Month: January 2024

The Kindness of Strangers

A few weeks ago, on the way back from our shopping round, our car started playing up. The automatic brake system started engaging the brakes at random moments, which was scary enough, before all kinds of warning lights appeared on the dashboard, followed by a warning in bold letters on a bright red background that told me the car would start an emergency shut down in 15, 14, 13, …. seconds, inexorably counting down while I was frantically looking for a safe place to take the car off the road.

We almost made it to safety. The car was half on the shoulder of the road, with only a bit of the rear still sticking out when we reached 0 and the car completely died on me, in the process locking the brakes and the steering wheel. It could have been worse, at least most of the car was off the road, but the bit sticking out, on a 1.5 lane road, in a bend flanked by trees, was dangerous enough to have us worried. Whatever I tried, I couldn’t restart the engine, nor could I unlock the brakes and steering mechanism.

Within minutes, a van stopped behind us, the driver got out and asked if he could help. We tried pushing the car further into the shoulder, but it wouldn’t budge, so he apologised profusely, before driving on. The next person to offer help was a local farmer who had been told someone had parked a car on the edge of his potato field. He was very friendly, too, and suggested some numbers we could call to get expert help.

So we called roadside assist (ANWB, for those that know the Dutch system) and waited, hoping no-one would hit us from behind, or cause a head-on collision by steering around our car without checking if anyone was coming from the other direction. Truth be told, there were some near-misses, but no actual crashes.

About an hour later the ANWB guys showed up. He introduced himself and then spent the best part of an hour running all kinds of diagnostics trying to resuscitate our defunct vehicle. To no avail. We had to call a tow truck and were told it would take at least another hour before one would arrive.

To our surprise, the ANWB guy decided to wait by our side. He had turned on the rotating alarm lights on his van and put a series of witch’s hats around our car to make sure no cars would crash into us. And, as relaxed as could be, we then had a very engaging conversation about his work, my work, the state of the world, even politics and a bit of religion, all in a most amicable atmosphere, almost if we were old friends having a yarn over a beer. When the tow truck finally arrived, with the help of the ANWB guy, our completely dead car was successfully loaded onto the tow truck.

He didn’t have to do this. He could have packed up and moved on hours ago. It was pure kindness and helpfulness that made him stay by our side and I will always be grateful for that.

Below you see me carting away our shoppings in a wheelbarrow we had just bought, not knowing it would come in so handy :-).

My Country of Birth is Reclaiming Me

My Country of Birth is Reclaiming Me

I have been somewhat absent from this blog in the past 2 years. Not completely, but I was far less active than in previous years.

One of the reasons is the fact that circumstances largely beyond our control have forced my wife and I to relocate back to the country we were born in, The Netherlands, and leave our country of choice, Australia, behind.

That process, happening in the midst of the COVID pandemic, was messy, hectic and rather painful at times. But the transition is behind us now and we are settling into our new home, in a beautiful forest in the north of the country.

One interesting thing I am noticing is how the country seems to be reclaiming me. After living in Australia for more than 20 years, I felt (and still feel at times) more Australian than Dutch. I came back to this country feeling a stranger in a strange land; a visitor to a country that didn’t look much like the country I left behind in the previous century.

But in the past few months, that feeling has been changing. Gradually, I beginning to feel my old roots – the ones I thought I had severed and discarded when I migrated to Australia – come to life again and take hold in the soil of the forest around me. I am beginning to recognise the feel of the sand under my feet, the sounds of the birds and insects, the smell of the grass and the surrounding trees. And I am beginning to feel Home again.

What makes this process interesting to me is that it is not the nation or its people that is reclaiming me, but its Nature, its soil, its COUNTRY, as the Australian Aboriginals would call it. It is a feeling that had slowly grown on me in Australia, but – because I wasn’t born there – would never completely take hold: that of belonging to country. Here in The Netherlands, I feel I am welcomed back and told I do belong here; that I never stopped belonging here, no matter how far away I was.

For me, this is an important reminder of how deeply intertwined we really are with Nature, with the land on which we are born, live and die. We are not separate from Country, we are its offspring, and tied to it through many, many invisible roots and connections. We may have created this illusion of man vs. nature, or man over nature, or even man completely separate from it, but we are, in our core, just another form of Nature. Nothing more, nothing less. Only when we acknowledge that and let our country fully claim us as its own can we be truly happy and in harmony with ourselves and the world.

Here is to coming Home and being reclaimed. Here is to Country.

Happy New Future.