An august evening at the lake at Grodek

Sat on the veranda, overlooking a wooded island, standing there like a huge immovable stone in the middle of lake. The sun slowly setting behind, its snarling reds, feminine pinks and warm oranges all contradicting each other, until they finally reach a delicate marriage and at that second all becomes still, as if just for a moment the earth pauses and stops rotating. Then bit by bit the sun and the island are enveloped by the clouds that start to bring the rain gently sweeping over the lake. A faint clap of thunder momentarily drowns out the voices from the house of Joanna and her family, sat around the table speaking in a language that is at once both reassuring and indecipherable to my ear.

 I am sat at the foot of the Tatra mountains the Polish arm of the Carpathians, on a mid-August evening wondering at the surrealness of life and its ability to continue to amaze. It seems to twist and turn like it is its own life force; I am just the passenger, under some illusion of control that I might be somehow plotting the course of my own life. As I turn and look at the four candles flickering beside me, I realise I am as vulnerable as they are, given this unimaginable gift, but at the mercy of those same winds as the candles, blowing my flame about like a rudderless boat, somewhere in some nameless sea and in danger of being snuffed like the candle flame or cast asunder at any moment.

I only ever really feel these emotions, when surrounded and confronted by natures majesty and like a wave crashing against me, all of a sudden countless feeling roll over me, all elbows barging for a position at the fore to crash over my face, awe, gratefulness, terror, sadness and joy, a tumult. One after the other they hit me, until it is impossible to tell which feelings are washing over me and which ones are slipping back down below the hull of the vessel that others call by the name Oliver. They are now just silent lips, moving but without noise, or maybe deafened by the roar of those waves that shout “this is how it feels to be alive”. At that very moment it all seems so huge, too much, as if nature is making me feel the beauty and unbearable force of what it means to be alive.