Bliss

I just can’t stop saying ‘thank you’ for my life. Here I am in the middle of Europe (Switzerland of all places), teaching Drama, loving it and having the time of my life. It’s one huge adventure and I feel so excited I can’t wait to see what each day brings! Yesterday with Rob, Ruth and Giles we hiked up a mountain. I found a new job being a stuntwoman - tumbling down the mountain and laughing my head off. Not a scratch. My second year at school is like a revelation. It’s completely different from last year. I’m loving it. I know the kids, they know me, we all want to have fun and that’s what we’re doing. Our friends from Maleny arrive in two weeks, I go on a camp next week into the mountains, I’m off to London for a week in October and a playwright from New York is staying with us in November and working with my kids. How good is good? How good is God? I finally feel settled here. I feel like I belong. I know how things work, I’m excited by every day and I have butterflies in my stomach exploring the things I love to explore. I’m overwhelmed with gratitude - that I can explore topics that I’m passionate about and share them with others. And that I get paid for all of this. We have a friend who has bought a yacht that we’re going to stay on (near Santorini) in April. I can’t stop learning enough. I want to know more. I want to know more about theatre that transforms, I want to know more about how our life is really just thought. I want to know how I can be a better teacher, how I can be a better healer, how I can love more. I’m learning to stay in the moment, I’m learning to live fully in the moment and embrace it all. And I’ve stopped thinking about the future. I’ve stopped looking a houses on www.realestate.com.au and trying to work out what I’ll be doing in the future. I’ve just started to hug and kiss the now. In a word I am blissful. I know nothing of this has come from my own doing, but of God, Love. And I am incredibly grateful. So thank you! Thank you for knowing my heart, thank you for loving me and thank you for being so incredibly wonderful!

What Love does for you

Feeling rejected? Abandoned? Sad? Don't - here's what Love does for you - cherishes you, defends you, supports you, treasures you, embraces you, acknowledges you, accepts you, welcomes you, encourages you, admires you, appreciates you, loves you, respects you, believes you, trusts you, praises you, includes you, recognises you, nurtures you, guards you, takes care of you, builds you up and approves of you. And that's just the start of it!

What's it REALLY like over there?

So, what's it really like in Switzerland? Here's my attempt to answer that and more:

Q.1 How’s it really going over there in Switzerland?

It’s going amazingly and I love it. I’ve worked the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life and I’m hoping this year will be a little easier. I’ve learnt so much about myself in terms of creativity, inventiveness and how much work I’m really capable of when pushed to the limit. (I think I’m a pretty relaxed, lazy person at heart.) I’ve absolutely loved creating my own curriculum (teaching whatever it is I feel like it) and I’m looking forward to more of that!

Q.2 Do you miss home and family?

When I’m in Switzerland I call Australia home. I’m so fortunate to be able to talk to my Dad every week on Skype for an hour and we have a great big catch up. Dad knows everything about what’s going on over there for me, so if you ever want to know ask him. Ha ha! When I first got home from holidays, he said “It’s not like you’ve been away at all.” And that’s how it is really. I’ve realised everyone else is getting on with their lives and we are too. It’s been absolutely brilliant to see all of my family and they’re always in my heart, right alongside my friends!

Q.3 What’s it like to be back?

The first day of arriving in Australia I was shell shocked. We drove up to Maleny (we’d left a car at Dad’s) and I told Rob “I can’t live here anymore. I can’t live here, what could I do?”. It seemed so quiet and so still and I wasn’t coping with it. I’d just come from busy busy busy to quiet, quiet, quiet. But six weeks on, many beach walks on, about twelve books on and I’m loving it. It’s fantastic to be back! I love the stillness and the quietness that I’m afforded here and things are easy. Shopping is easy, talking is easy, sharing is easy. I absolutely love the relaxed lifestyle and there’s nothing quite like the beach is there?

Q.4 Are you looking forward to going back to Switzerland?

Yes, but not before I keep enjoying the rest of my holiday here! I’ve become a strong believer in living every day, not looking forward to things, not looking back, just trying to stay in the present as much as possible. I know there’ll be new adventures, new challenges and new exciting things to do when we return to Switzerland, but for now, I’m excited to be here and I’m enjoying every moment of it.

Q.5 How long are you going to live over there for?

I don’t have a clue. I honestly don’t. Could be a year, could be twenty. I’m still continuing to ask God every day to place me where I can best help others and to put me where I can be of most service to humanity. And so I have no plan. We have no plans. The only plan I have is to keep asking for the guidance that has become such an integral part of my experience.

Q.6 Where have you been?

Being in the middle of Europe, people often ask us where we’ve been - so here goes. Apart from our driving around Switzerland (which we actually haven’t done that much of) - here’s what our holiday itinerary has looked like and where we’ve been:

October holiday: London and Wales

October field trip: Rome

December holiday: Barcelona

February holiday: Paris

February ski week: Verbier, Switzerland

April holiday: Ireland

May long holiday: Cinque Terre, Italy

June/July/August: Australia

Yes, that’s right, it doesn’t look like I work much but I can assure you, I work my butt of during the year and look forward to every holiday I get - and yes, there are a lot of them!

Q.7 What have you been doing on your holiday?

Well, I’ve been reading lots of books. I developed quite a bit of an obsession with reading books about theatre in prison, I guess that’s because I was thinking that was something I could do if/when we return to Australia. I made some enquiries into doing a Masters in Applied Theatre at Griffith University, but am not really sure about that. I’ve also read lots of plays (you’d think I’d want a break after teaching Drama all year, but I absolutely LOVE theatre!) I’ve been for lots of beautiful walks on the beach with my wonderful husband Rob and we’ve been for delicious swims in the ocean at my favourite beach in the whole wide world, Little Cove, Noosa. We’ve been making the trek to visit Rob’s dad every Tuesday in Northern NSW and get him out of the nursing home that he’s in. He’s loved it and we have too! I’ve been hanging out with my wonderful Dad too and taking him out for dinner, taking him to visit Rob’s dad with us, going on a steam train with him (his request) and spending time together. We’ve been catching up with family and friends and talking about what we’d do if we came home, which, I have to stay, I still don’t know. My only regret is that I will have run out of time to see my rabbit, Magic who is living in Northern NSW!

Q.8 Will you keep a blog while you’re away this year?

I’m going to try this year. Last year I did a total of about three pathetic looking blogs. This year, I’m hoping to be able to document more of my time in the land of cows, Lindt and cheese.

Home....tap your red shoes Dorothy

It’s seems ironic that wherever I am not, that’s where I call home. A month ago I was calling Australia home and when I got here and start talking to people about Switzerland, I find I’m calling there home! I did a double take in my own thinking the first time I did it.

I think I’ve cheated myself for a year. For a year (that’s the prescription I was given by everyone) I’ve taken my time to settle in and it’s really only in the last few months that I began to feel ‘at home’ in Switzerland. Everyone you talk to who has ever moved across the globe or across the state tells you “It takes a year for you to settle in.” And so it has. But now the predicament is that I’ve come home to find that what I thought was ‘home’ is not ‘home’ at all. And I think about the times when I told myself ‘Can’t wait to get home.” But what a cheat! And it finally dawns on me (slow learner) that I could have dealt with ‘whatever’ it was bothering me, then and there, rather than thinking a change of location was going to help. Sure, I’ve climbed some pretty high mountains this year (physically and metaphysically) but I could have been wiser and kinder to myself! But now I know, I mean I really know.

Part of my problem in being away (and don’t get me wrong, it’s been an absolutely fantastic year) has been my false belief of feeling responsible for others. I’ve thought at times that I should really be around to support my family. But I come home and my family are doing just fine thank you very much. Maybe for a while there I thought I was God or something and that I had to be there for everyone! *he he*. But now I see that everyone’s fine, they still love me, I still love them and they don’t really need me here at all. And I see that God’s doing a great job without me actually.

And so, we returned ‘home’ to our hometown to find it so far away from everything, so far removed from everything and it was doing my head in. “What can I possibly do from here?” I was thinking to myself. “I can’t live here anymore”. And so it was... It’s a spinner, this not really knowing where your physical location of home is. It’s driving me underground to find a deeper meaning of home. It seems like an ongoing pilgrimage that I keep returning to time and time again in my life. I’ve learnt, through my study of Christian Science that home is not a physical location, it’s more a combination of qualities like warmth, love, comfort, light etc that is within. Things you can’t see. But there’s seems to be this deeper yearning in me to have a home and I don’t even know what that really means yet. The meaning of it keeps changing for me. We’ve rented our ‘house’/‘home’ out for two years and we went to see it the other day. I kept waiting for something to “kick in” to say “Yes, this is your home” but it didn’t happen. I’ve kept waiting for that “this is it” moment for the last three weeks and....nothing. The closest I got to it was going for a walk in Noosa National Park along the ocean path. But I know they don’t sell houses in a National Park so I don’t know what that was all about *ha ha*.

I’ve been fighting all year against the idea that we could possibly live overseas and call that home. I haven’t wanted it to be. Not because it’s not absolutely fantastic over there...it is...but because it goes against all my notions of what I thought ‘home’ was. I’ve been so patriotically Australian (when I’m not in Australia that is) that I couldn’t possibly conceive of it. A great friend from church who just returned to Australia from overseas told me the same thing when I told him I keep calling Switzerland ‘home’ now, but I wasn’t when I was there, I was calling Australia ‘home’. He said he did the same and it was a curious thing!

And now I find that the Paddington Bear from London and the sheep chess set from Wales that I bought ‘home’ with me to Australia (so that I wouldn’t have excess baggage later on) are now actually going to be coming ‘home’ with me back to Switzerland. That’s telling.

Switzerland one year on

It's been nearly one year since I wrote a blog and since we've been in Switzerland. In three weeks time we leave for Australia for a two month holiday.

It's been an amazing year. We've just gotten back from the Italian Riviera (Cinque Terra) where we walked the five villages in a day and I swam in the ocean for the first time in the year. Pretty cool that my first ocean swim in a year was in the Mediterranean!

We've been to so many places on holidays, it's been fantastic and is a little hard to describe how the whole experience has been. We've seen Barcelona, Paris, Rome, Aosta, Pisa, The Appinines, London, Wales, Ireland, Cinque Terra, Annecy and a host of other new places closer to Pully, where we live.

All I really want to say is how grateful I am to God for this experience and that I wish to keep listening to that "still, small voice" to guide me on my journey Spiritward.

I know I haven't written anywhere near what I thought I would here, but you see, there's just so much to take in! So much to do, so much to see, so much to everything! It's amazing. But here's a little list. Before that though, I just have to say that our nearly three weeks here has been incredible. Everyone we've met has been so warm and inviting, we've made some wonderful friends at church, great teachers at school and we're having a wonderful time. I start school next week and have been busily preparing for that (hence my lack of communication but preparing for school always makes it so much easier). And this weekend we're trying to decide whether to go to Paris or Milan. Life's tough and I'm incredibly grateful to God for all the good pouring our way! Here's a few little bits I wrote about:

The great things: Everything is new, new, new

1. Meeting fantastic people who are likeminded
2. Finding a wonderful apartment with views of the French Alps and Lake Geneva
3. Raspberries, blueberries, mulberries - all for breakfast
4. Going to France one week, Italy the next
5. Everyone being so amazingly kind to us
6. Swimming in Lake Geneva!
7. Not understanding people on the trains or buses - it gives me so much more time to think *I've realised what an eavesdropper I was in Australia!*
8. Going to wonderful art galleries where you see Monet, Picasso, Giacometti, Van Gogh, Klee, Warhol, Gaugin etc. etc. etc. all in the SAME museum!
9. Being with a wonderful husband who is so supportive
10. Seeing the old A-Team series in French and other English movies dubbed

The weird things:

1. Getting letters in the mail and you can’t read them - they’re in French
2. Trains without drivers
3. People taking their dogs shopping in Ikea
4. People taking their dogs on the train
5. People taking their dogs to the restaurant
6. Dogs taking their people to the restaurant
7. Going to Northern Switzerland where everyone speaks German and not being able to decipher a thing on the menu (except for “birchermuesli”)
8. Seeing people have a domestic in the cafe and you have no idea what it’s about
9. Staying up so late every night because 9pm feels so early here...
10. Having an ironing pile for once in my life and actually thinking about doing it all at the same time instead of once every day! (This'll be a first for me!)

The funny things:

1. Learning a phrase or two in French, speaking it and then not knowing how to reply when someone understands the first thing I said.
2. Forgetting that everyone outside our apartment speaks French when we’ve been talking in English together all day
3. Trying to explain 100g of Pepperoni in French
4. Having to have a card for everything - train pass, bus pass, residency permit,
5. Not going to bed until at least 11pm every night and then waking up our normal time
6. Constantly forgetting that you have to weigh your fruit and vegies BEFORE you take them to the checkout - and being sent back by the checkout person all the time to do it.
7. Ordering a salad (thinking you're so smart you know a incy whincy bit of French) and then having to eat humble pie when the salad has pastrami all strewn through it and you still want to be a vegetarian!
8. Having a wallet for Euros and a wallet for Swiss Francs! Go figure.
9. I have to say it again - dogs everywhere - Ikea, department stores, restaurants etc. etc.
10. Our temporary apartment filled to the brim with el tacko pictures and figures which I have now safely stashed behind the lounge and in the cupboards!

Love ya all. Oh PS. Rob has a new blogspot it's http://robswales.blogspot.com. He's sure to fill you in more than me! xxxx

Jodie

Our first week in Switzerland

Our first week in Switzerland and France (photo of Annecy courtesy of the fantastic Rob Swales )

Well, here we are! We've moved into our temporary apartment, I've taught myself to tell people I speak a little French, do they speak English? And today, I even managed to buy a cardigan and have a little conversation with a woman. Actually, it was more a monologue on her behalf, but anyway. I've been to the school and met a few of the teachers, been told I'm off to Rome in the first few weeks of school for an excursion and purchased our demi tarrif (half price tickets) so that we can catch the train to Milan, Paris, Zurich etc. for half price. Two of the teachers took us to Annecy in France on Saturday, it was stunning. And then on Sunday Rob and I went for a swim in Lac Leman (Lake Geneva). Everything (of course) is NEW NEW NEW. It's so wonderful. You have to shut your eyes to have a rest from taking in everything! And today, we went to look at an apartment. Legend has it, it's very difficult to find permanent or temporary accommodation in Lausanne. You have to look at least two months beforehand because legend has it again that there's a big shortage. Well, I'm not much into legends, so I've been thinking about how there's a right place for everyone. Today we think we found ours. The school is putting in an application. It has a mezzanine level, stairs that look like they go up to a treehouse (I'm such a kid!) and views out to the lake, that will be covered in snow in winter. In short, it's a perfect cubby. We'll see what Life has in store! Only good of course! Grocery shopping has even been fun and can you believe it, I'm actually looking up my French dictionary to learn how to cook certain new things. Now that's a miracle in itself (the cooking part). I'm starting to do some serious planning for work (I start on the 15th August) and it's all really interesting and exciting. We went to Evian about three days after we were here. And one of the teachers took us to a crazy day spa. It had a polar room where you could put snow over your body (I did of course), a very fun whirlpool that whizzed you around and even a pool that where you could hear classical music when you swam UNDER the water as well as Turkish baths, saunas and other delights. Well, I need to go do some planning for school now, so take care everyone. Au revoir. PS. I have discovered that Rob has a built in GPS. I'm feeling brave with speaking new phrases in French and he's not, and then I'm absolutely hopeless with getting my way around town and he's great. Love to everyone!