A Blossoming Journey

Gotta love it.

Hey folks, its 2 am in Swwwwitzerland, the land of milk and honey (and a great deal of cheese, and more cheese, and cheese fondue....), so what you get is Austin in sleepy, joyful rambles recounting the last two weeks.  Soooo...the answer is yes, we are STILL in Berner Oberland, having moved from wild campsite A in the valley to campsite B in alpine land Murren to cozy Mountain Hostel in Swiss classic small village Gimmelwald, then back to campsite B, and now, finally, in warm bed A of our new friends Doris and Ed.  Wait?!  You're transitioning a lot, you say.  Yes, we are.  To tell it all to you straight would require skype and a glass of wine.  But since this is a blog, I'll have to keep it to some highlights intermixed with philosophical conjectures.

We are loving life.  I don't say that as gloating, or as a fake, glossy cover, just simple feelings.  The last few weeks have been unreal.  Unreal in the kindness and generosity of absolute strangers, unreal in the abundance of fun, genuine friends,  unreal in the views and experiences and laughs.  Unreal over pourings of love.  It is a season of finding and thriving in who we truly are.  We are creative.  We are silly, laughter filled people.  We love to sit with people who are different from us, to learn from them, to enjoy what they uniquely contribute to humanity.

We are finding ourselves.  I have spent A LOT of time connecting with the absolute coolest people, and it has rebirthed my love of people.  Or rather, my love of connecting with people, of circulating social circles, of rallying people to a cause and encouraging them, of having deep, honest conversations on the most important topics to myself and Kindra.  Conversations about food politics, imbalanced health care systems, backpacking, the relevance of God in a post modern age and the deeper "religion" of love, the pains of our past, the dreams of our future, the laughter of the present.
 Kindra is finding her passions for guitar, jewelry making, and world issue awareness expand and evolve, as well as her love of meeting connecting deeply with people.  It is so unreal how you can form a genuine and deep relationship with a new friend in an evening, one that is more honest and intimate than people you have known for years.  Take our time with Doris, a Swiss native who grew up in Canada before returning to Berner Oberland to run a hotel at eighteen and fall in love with an awesome English dude, Ed. 

Doris approached us from her group of friend sBBQing in Murren one evening to offer us some wine (cool already in our book!).  We start chatting with her, and she invited us to come hang with her and her crew.  Within an hour or two of talking just with Doris, Kindra and I had shared some of the deepest details and feelings our trip, and it our blew our minds how accepting and at the same time honest Doris was.  She extended an invitation for us to stay with her and Ed, and here we are now, four days in hanging out with such cool people.  Never on this trip have we felt so welcomed into a home, so a part of the culture of that home and free to be ourselves.  It has inspired us to pay it forward in every generous way possible on our trip and beyond, and I am mentally chewing on thick morsels of the meaning of love, on the deepness of generosity that exists in this world, and the freedom we were meant to have as people, to actually feel alive and happy.  And I am wanting to blog another time on how Kindra and I have become so "unchristian" or unreligious in our lives, yet the abundance of God and the realizations that his heart is so so deeply love and acceptance are clearer each day to us, and the crock of thinly veiled judgmental religious performance that trumpets a conditional view of God becomes more clearly the garbage that it is.  Again, more on that later.

Also, Kindra was pretty sick, but has recovered!  We stayed at the coolest place ever, the Mountain Hostel in Gimmelwald, to help her recover for a few nights (ironically, camping alone for a night was what really healed her).  I met many incredible people, especially some super cool outdoorsy guys.  We hiked together, we rallied a bonfire together, and we swapped life stories and fun moments.  I wish I could tell each story of the song filled nights or strenuous hikes with epic views, but my eyelids are getting weighty.

Stay classy you guys, and follow your dreams!

Pics: https://plus.google.com/photos/117860913937238604610/albums/5913822296556787505?banner=pwa