Through the fields
Somewhere in southeastern Poland (Photo credit: Yantar Yoga)
Taking advantage of the eased Covid-related travel restrictions (which seem fleeting with each day of the delta variant spikes), I finally boarded a plane for the first time since October 2019 to visit family in Poland. It felt like a trip through time as well as space, in part due to a tentative sense of regaining some kind of normalcy, but more importantly because I went back to the rural area near Sandomierz in southeastern Poland where I used to spend most of my summer holidays as a kid. I can still remember - and now managed to recapture - the excitement of a long-awaited escape from the crowded city into a parallel universe of spacious fields and meadows. The sky spills along the lush horizon, summer breeze becomes the earth’s fragrant breath.
There is a poem by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz I always liked called July (Lipiec) a particular fragment comes to mind whenever I take off walking through Poland’s open spaces. I won't attempt a literary translation, but he paints a familiar rural landscape of moss-covered alder trees, ripening blackberries, and asphalt of a country road melting in the summer heat, feeling a sudden urge to explore. Sensing the very same compulsion I set out to go well beyond the paved road of the town. A tantalizing pathway opened up like an invitation I could not resist. The path first led next to fenced yards and gardens full of delicious currants and gooseberries, then a golden field of oats to the right and a thistle-rimmed meadow to the left. The sun bathed this idyllic landscape in its golden rays, the sky was perfect blue.
Time felt like an illusion and maybe indeed it is. The moment felt fleeting and endless, ancient at the same time. Appropriately, the very name Poland means “the land of field dwellers” (pole means field from Proto-Indo-European pleh, which means flat or wide). Feeling fully present, I simultaneously sensed the connection to ancestors who walked, worked, and played in these fields for centuries, no doubt frequently enjoying a moment of summer respite very much like this one. This could be 2021 or 1991 when the younger me picked wildflowers and chased butterflies here. Or 1921 or 1421 for that matter, dates become just numbers in unspoiled, ever-regenerating and vibrant nature. I stood there in awe for a couple of mindful breaths and then continued on toward the horizon...