My Life in Azerbaijan - Begining to Live

March 7, 2011

Woke up late Friday morning, light snow is falling and I do not feel like to go to work. (Good thing about being a volunteer, you are not obligated to work!). Sitting by the kitchen table, I warm up my fingers with a cup of steaming hot coffee. Feeling unusually content, I watch a cheerful bird leaping up and down between the branches of a giant Pine outside my kitchen window. The snow in March is just a teaser, it does not last. I smell Spring already!

I am idle for the rest of the day; read some books, cook lunch, read more and work on my book for a few hours, after an hour of yoga, cook dinner. Before long, the day dims and I stretch out to watch the dark clear sky outside my balcony. It is a moonless night and the stars grow thicker and brighter. Besides feeling a twinge of nostalgia for a special friend, I am absolutely content.

Here in this foreign land, I grow to enjoy the seemingly dull chores; hanging my laundries on the wire, smelling their raw freshness from the sun, peeling potatoes and chopping vegetables in the kitchen, rolling a flour dough for my dumplings, eating a coarse local bread when my allowance is low or simply holding a cup of tea and listening to the sound of the frigid wind from the Sea, the contentment of doing one thing at a time or nothing at all.

I am alone most of the day, but I am never lonely! I realize I have reached as Sigurd Olson wrote,

“ the point where days are governed by daylight and dark, rather than by schedules, where one eats if hungry and sleeps when tired, and becomes completely immersed in the ancient rhythms, then one begins to live”.
Amen!