Natasha Regehr
Have you ever received a message like this?
It’s a little surreal. It feels quite final. I’ve made the leap.
I’ve made leaps before. Big leaps. Resigning, house-selling, relocating leaps. Blind leaps, for the most part. Great, optimistic, terrifying leaps into a new unknown. Leaps I’ve later questioned. And here I go again.
Greeks can be gruff. This is my studied opinion after spending a week in the myth-infused homeland of the gods, with its gruesome stories of bickering deities vying for power and favour.
My Airbnb hostess in Athens was the first to freak out at me. “Why are you late? You should have called! I have a baby! I’ve been waiting for you in this apartment for eight hours now!” For the record, I was not eight hours late, my hostess lived a mere 15 minutes away from the apartment, and I communicated with her the instant my plane landed, so now that I think about it, I’m kind of sorrynotsorry…
Then came the old couple on the ferry. The ones who freaked out when I took one of six empty seats around a table, because they had, in absentia, appropriated all six seats for themselves – only to abandon them after I meekly relocated. I sat at the next table and gave them the evil eye for the rest of the trip. Yeah, mister. You’d better get out your worry beads. Continue reading
I love water. I love being in water. I love being in deep water. I love being upside down in deep water. I love gliding through it, feeling its silky caress against my skin. I love the aquamarine blueness of it, the way the light dances through it, the way I drift and float and submerge and emerge with perfect ease and grace. I love the serenity of this glowing world to which I can escape and suspend time — until my lungs oblige me to surface for a little bit of oxygen.
You can imagine, then, the appeal of staying in this underwater world indefinitely, unconcerned about the trivialities of inhaling and exhaling — just drifting from one delight to the next in a slow ballet of submarine bliss.
Scuba diving, I thought, is exactly what my life has been missing. I must go scuba diving. I will be a natural at manoeuvring through this liquid paradise. I will feel utterly at ease in my favoured element.
Not so. Continue reading
That last post was a little too light-hearted for its content — or rather, for the trajectory of its content. Because what happened next was not at all funny. Continue reading
Am I complicit in this? I think I am.
It was with shock and heartsickness that I woke up on Wednesday morning to find the world on fire. I had followed the campaign process with a kind of grim amusement for the last year or so (how could one not?), and therefore I thought I knew what was going on.
Clearly, I did not.
I had gone to bed the night before mildly curious about the outcome of the presidential election, but not at all perturbed. “Surely the majority of thinking, voting Americans share my viewpoint,” I thought. “They’ll never vote him in.”
So how was it that I was so completely sideswiped by the next morning’s announcement? How did I not see it coming? Continue reading
A year and a half ago, with my sights set on Morocco, I trotted to the Peterborough Public Library and went berserk. First, I gave away about fifteen boxes of books, and then, I set about replacing them.
I signed out an armload of language and travel resources, fiction, and DVDs about North Africa, and devoured them all, in between spastic packing fits. But my most precious acquisition was a tiny, one-dollar purchase from the library basement: a slim, winsome copy of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince – en français, of course, because I fancied the idea of becoming fluent in French during my two years abroad.
Ha! Well, I exported myself from one continent to the other, and soon discovered that “learning French” is a bigger endeavour than I had expected – and that Le Petit Prince is not so little after all. Continue reading
I am thankful for the big things: the people who make my world beautiful every day, both here in Morocco and in my other happy home in Canada; for the many places in between that I’ve been able to visit this year (twelve airports, if I’ve counted correctly!); for the rich cultures and histories that intersect my days; for meaningful work; and for the provisions that allow me to keep on living this colourful, promising life.
But every Thanksgiving, I take a few hours to collect all the smaller thanksgivings I’ve recorded throughout the year as well – those things that, at the end of each day, remind me that there is always, always a little goodness to be found, or to create, with a small turn of the mind.
Here, then, is my 2016 Gratitude List, beginning with last year’s Thanksgiving trip to an all-inclusive resort in Southern Morocco, and ending with yesterday’s roast chicken at home. I invite you to walk through my year of thankfulness with me: Continue reading
When your travel buddy deserts you in the middle of a mountain, you have a choice to make: do you follow her to the local spa to be coddled for the rest of the day, or do you carry on without her?
I chose to carry on.
Poor Jennifer. She didn’t really desert me. She just wasn’t feeling well. We had taken the cable car to the top of Mount Jenner, and halfway down again, hoping to do the last 8.5 km on foot. In her bodily distress, she opted to ride all the way down, but I refused: “No way, not me. I did not come to the Bavarian Alps to do a wussy cable-car descent. I came to hike, and hike I will!”
She waved a cheery good-bye and floated away in her glass carriage, and I confess, I gulped a little. Me – find my way across the mountain and down to Lake Königssee, then catch the boat to Kessel, the bus to Berchtesgaden, and the train to Bad Reichenhall – without my GPS? Or Google maps? Without even my phone to look after me if I get lost? No cell service, no wi-fi, no homing pigeons… just me, a pamphlet, and a series of destinations? Me – the wanderer who can barely get from home to work and back again without an unintentional detour? Without a functioning phone? Not even one?
Yes, me. I can do this. I’m an Adventurous Adult. Continue reading
Vienna, you very nearly failed me.
I approached you with the same wide-eyed wonder with which I’ve approached the rest of Europe: quivering with anticipation at the thought of having an Authentic Cultural Experience in a city Steeped in History like a well-brewed cup of tea – a classy, temporal tea made of Stately Buildings and the Important People who once inhabited them. Oh, I would imbibe this heady tea, I thought. I would establish a mystical connection with the legendary masters who created the music that has so inspired me all my life. I would enter and inhabit their lofty, artistic world.
Vienna! You tease.
What I got instead was a whole lot of kitsch: bewigged men in velvet breeches handing out glossy pamphlets advertising cotton-candy concerts in gaudy palaces; church cantors with nasal voices, leading quartets instead of choirs; museum exhibits with nothing but facsimiles and gift shops; and Strauss. Oh, the Strauss. And not the good kind, either. Waltzen-Strauss. Vienna, you and I both know that there’s more to you than triple time, treble clef trinkets and musical ties. But where to find it?
O, Canada! How do I love you? Let me count the ways.
I love the way your cars travel in placidly parallel lanes, staying obediently between the dotted lines, graciously allowing each and every vehicle its own personal space. I love how I can always tell with reasonable certainty whether it’s safe to enter your blessedly perpendicular intersections; I love how I can see your traffic lights no matter where I am, and people wave at me to say, “Please, you go first. I’d rather wait.” I love it that I have been here for thirteen days now and I haven’t heard a single honking horn or shrieking whistle. I love how your cyclists get their very own lanes, your signs tell everyone to share the road, and people are happy to take turns. O, Canada, I love your pretty roads. Continue reading
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