On May 26th, 2007 I went to Europe. When June 22nd made its debut about a month later I pulled myself up off the thinly carpeted floor of an alcove in Aéroport Lyon-Saint Exupéry, and began the slow journey back to Rhode Island. A month on another continent seems somewhat daunting if you haven't done it before, but looking back on it, its almost like it never happened. These are the people who came across the Atlantic with me, for various periods of time during my journey. If you were a Bokononist you might say that these people were part of my granfalloon, the sort of intentional, purpose-driven assemblage of people that attempts to do the will of the Universe without understanding the laws of its design. This is in contrast to my karass, a disparate group of people brought together by the motion of the universe to further its ultimate purpose. A granfalloon is essentially a false karass, an attempt by man to control that which is not his to control.
Principal Actors:
Adam (Me)
Nate
Charles
Supporting Actors:
Maarten
Robbie
Additional Cast:
Ty
Becky
Meghan
Jon
Julie
Megan
Rachel
This is a list of the people I met along the way, in one form or another, in no particular order, but tending towards the chronological. You might say they were members of my karass…
* The guys from North Carolina that were in an acapella group
* Phillip, Michael, and Daniel from Cologne, Germany - My Taize roommates
* Timo the Finn
* Volod, Hanna, Taras, and Iryna from the Ukraine, and Johannes from Freyburg
* Brother John, originally from Phillly. A brother at Taize.
* The California kids, Dan and Jeanette
* Mareike at Oyak
* The waiter at L'Est in Lyon
* My friend Anna in Stuttgart
* Anna's friends Karoline, Andra, and Sophie
* Killian, Roisin, and Ciaran from Ireland, Sylvestre from Berlin
* The Gypsy rock band 'Grams'
* The two Swedish guys Andreas and Robert
* Kim, Ryan, Ron, and Andy - the Australians
* Rajiv
* The people at the bar in Prague whose names I don’t know
* The Asian girl and the German man in our sleeper car
* Justin & Jeremy from California
* Pastor Mark from Humbolt
* The Indonesian/German/Floridian lady at the Ice Cave
* Joe from The Elf & Yoho
* Ken from Singapore & Andrew from Detroit
* Barbara & Magdelena (and Barbara's sister)
* The British lady in the square in Salzburg
* The baby Nate saved and its grateful mother. Also, the guy that cheered for us.
* The obnoxious girls from California on the night train to Paris
* The funny ladies from Louisiana on the same train
* Kimya Dawson in Amsterdam
* The two Welsh kids that were going to Cassis
* The girl with good taste in music on the way back to Lyon
* The cab driver that took us to the airport in Lyon after the buses stopped running
There were others, and some will likely appear in my story. Some of the people above may not be so (un)fortunate.
Here is a map that I marked up with where we went…
Part I -
There was a lack of foresight from the very beginning. I found myself on a Peter Pan bus, sitting between Nate and Charles. The lack of foresight was apparent because rather than sitting in any normal set of seats, we chose to sit together in the only seats where we could sit three across - in the back. The back of the bus might seem like a good choice for reasons that would resonate with a pretentious teenager: (1) you don't have to be surrounded by strangers, (2) you can sit next to BOTH of your friends, rather than one, and (3) of course everyone knows the cool kids sit in the back. Unbeknownst to us there are reasons you don't want to sit in the back of the bus: (1) its next to the bathroom, (2) the seats don't recline, and (3) the air compressor located directly behind your head is deafening.
Lesson learned.
The Peter Pan bus was departing the bus terminal situated on Route 95 just north of Providence, RI. It was heading to Logan International Airport. It was our intention to get on an airplane at Logan, sit on that plane for seven or eight hours, and then disembark at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam. From there we would repeat the dreadful process en route to Taize, France. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
As said, Nate, Charles and I were sitting in the back of the bus. I would spend every day with them for the next month. As I write this I'm beginning to realize the enormity of the task ahead of me, because you don't know Nate and Charles. I feel some sort of obligation to introduce them in a formal manner, because I’m always annoyed when I find myself in a room with a stranger who shares a mutual friend and that friend doesn’t have the courtesy to introduce the stranger.
I've known Charles since we were 5 years old. We were in the same kindergarten class at Hampden Meadows Elementary School. If you stepped outside my suburban, ranch-style home that is currently a bluish-grey color, with a maroon front door, but at the time Charles and I were in kindergarten was a pale green color with a front door that I can't really recall, and you walked past my neighbor's house on the right, which back then was Henrietta's house but is now Beth's parents' house (Beth lived there after Henrietta) because Beth and her parents swapped houses when she adopted her second child from China, you'd be at the corner of Greenwood Ave (my street) and Martin Ave (Charles' street). If you took a left there and walked past 3 houses, and then looked to your right, you would be staring at Charles' house. Aside from my family, Charles is one of the only people that I currently know whom I can't remember not knowing, that I can't remember meeting, and certainly the only ‘friend’ that falls into that classification. I'm not sure what that means, but I know that I could fill this book with so much background on Charles that it'd make you hate both of us.
Seventeen years is a long time to know a person. In those seventeen years, these are the things that I've come to realize are most important about Charles and my friendship with him. I will always be friends with Charles because the laws of the universe have dictated that it be so since my conscious life began. I’ve ceased my contemplation of struggle against those forces. I'm 6'0", Charles is slightly shorter than me, I think. Maybe by as little as an inch, but possibly an inch or two more than that. Charles is rather smart, with a knack for things that tend toward the scientific and musical. He's probably smarter than you, and even if he's not, he'd probably trick you into thinking he was, so you could say he’s clever as well. He was going to study physics at the University of Rhode Island, but then he wised up and went to Full Sail College in Orlando where he earned an associates degree in Sound Recording. He plays bass and guitar and he's got a great ear for music. He's direct, to the point of being an asshole. He's also highly sociable and I know a lot of people who aren't as close friends with him as I am, and they say 'oh I love Charles'. I love Charles too, but I'd never say it like that, because sometimes I want to slap him. Saying it like that merely shows that you don't know that person well enough to occasionally hate them. Charles is hung like a horse. His mom said he takes after his dad. No joke. He was the only one of us that wouldn’t save a baby from its doom during the course of the trip.
If Charles is my metaphorical 'right hand man', which I assure you, he's not, then Nate would be the back of my left hand. I've got three circular scars there, right below the knuckles, spaced just right so that it might look like I could potentially sport claws in the same fashion as Wolverine of Marvel Comics fame, but that’s not the case. I just had a real bad fall on my skateboard once. Nate is my closest friend who I know the least about. I'm not even sure when I started to know Nate, I think it was sophomore year of high school. I know Nate because Charles knows Nate (I told you Charles was sociable). Nate is taller than me, probably two inches taller. He has scraggly blonde hair, a contrast to Charles' shorter, brown hair. He's got childbearing hips. Nate also dresses the most absurdly by conventional standards, which really means he wastes less time and money than most people in assembling his wardrobe. I think more than anything Nate enjoys keeping people on their toes, if only for his own amusement. He liked to steal things when he was younger, but he doesn't really do that anymore that I know of. He might just be a rather exceptional thief now...
Nate, Charles, and I were bound for Europe, but we were not alone. There was a point at the end of the journey where we were alone, but until that point we were accompanied by eight people, two people, and finally one person from our side of the Atlantic. The person leading the initial group of eleven was Ty Creason, who warrants a book unto to himself. Ty was raised in rural Arkansas, spent at least ten years as a college student, played Dungeons and Dragons in Los Angeles with Gary Gygax, spent a couple of years as a monk, and now works as the assistant to the Episcopal Bishop of Rhode Island. Ty organizes a trip to Taize every year for college-aged kids. He has shoulder length, thinning grey hair. He rocks a graying beard. If you can't carry a conversation with Ty, you're hopeless, because through God's divine grace, Ty seems to be able to get along with everyone.
As I sat inside the poorly air-conditioned, green-trimmed bus along with Nate, Charles, and Ty. But there others. There was Maarten, who warrants some text as well. Roelof Maarten Hoogeboom has a very Dutch name. He's also taller than I am. He has thinning brown hair, which is usually covered by a Red Sox baseball cap. I worked with Maarten at God camp, where we did things that people wouldn't normally associate with God camp, but that I don't think God would particularly condemn. Since I don't have a younger brother (I have a younger sister), I imagine Maarten is the closest thing I might have to a younger brother. He's very eager. People's moms really like him. He's kind of a goofball.
The other people on the bus were as follows... Becky: I call her Becky Binns, but she got married two years ago and I really should get in the habit of calling her Becky Gettel. But it doesn't flow. Becky is shorter than I am, as most girls are. She is one of the most thoughtful and peaceful people that I know. Thoughtful doesn't mean that she's always giving presents, though I'm not saying she doesn't. I just want to differentiate between the self-centered perception of 'thoughtful' and the proper definition, which I would venture to guess is something like 'full of thought'. Becky doesn't half-ass the things she says, and I like that about her.
Then there was Meghan and Jon. They're about Becky's age, meaning Jon is three years older than me, and Becky and Meghan are a few years older than that. Meghan and Jon got married just before we left for Taize. Just after we returned Meghan was ordained as an Episcopal minister. She’s very intense. If you didn't know Jon was married, you'd probably mistake him for a flaming homosexual. You might make that mistake even if you knew he was married. He's a great artist who can work well with more mediums than anyone I know.
A list of the rest of the people on the trip will probably drive you to stop reading this, and me to stop writing this. They'll be introduced as I find necessary, which may mean not at all. Time will tell.
We passed the hour-long bus ride by dangling my miniature iPod speakers over the railing of the storage shelf above our heads and doing out best to hear the tunes over the din of the air compressor droning on relentlessly behind us. I had drunkenly convinced our friend Pete to allow me to borrow the speakers for our trip the previous night at Justine's beach house. The speakers consisted of a round plastic sphere that opened up to reveal a small speaker in each half of the orb. We had been using them on the porch that night, until a South Kingstown police officer came to inform us of a noise complaint against us. We all, including the officer, had a good laugh when he saw how inadequate our sound equipment was. He wished us a good evening and didn't even hassle us about our drinking, which was illegal for roughly half of us.
We arrived outside Logan, climbed off the bus, and dragged our luggage out from the storage compartments that we had been riding on top of for the past hour. My luggage consisted of my 4,000 cubic-inched, green and white North Face backpack. I hated that it was as big as it was. If my bag had been smaller, I would have packed lighter, I told myself. I was disappointed in my packing. If only I had packed ahead of time, I could have cut it down, I told myself. Charles’ backpack was a bit smaller. I envied his backpack. But he also sported a thin, navy blue nylon tote bag that could be folded up into itself. He used it as his carry-on. It looked like the kind of bag you’d put a bomb in and leave under the seat of a busy airplane terminal.
Even more than Charles’ bag, I wanted Nate’s bag. His bag actually belonged to Pete, but Pete had left it in Nate’s dorm room at Marlboro College years ago. Many people had made it their own since then. Pete was not one of those people. The bag was Nate’s for now, and it was a beautiful size, just a large, black daypack, with enough straps and loops to attach the bulkier items to the outside. I felt like a tourist with too much luggage that deserved to have their passport stolen by a clever Italian thief. I had a copy of my passport buried at the bottom of my too-big backpack for just such an occurrence. Its probably still in there.
The 1pm bus got us to Logan much too early for our 5pm flight, but the 3pm bus was cutting it too close. When we arrived the terminal was a ghost town. The room felt like an excessive metal and glass temple built to some non-existent God, designed merely to make those within it feel small. Without must haste Nate, Charles, and I proceeded to the counter to have our bags checked. The woman speaking broken English at the counter put the wrong tags on the bags. I got Charles’ bag. I still wanted Nate’s bag.
I had transferred some essentials to a green messenger bag for use as my carry-on luggage. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, which I struggled through most of the trip, and The Old Man in the Sea by Hemmingway, my maroon, spiral-bound notebook that sported the spiral binding along top, rather than the side, my iPod and Pete’s inadequate speakers, travel documents, several granola bars, and my toothbrush and toothpaste. I felt the need to brush my teeth every couple of hours on long flights. The time change, coupled with my propensity for consciousness while being rocketed over the ocean in a metal tube with a couple hundred strangers, always left me with that dried-out corpse feeling that one inevitably obtains when spending too little time with your eyes open and not enough with them closed. I would shuffle to the bathroom in the back of the plane when I saw that the bathroom was vacant, slide into the two square feet of space, and manage the bi-fold closed so that I could brush the sweaters off my teeth, splash the artificial plane water on my face, and wipe my armpits with a couple of wet-naps in blissful solitude for two minutes. After staring at my increasingly bleary eyes in the mirror for a few moments, I would return to my seat and watch another crappy movie offered by the 4” monitor that grew out of the back of the skull of the person seated in front of me and protruded through their headrest for my viewing pleasure.
We passed through security at Logan without any hassle. I always wondered how little I could bother to remove from my person and still go through the metal detector without setting off any alarms. I’ve found that my cross, which was crafted from two old iron nails soldered together, never gets anyone’s attention. Neither do the screws holding parts of my left wrist together. Apparently the Bic lighter that I forgot was inside my cigarette pack did not concern them either.
After 20 minutes inside the ‘secure’ portion of the terminal, where they sell whiskey and cigarettes at prices that could get them placed on a ‘value meal’ menu, we realized we couldn’t smoke a cigarette anywhere. I bitched and moaned and even tried to sell the idea of smoking in the bathroom like a bunch of delinquent high-schoolers, but in the end we took the reasonable course of action and exited to where we had been dropped off by the big, green Peter Pan bus. I smoked two of my Turkish Golds, which took only slightly longer than it took Nate to smoke his one American Spirit. It would be a while before we could light up again. I wished it was the 1970’s and that I could fill our 747’s cabin with hundreds of cubic feet worth of my second-hand smoke. My fantasy was interrupted as we passed back through security, and my wrist screws, cross, and Bic lighter still didn’t set the metal detector off.
We killed the remaining hours that stood between the present and our departure by eating dinner in one of the airport restaurants. O’Houligan’s was a cookie-cutter mockery of an Irish pub, decked out with cheap, dark wood accents and a dimly lit bar. Any attempt at an authentic atmosphere was ruined for me not by the crowds of baggage-laden travelers scrambling through the terminal just outside the restaurant, but by the plastic knives that accompanied our otherwise-normal set of silverware. I could probably pull off a hijacking with this if I really wanted to, I thought to myself. I ordered the French Dip, and as I assaulted the thinly-sliced roast beef and cheese wrapped in a rapidly disintegrating roll between pints of Miller Lite dressed up in Guinness Pint glasses, I realized that I had eaten the same thing, in the same place, the year before when I had made the same trip to France. Matt, Erin, and Ty had been transformed into Charles, Nate, and Maarten, and the French Dip had stayed exactly the same.
As we waited for Northwest Flight 38 bound for Amsterdam to arrive at the gate, I contemplated whether or not the first week of this trip was worth taking. I had been to Taize the year before, at the same time, with many of the same people. I didn’t realize it then, but I was upset that Matt and Erin were not there this year. They had been spiritual mentors to me for years as we had all been involved in an abundance of Episcopal youth groups, retreats, and events. I suppose this trip partially fell under that guise as well.
Ty led the same trip to Taize every year at this time of year, which was late May. It was the second year in a row I was making the trip. It was the first time for Maarten, Charles, and Nate. Taize was, and is, a monastic community that was started by Brother Roger, the son of a Swiss Calvinist minister, prior to World War II. When the Germans invaded France and Taize eventually found itself in occupied territory, Brother Roger returned to Geneva with a few brothers and waited out the war. When it was over he returned to that rural hilltop in southwest France and began a brotherhood that now includes Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox Christians from over twenty different countries. Over the decades Taize began attracting pilgrims, mostly young backpackers seeking a place to rest. Now it receives hundreds, even thousands, of visitors each week, from all over the globe. Most are between the ages of 18 and 30, and the brothers accept them all, and allow them a glimpse of the monastic life, and somehow, their routine seems little phased by it.
I napped on a padded row of seats near our gate as Jon, Meghan, Becky and Charles played the ‘travel’ edition of Scrabble that Meghan seemed to adore. I had never played scrabble and was not interested in picking up the habit. The personal side of my eyelids was more interesting to me at that point. I knew I would not sleep on the plane.
We boarded our flight and my initial disappointment at not having a window seat was assuaged by the fact that I had an aisle seat in the middle section of the Boeing 747. With the aisle to my left, and Maarten two seats to my right, I wondered what unwelcome stranger would fill the space that I wished would remain empty between us. It turned out that no one was meant to fill the space, so Maarten and I had the luxury of storing our carry-on items within easy reach, and using the monitor belonging to the empty seat to constantly keep track of the plane’s progress towards Amsterdam with the small, digital map that alternated between a depiction of a tiny, white plane slowly progressing over the Atlantic, and constantly changing data concerning our speed, wind speed, time of arrival, and the local times at our point of departure and arrival. Time does not exist when you are thousands of feet above a dark blue ocean that continues thousands of feet further downward to the largest mountain range in the world that few people realize is even there. We were in a frozen, metal time bubble, defying the laws of nature with a plethora of our fellow plebian time travelers, while uniformed attendants doled out the 21st century’s version of Juvenal’s bread, and our personal entertainment monitors provided the circus. I was sure that first class tickets must have come with the luxurious option of being cryogenically frozen. I wanted to mutiny.
Our time-defying journey, which began at 7:10pm in Boston, and was scheduled to end at 8:10am in Amsterdam, with only 7 hours of time in the air, ended up taking closer to 8 real hours and 12 in fake, paper time. By the time we touched down at Schiphol Airport we had less than half an hour to exit our plane and sprint from terminal (the Dutch called them ‘piers’) B to terminal D, which were much farther apart than the designations ‘B’ and ‘D’ would lead you to believe.
After impatiently waiting for the people in first class to be unfrozen and led out of the plane, those of us in coach finally were able to exit. We ran. All eleven of us. It was a sad scene. My right knee ached with the dull soreness that running in worn-down flip-flops will cause you when you have annihilated most of your cartilage in that joint by playing Ultimate frisbee for the past 4 years of college. We ran down corridors, sometimes the wrong ones, and along people-mover conveyor belts that were rendered nearly irrelevant by the fact that people do not move while they are actually on them. Carry-on luggage made of cheap, ripstop nylon fabric slapped against our collective backs and sides as we desperately maneuvered through an infinite crowd of indifferent travelers.
We eventually found our way to Terminal D and had the unfortunate luck of having our gate located at the far end of the terminal. We continued our frenzied dash, taking some solace in the fact that many of our time travel companions from the previous flight also had to make this connecting flight to Lyon. KLM knew this as well. I was one of the first to arrive at the gate, and my heart immediately sank into my stomach as I realized there was no plane at the gate. Ty came bustling up behind me, hardly out of breath, with a confident and carefree air about him. “Oh good, we made it” he remarked and proceeded to step up to the check-in desk. I gave him a puzzled look but then noticed the large airport bus located right outside the door to our gate. Apparently we had to be bussed across the damp, misty tarmac to our waiting 737, which had been notified of the late arrival of many of its passengers on this dreary Dutch morning.
I boarded waiting shuttle after handing my boarding pass to the girl at the KLM counter who returned the gesture with a knowing smile and no words. I squeezed onto the already-packed, doublewide shuttle and held onto a grab-bar mounted to the ceiling. Trendy looking, 30-something Europeans surrounded me. I felt haggard and out of place. My knee ached from running through the airport, and I knew that while our next flight would be much shorter then the previous, I knew it would be much more miserable.
As I waited in the shuttle the rest of my group slowly filed in, filling in the less-than-adequate spaces between the already-present passengers. I was feeling a tinge of guilt for being the last group on the bus, and thus the reason for everyone else’s delay. At least I can’t understand their pissed-off remarks, I thought to myself. Besides English, I knew a very basic amount of Spanish that was really only adequate for finding the location of the bathroom, exchanging pleasantries, and ordering breakfast. I could feel the weight of my fellow passenger’s collective pride at the knowledge they were far more accomplished communicators than I. Their intellect embarrassed me and encouraged me to blame our sub-standard school system for my own failings to progress through the increasing levels of Spanish instruction. I had started taking Spanish in 7th grade, and progressed to an intermediate level by my senior year of college – not a very astounding feat. I would later be told by Philip, one of my German roommates at Taize, that Germans now began English instruction at age six. “Its almost as if we have no mother tongue now,” he remarked. I wished I went to kindergarten in Germany.
I was snapped out of my educational self-loathing by noticing that Ty had exited the shuttle to go back to the KLM desk. I watched through two layers of glass as he spoke to the woman at the desk while Maarten and the second Meghan with us stood next to him, the last remaining members of our group that had yet to board the bus. After a few moments Ty returned to the bus, and in his typical fashion shrugged off what would cause many people great anxiety, as a minor complication. Maarten and Meghan would not be joining us on our flight because they had not printed out their boarding passes prior to our arrival at Schiphol, and by that time it was too late, even for the woman at the KLM desk, to obtain them. I laughed at their misfortune, but was incredulous at the fact that I was standing there, observing them through the glass window of the shuttle, a shuttle which they could very easily board in physical terms. Yet our ill-conceived system of human rules and regulations had routed the prospect of the rationally and physically possible. Maarten and Meghan would arrive in Lyon late – just like our luggage.
Maarten waved goodbye through the glass window of the airport terminal with a wide, resilient smile pasted across his face. Meghan looked much more concerned, as her methodical and organized nature was apt to make her. I imagined that Maarten would nap on the black leather terminal seats while Meghan worried and waited for their substitute flight to depart. I learned later that I was mostly correct.
Our flight aboard a Boeing 737 to Lyon, France was less than two hours long, but I hated those two hours. I was beginning to feel rather acutely the lack of sleep I had gotten during the course of our overnight time travel. My skin felt dry, my lips chapped, and my brain fuzzy with the remnants of too much airplane wine and not enough nicotine. I sat three across on the right side of the plane with Nate and Charles. I got the window seat that I wanted so badly to relish, but which I found merely forced me to crane my neck to the left as I tried to lean against the side of the plane to rest my head and close my eyes. The morning sun streamed in through the window and penetrated my eyelids with blinding fury, angry that I was in no condition to appreciate them. I forced myself into a light, fitful sleep, interrupted by announcements over the cabin intercom and stewardesses’ offerings of artificial food that they grew in the belly of the plane.
We touched down uneventfully at Aéroport Lyon-Saint Exupéry, and very expediently exited to the main lobby and purchased bus tickets into Lyon proper, where we would board our train to the village of Macon. Ty had decided to stay behind at the airport upon getting word that Meghan and Maarten would soon be boarding their flight to Lyon, along with our baggage. I thought about how pleasant it was to be accorded a group of sherpas for my oversized bag. At least I wouldn’t have to be seen with it while journeying to Taize.
The remaining eight of us now deferred to Becky for group leadership. She too had been to Taize before, though it was some years earlier. Julie, another of the girls in our group, and myself remembered the procedure quite vividly from the previous year, and between the three of us we managed to see ourselves delivered to Lyon Part Deux, the train station where we would depart for Macon, the closest stop via rail to Taize.
As we exited the bus and sauntered across the busy square that prefaced the train station, images of Lyon flooded back into my memory. We had spent two days there following our week in Taize the year earlier, in order to ‘decompress’, as Ty put it. This basically meant getting dinner at the nicest restaurant where Ty could get away with putting the bill on the Diocesan credit card. I remember quite clearly being close to tears of joy as I consumed that meal the year prior. Feasting upon four courses, including the sweetest tasting sausage bread that, while odd looking, literally melted in your mouth, and a raspberry tart dessert that concluded the meal with something of an edible exclamation point, was such a drastic change from the spartan Taize menu that I could barely contain my joy. Having a private second story room with a balcony that overlooked the street below was enough to overcome my constantly fleeting sense of discipline as I indulged in one of Ty’s cigarettes only a few weeks after I had ‘quit’. It was not the first, nor last, time I made the attempt. Topping off the evening with an average table wine that was far superior to anything my naïve tastebuds had encountered, and a coffee that I had no desire to sweeten or dilute with sugar or milk made my first impression of Lyon a very unique and memorable conglomerate of physical indulgence, mental contentment, and spiritual relaxation.
My first week at Taize the year before had been one characterized by blissful exhaustion, and that meal in Lyon had been the culmination of the week’s journey. I felt full in every aspect of the word, and the distinctions between physical, mental and spiritual became blurred to the point that those distinctions ceased to exist. I felt whole. Thursday evening I had been broken, I had literally shattered my being on the floor of the church at Taize, leaving God to pick up the pieces and in one of my rarer moments, fully trusting that he would. I had emptied myself in a way that I had never done before, and that night I felt the contentment of being empty, and of being broken. Then just four days later in that restaurant, L’Nord, I had refit the experiences of my life into a new design, and the contentment I felt from this fullness echoed the joy that I felt from being empty, and I realized then that these two extremes were not linear, but circular, and thus not extremes at all.
And so, as we proceeded into Lyon Part Deux to board our train, I hoped again that I was in a place to empty myself and rebuild my experiences into an even newer design that I could once again fill to capacity with provocative thought and gourmet French food. I hoped this against my all-knowing logic that I could not, and would not recreate my experiences from the year before. I struggled to burst my balloon of hope with the sharp edge of logic and instead replace it with the knowledge that I had come to Taize the year previously with no expectations, and without that mindset I would undoubtedly be disappointed this year. I decided that I wanted to procure the same feelings through new experiences, and I wondered if that were even possible.
Consciousness overwhelmed my thoughts only when I found that our bus from Macon was now taking a right hand turn, heading up a steep, winding road surrounded on all sides by the rolling hills that countless French farms called home. To my right and left were the same passive, albino cows that watched me take my countryside walks the year before. The coach bus groaned as it climbed the hill towards the clustering of ancient clay-colored brick buildings that made up the village of Taize, passing a handful of cyclists being slowly propelled by their quadriceps towards the same destination. It was late afternoon and we had finally reached Taize after nearly 32 hours of timeless travel. My mind raced with anxious thoughts. My stomach groaned with hunger. I prayed that they would be serving mashed potatoes that night.
