I’ve broken many promises to you, esteemed readers. This most recent one is unforgivable. I tell you that my writing hiatus is over – and that I will be updating you with a blog post very shortly after my last one – and yet, I didn’t. Promises, like piecrusts, were meant to be broken.
Anyway, here I am, writing this on a Friday. I have just completed some Friday errands that included going to the bank and waiting in the queue, updating the attendance for students in my records, responding to the backlog of emails, and spending the entire time wondering what I’m going to have for dinner tonight (I think I’m going to take a stab at making some faux-asian-style noodle dish because there is a small-but-growing number of Chinese people here working on a new highway which has lead me to understand why I can now find some unexpected items at the grocery stores).
Needless to say, this is becoming a bit routine. It’s a shame since the routine of it all, after so many months of adjusting, growing, becoming comfortable, adjusting again, falling down, getting back up, becoming a hermit, becoming an artificial extrovert, eating out, eating in – I am (for the umpteenth time I will say it) finding that, in a little over two months, I’m really going to miss it here in Montenegro.
I’ll save the pictures for the end of the blog so, if that’s what you’re looking for, feel free to bypass the word-stuff.
From an ex-pat standpoint, it’s been an eventful duration of time. Some ETAs from the region came to Montenegro a while back and Sydney, the other ETAs, and myself took a day trip to Kotor. I’ve been to Kotor already (and climbed the daunting Fortress) but it worked as a reminder that a lot of the country I am surrounded by is filled with untainted beauty.
I want to pause on this thought for a moment because it is something that has been simmering for some time. That trip to Kotor – and especially the bus ride to and from the coast, caught me off guard. It’s funny because I’ve been on this road and ones very similar to it many times now — I take an hour-long bus ride, surrounded by mountains, for work, four times a week. But this bus ride has a strange sensation. It was like instantaneous nostalgia – like I knew that I would feel nostalgic for these landscapes at a later date.
It wasn’t necessarily the romantic idea of the sublime. However, it is comparable in the sense that I found that I became a bit misty-eyed and overwhelmed, even. Montenegro is both long-lived-in and not at all curated; the spontaneity, the audacity of the landscape is, on occasion, made to fit the will of the people who live here – but, in a lot of places, there is no dominion over it. The landscape is just too wild for anyone to totally take charge.
Recently I found myself listening to an interview with the cocreator and showrunner for the HBO show “The Leftovers” (shoutout to The Watch podcast for always giving me something to do while I cook dinner) – and he mentioned the importance of place in his work. I’ve never really been one to write with a significant interest in place – only because I think the setting of my life has been singular: I lived in Massachusetts my whole life. Being in Montenegro has made me re-see the importance of place; the way it controls and defines what people can do and how they live. If it weren’t for the correct shading of light over a mountain, maybe you wouldn’t have been inspired to have the thought that you are now having – which may lead to the idea that will change the course of your life.
As I mentioned earlier, this place has had its ups and downs for me. That was the adjustment to a place that has more control over its people that the people have control over it. The disillusioned American idea that we have dominion over a landscape – manifest destiny – is probably never more void of meaning than in Montenegro. The though I had, seeing the wild, vibrant weeds of bright green grow over so many attempts to tame it made me see that, perhaps, in parts of the world, ideology hasn’t won over nature; that there are still places that can, at least for now, be uncorrupted by a human agenda, for better or worse. Where people can humble themselves to know that we didn’t make this world (no matter how many highways you create), but that this world made us.
Oh BEETEEDUBS (I guess this is applicable) – Happy Belated Earth Day.
Here are some pictures from Prague and other travels.
me and my new friend, Edu from Spain, giving you hours of entertainment in 6 second increments
tcampbellmurphy 