When in Doubt, Ski

In case you missed the memo: I love diving. Just over a year ago, I took my first plunge, and I was hooked. After debating with myself the various theories as to why I like diving so much, I’ve narrowed it down to the neat looking, technical gear and all the cool stuff that lives in the ocean. There’s just something about being literally over your head in nature while breathing from your personal tank of air. The clear, warm waters and blazing sunshine of Indonesia didn’t hurt.

Safe to say, it has been somewhat of a jolt to go from this…

…to this.

I love Hamburg and all it has to offer by way of diverse cultures, delicious food, friendly people, international commerce, and maritime charm. But for someone who has spent the past eight years much closer to the equator, it’s sometimes hard not to get down during the damp, cold, gray winter.

Not one to admit defeat, I considered my options.

Option one: diving near Hamburg. While this would satisfy my desire for wearing some neat dive-gear, the cold, dark waters in and around Hamburg weren’t so exciting. Also, this is expensive.

Option two: flying to Indonesia. This would make both neat gear and beautiful waters available, but (while cheaper than from the U.S.), tickets to Indonesia are wildly out of my price range.

Option three: find a new hobby that includes neat, technical looking gear, lots of time outside, and is within my price range.

Enter: Cross-country skiing in Oberstdorf.

The tickets were cheap, ski-rentals were cheaper, and I had a four-day weekend calling me to the Alps. All signs pointed towards the snowy south, so I took a chance and “dove” in.

I’ve been a down-hill skier since the tender age of four, and I used to love all things winter, but I have to admit that I was a little nervous as I set out. Could I handle the cold? Despite my down-hill experience, would I be totally incompetent?

Yes, and yes.

 

Cross-country skiing is hard! And I was slow. Very slow. Little old ladies and eight year olds were passing me kind of slow. By the end of each day, my legs were so sore that I could barely struggle up the hill to the youth hostel. But because of all my effort and exertion, I stayed nice and warm in my layers of flannel.

More importantly, I LOVED it.

To be outside, working hard, pushing myself to meet new challenges while surrounded in some of God’s most beautiful, mountainous creation! There were moments when I just had to stop – sweating and panting – look around myself, and sigh, “Wow.”

There has been a lot of turmoil in the world as of late, and one of the things I loved about diving into the ocean’s depths was the peace and tranquility of watching sea turtles and parrot fish floating by and munching away on coral – so undisturbed by the surface and yet so inseparably connected to all of us.

This weekend, I rediscovered that same calming communion in the mountains. It is in the leafless branches and the ground sleeping beneath its covering of snow. It is in the birds singing as the sun warms their frozen trees and in the tracks of rabbits that have scurried across the fields.

We can feel it tugging at something deep inside us – like the roots of our souls are somehow connected to the roots of those mountains. It is grounding, and it is transcendent.

I discovered that the hole I was feeling in my heart in the absence of diving, was the absence of this connection. The city is exciting and engaging, but – for me – there is always a lack, something fundamental that is missing. Something found in forests and mountains, fields of snow and ocean reefs. It is to feel and to begin to comprehend that we are all a part of something much bigger, something much more alive.

 

Let’s Climb Together

This past weekend I hiked Mount Lawu, a dormant volcano straddling Central and East Java. I see this mountain every day when I walk to school, and from the first time I saw it, I knew it was something I had to conquer.

One of my first instagrams from site – dreaming of Mt. Lawu!

Along with a handful of Peace Corps friends and a few teachers from my school, we started up the mountain around 9pm. We thought we would hike a few hours until we reached the summit, bunk down along the trail, and rise early to see the sunrise. As the Indonesians say, we were going to santai (relax). As the trail started to rise into steeper and steeper boulder-paved-steps, I quickly realized that there would be little santai-ing.

This picture doesn’t even do the trail justice, but let me tell you it was a good thing we hiked up at night and couldn’t see what was ahead of us.

I have hiked a fair number of mountains, but the two I have hiked in Indonesia have challenged me in ways that the ones back home never have. I don’t quite know how to describe it, but these volcanic masses have a different character altogether.

Views from the ridge-line. Amazing.

One of my PC friends described hiking up Lawu as being on a stair-master for 17 hours with a 2 hour break to rest inside a freezer. And that’s pretty accurate. It was hard, it was challenging, and my little toes – four days later – haven’t fully regained feeling.

At the summit!

But it was amazing, too. Oblivious of the challenge that was about to meet us, I started on the trail full of excitement. I was blissfully naïve. But my excitement wasn’t for naught.

The sun, starting to rise beneath a sliver of moon.

Never have I seen stars like I did that night, stretched across the heavens and clustering along the Milky Way. Never have I gone from tropical rice-fields to frosted, edelweiss strewn ridgelines in only 10 hours. Never have I crouched next to a paraffin flame in the small hours of the morning and listened to stories of Javanese mystics drawn to the mountain by the knowledge and peace that can only be gained by living in such drastic conditions. Never have I been so ready to welcome the warmth of the Sun, rising like a fiery jewel over the expansive eastern horizon, erasing city lights and trembling stars in its path.

Ready to greet the sun!

We are all climbing mountains. We all have struggles and challenges, and we all meet them with varying degrees of excitement and anxiety, knowledge and naïveté. I am often asked, “Di mana lebih enak, di sini atau di sana?” – “Where is life better, Indonesia or America?” Depending on who you ask (and relying on the most broad and flawed stereotypes), Americans are either living it up in luxury or working themselves to death. Indonesians, on the other hand, are either laid back and communally focused or enslaved to poverty and corruption. But anyone who is looking for a “Promise Land” in either country will be disappointed.

Views of other peaks around the summit.

The truth is, we all have mountains to climb and challenges to overcome in our lives, but our mountains are each different. Just as I can’t describe what exactly makes mountains in Indonesia different from mountains in the Appalachians or the Adirondacks, it can be hard to pinpoint what makes one person’s struggles – individual, familial, communal, cultural, or national – different from another’s.

Living in Indonesia is teaching me, little by little – bouldery step by bouldery step – that we have to approach each other as fellow climbers on different mountains. We are all trying to go somewhere and do something, but those somewheres and somethings are inextricably fused with our personal, cultural, and national histories. As much as I want everything in Indonesia, or in any country or any person, to make sense to me in my American, white, female, 20-something mindset, sometimes I have to be ready to accept that something about the character of the challenge, the terrain of the mountain, is simply different. It’s a trail my feet have not been trained to tread.

And yet: I have the privilege to step into something new – to see new stars, to reach new peaks, and to feel new sensations. It’s a privilege we all can have, whether half-way around the world or half-way across the office. Ask people about their lives; tell them about yours, climb together. We have all heard, “Walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.” In light of my recent hiking adventures, I suggest we all walk a mile on someone else’s trails.

We may all be climbing different mountains, but at the end of the day we all have burning quadriceps, beating hearts, and waiting goals – somewhere out there in the distance. And just maybe, when we reach a summit, we will look out from our peaks and see one another in the distance, far but close, different but utterly recognizable. And if we are really lucky, maybe we will all bask in the same sunrise.

Weekend Getaway: Sarangan

Everyone needs to get away sometimes. I remember the thrill and adventure of camping trips with my family when I was a child. I remember the need to go to Apalachicola one weekend in college to eat oysters and see the ocean. I remember the freedom of driving and driving along the mountain roads after a long week at the summer camp I used to work for.

Most of the time I have spent away from my site in Indonesia has been with my American friends doing rather American things (think cheese and Starbucks).

But Indonesians like to get away, too, and this past weekend I got to join my counterpart and her family for a little weekend get-a-way, “Indonesian-style,” at Sarangan.

Swimming in Our Sunday Best

After living on a tropical island for three months I have seen the beach for the first time!

 

Teleng Ria Beach, Pacitan

As an American I have a certain concept of what it means to go to the beach. Bathing suit clad families splashing in the water and picnics spread out on beach blankets come to mind. But on this day, a day out with the teachers from my school and their families, the scene looked a little different.

Can you spot the differences?

I knew that I wasn’t going to see any teachers in their bathing suits that day. But having at least planned to change into yoga pants and an old t-shirt before going in the water, I was taken a little by surprise when everyone started wading into the waves in the same clothes they had been wearing when we had boarded the bus at 4:30 that morning. I stood, toes digging into the sand, in my skirt and t-shirt. I looked out at the families happily splashing in the waves, fathers in shorts and t-shirts, children in the casual clothes they had come in, and mothers wearing colorful jilbabs, long skirts or pants, and long sleeved shirts. And then I was invited to join them.

My counter part teacher and her family playing in the water.

Wearing what I might have worn to church on Sunday back in the States, I joined my Indonesian friends in the water. We splashed, we laughed, we corralled small children back towards the shallow water. All the while I tried to keep my skirt on and thought about how I had never experienced the beach quite like this before.

Before…

After! (With my counter part teacher and family)

All I had to do was look down the beach and see people swimming in their regular clothes to know that there was something different about this place. But at the same time the smiles and the laughter and the joy of families enjoying the sun and the waves was so familiar. That’s often how Indonesia feels – so very different and so very familiar at the same time.

A look down the beach.

Sun bathing.

I want to share a little piece of my personal history with you to help you understand what a beautiful experience our trip to the beach was. Almost two years ago in the waves off the Gulf Coast of Florida, I reaffirmed my baptism in front of a group of college students who I dearly love and count as some of my closest friends. We had spent that afternoon playing messy games (that involved digging in the sand, cheese puffs, and catchup), and were still dressed in our team colors. As the sun set, that group of wild and crazy college students cheered joyfully for each person who went out to be baptized.

With my friends two years ago in Florida.

My friends yesterday!

I know that not all my readers are Christian, and I respect that deeply. But the picture I want to create is how that group of my goofy American friends laughing and playing and celebrating in that ocean is connected to my new Indonesian friends who laughed and played and celebrated in the waves yesterday. To me the ocean has become like a promise. It is a promise that across miles and miles and unfathomable depths of history, experience, and culture – across incredible differences – we are all still connected. It might take years and years, but it is the same water cycling throughout the world, the same water that we swam and played and bathed in. And even though we are sometimes so far apart, there is a joy and a delight in the sun and the waves that brings us together. I wish that you could have been with me at the beach yesterday! I wish you could have seen the smiles and the joyful faces and recognized as I did that, although we may be so very different in some ways, we are so very similar in others.

 

Classy Lady