old barn, birds accidentally flying in while buzzing overhead from insects nestling in the wooden ceiling, I know there’s no turning back into a style that I once, and still, longed for.
The pillow case is available for € 20 and comes without pillow (nor cat): Pillow case Wall Tiles. Unfortunately, mother cat and the kitten beside her have both walked off.
Not that I can imagine anyone would want that. Any person choosing self sufficiency, in my mind, can not choose a quality of life lower. Yet self sufficiency means staying put all summer long, and Hungarian summers are lengthy. The traveler needs to get out while, oh, difficulty, the slow forming of life is equally fascinating, then again: social encounters are as much food as the literal word is.
All that is left is the hind paw of a hare, caught by our young male cat. He decided to run off after his mom and sister ate the whole carcass when he thought he gave it a secure hiding to eat later. After he’d left, his mom decided to walk away too.
When cycling the world the mind is blown away by beauty but lacks a whole lot of other things. When visiting the home country a feeling of literally being home befalls while the entire abundance of a self sufficient retreat is bombed dead. Going to Bosnia in early June seems to be a fine balance.
Having had some taste of Bosnia, it is here I want to go back to. Bosnia however has still lots of not exploded land mines and 1300 counted bears (how they count them I do not know). Land mines are easy to avoid (in my not-all-knowing mind). Wolves, snakes and men don’t scare me but bears pose a real fear.
Having practiced slinging a rope onto a high branch of a tree and printed a brochure on how to react when approached by a bear, I feel slightly anxious to set off by foot into the mountains of Bosnia. But I simply need to be immersed by the mountains and not on roads through them and that means keeping my food save from bears to smell. I am practicing to handle fear for bears (just as I did when I had fear for stealth camping when starting the cycling tour): tracking the thinking pattern makes you immediately aware of it’s trick, and fear evaporates.
There’s something about Bosnia that sparks us. The optimistic Bosniaks who have a pleasant feel about them: a joie de vivre that doesn’t exist where we are. A stunning nature with green blueish rivers popping up and not leaving your side. The eighties music blaring at the over abundant caffe places, often filled to the brim with smoking men. The unfinished buildings, pressing down the tax payments with stalling the work. The whole setting often messy and unorganized. I love it, together with the azan and the food that’s still worth eating. The influx of Gulf residence with women in hijab and strict looking men, so in contrast with the Bosniaks. Few tourists stumbling out of Sarajevo and onto hidden treasures.
‘I get you, wanting to have solitude,’ says the Israeli Spaniard who eats a börek while his switched off motorbike carries him over the track meant for mountain-bikes. I say ‘yes’ but I mean ‘no’, not wanting to start a whole explanation. I seek socializing and odd enough I find that even when walking alone in the hills. People commend the trailer: a young French bike-packer stops to talk to me, while he’s enjoying a downhill of 12%. Geo and I have talks no matter where we are: the difference with the camino Portuguese (or Hungary) is stark.
When I have a choice I take my own vegetables and local grass feed, non antibioticum sheep meat (to sound very up to today’s norm) to make a soup yet the surprises that comes our way in Bosnia (cringing sweet coffee, homemade cookies and limonade) do have a charm in it’s own right.
Bosniaks in white singlets, some with teeth missing, some the looks of a thug but all in a VW Golf ask me repeatedly whether I need help and a hitch up the hill or just further down the road. Oh boy, do I feel traveling! Some honk the horn of their car when they pass me, to say ‘hello’, which makes me jump in sudden surprise.
This sort of breakfast made me buy a titanium bento box. Soaking grain and seeds, nuts and husks has become a winner, also in a travel diet.
At home, the summer means hard work. A skin, itching from ticks and mosquitoes, getting the maximum amount of sunlight. Each evening washed clean from sand mingled with sweat. A skin belonging to a body that consumes very little from a supermarket. Did you ever really look when you walked into the supermarket: it’s full of things not coming from the bare uncovered earth. I don’t eat anything not in season not from my own soil but onions, garlic, ginger, avocado and lemons (although there’s quite some I can’t produce myself and wouldn’t want to do without).
The pillow cover Wall Tiles on the chair is available, with or without feather filled cushion.
The sky swollen with a yellow thick volume of thunder, a temperature that makes moist appear on the bathroom tiles. Freshly transplanted beets hang limp for days until the rain finally comes, with thunder that makes the tall hollyhock happily burdened with colorful flowers sway left to right. The cool Hungarian home is suddenly a chest that keeps the heat. Until temperatures reach well above 35 degrees, we both seek cool inside the Hungarian brick structure. A home so naturally cold in winter now with a black strip of fuming tarmac in front where small yellow leaves stick to as if it were a palette of a painter.
The dried flowers will be used as dye for my embroidery projects and for making calendula salve while muscatel sage is a fantastic smelling tea.
The pinkish soft looking stuff on the left is coming from an ornamental tree and adding sourness to your meals. It’s called sumac and it’s free if you have time to harvest and a desire to process it.
An abundance of plants mingling with a sea of flowers is my garden, and in trying not to extend and thus my work, I kept within the boundaries of the hundred square meters but I crammed in as much as possible. Muscatel sage spills over, Tagetes and marigold are forming a sea of orange where the strongest mint I ever came in touch with spreads to both our hearts desire. Pumpkin arms seek hold to the wood stack where the arms of the uninvited mole keeps moving earth in an upwards stream. So be it.
A garden is as much as a burden as a job but one I choose for. A garden is keeping me enslaved to my own desire to create an extraordinary biological way of life where outside is the living space. Yet, walking over pebbles water flowing between them, pulling a cart, plucking wild strawberries to add to the breakfast that I didn’t eat yet, I wonder how wonderful it is to the one who keeps large herds of sheep, living on higher ground, away from modernity? Where I was sweating like a lazy pig dabbling in a mud pool I now have blue finger tops barely able to move and bears are not the least on my mind. My walk brings me further uphill and into a raging thunderstorm. Loving the sound and boost of nature so close above me I now worry that rocks will be destabilized by the flow of water and skittles me off the track. One day sweat, the other discomforting cold, that is aliveness.
She walking long distances, a girl bike-packing on her damned saddle, guys being tough on their Enduro motorbikes and couples dressed in Lycra trying to cycle together up the hill. Isn’t it all to feel the fruit of work, the satisfaction of endurance and challenge. The lack of physical workout in our daily lives. The missing of adrenaline. No shepherd is going to haul a cart to have extended pick-nicks, nor will he walk without his flock. Is it luxury to feel what others want to escape from?
The route that I’d chosen was, by chance, an extreme beautiful one, mostly on gravel and would not have been possible with the Renault van. Here’s where I erupted, in a total blissful state.
Walking in a country where I not yet did so means figuring out the numbers attached to roads and whether they’re quiet but not so narrow that a trailer can’t pass. In Hungary I know which roads that are but the flatness prevents me from seeing anything and the food is failing performance. In order to leave my garden and the stream of never ending work, it somehow needs to deliver else where. Bosnia does.
When seeking beauty and precision a garden can be a playground where one has ample choices and creativity might flower into such an abundance that there’s no amount of sticks, threads and wires to keep it all from overflowing. Like a pimple needing to be popped, weed needs to be absent. Quite a task when leaving it behind for a week. A garden means choices in food and nowhere else are they to be found, least of all in a supermarket.
Early morning birds sound like dolphins or cicade in slurred motion. The summer has arrived and the work load is more than our hands can work and my stomach hold. Days are too short and temperatures reaching the 40 Celcius.
Getting deeper into the deliciousness of home grown, without becoming a fundamentalist (in my eyes), I do question all that comes forth from supermarkets, even if they carry a ‘bio’ or ‘organic’ sign. Because how is it even possible to deliver such quantities and can a coconut ever be not organic? However, there comes a point that I have to go from my own flowery, crispy fresh, earth grown and sun warmth bounties. The feeling of missing out on world becomes at one point as big as the feelings derived from shopping on own soil.
One week of Bosnia revives and sparks and has me run much longer, like the shepherded sheep on the pastures at Ruiste, where I stay the night. Or the shepherd dogs come running toward me, sniffing the trailer where I seek coverage behind. And the bears? I kept my food and toiletries 50 meters away and my head empty from thoughts running wild. Slept like a marmot in the sleeping bag from Geo which I could cut and restitch. Too tired of walking, I didn’t embroider a tiny bit (that is, not this time).
Pouch Pag is available to send out, here’s to go to the shop
