Island Love Letter

Evening. About thirty people stood up on the cliff where the wooden stairs lead down to the beach and watched the sunset. It’s a thing here. We gather to honor the ending of a day, the sun disappearing in an ocean we love and fear. It’s 13 degrees Celsius (55F) at the height of summer and we are wearing down, fleece, and wool jackets. Some evenings it’s very quiet and people don’t talk at all or do that church/museum-whisper but today there was chatter and cameras were out.

A little later I walked over to the east side of the island (narrow island advantage) and saw the full moon rise round and orange, so eerily similar to the sun on the other side just a while ago.

In the mornings I join a gaggle of mostly old naked women in the water. The water can be choppy, flat, moving fast, still as a lake, cloudy with churned up sand and algae, clear as a brook, fizzy from wind, but always we comment on how this is just the best. Hey, you said that yesterday! Did I? Well, I meant it then and I mean it now. Once you are in, you love it with all your warm heart and cold limbs.

Here I know when the tide will be high or low, what the water temperature is, where the wind is headed and at which speed. I can tell you if the moon is waning or waxing and what the clouds look like as they fly across the island.

I am in it. In this world that moves with or without me regardless of if I am here or away, no matter what good or terrible things are happening elsewhere on the planet at this moment in time. It has an independence I admire, this nature, an agency we need to give room and respect.

I dig it. I see it. I crave it, me, the city slicker, the kid that grew up on a busy street in a large city. This makes me tick.

There is no noise pollution here, no air pollution, no light pollution.

This is a German village with German people doing German things. It has a touch of a cliché, an illusion of the idyllic but it’s not far off.

Problems are everywhere where there are people and this is no exception. Not all that shines is gold. But. But it is close to perfection in my view. Now during this stage of my life particularly. Now during this stage of the whole world particularly. As we as a civilization move away from the primal, from the connection to the divine, from rituals, from seeing the environment as sacred, as we en masse are going in that direction I am finding comfort in the simplicity of observing and living as close as possible within nature.

This North Friesian island is not for everyone. Don’t come here looking for a beach vacation or night life. Don’t come here for hiking or cultural diversity. Don’t even come here if you wish to actually swim in the ocean.

But for me there is no other place on earth I’d rather be.

The Breadwinner

The weight of it