The holiday is already 12 days old today! (And terrible internet mixed with a hint of laziness has prevented me from posting this earlier!)

Every day has held so much life, love, and presence. It feels so good, so right, to be centered nowadays (most of the time anyway), to cultivate and nurture this presence, to fully live, enjoy and appreciate every moment…

Apart from that, I have definitely hit a slight low point today. It is the day after the main night at the Sommerhausen wine fest where we drank and danced with a wild variety of people. So I am feeling a little worn out. We still made ourselves a gorgeous day, with a late breakfast and then a very chilled out mini road trip to some of the gorgeous small towns around the Frankenland and along the river Main in Northern Bavaria.

Then I had a few hours to myself – precious time to have a nap and a yoga sesh, write diary and take stock of me and the now. It took a while to slot back into “me-time” – I have spent so much time with other people in the last year, and then with my family since I flew into Hamburg last week, being alone I had trouble deciding what to do first. What little routine I had is completely out (that’s holidays!) – I have not been jogging since Monday, and since Thursday no yoga or proper meditation, no journalling, no blogging, shaky internet (oh how irritating to have unreliable internet!), no reading and on top of that a lot of food I do not normally eat…

However, I have sorted some paperwork which annoyingly could not get done before I left Australia, driven a bit of Autobahn on the 500km trip from North to South (my top speed: 145km/h), had endless great conversations with my parents (as usual), gone hiking, seen a lot of natural and human-made beauty and taken a lot of photos, talked to some interesting people and finished editing a friend’s short story (I started on the plane over).

All this means that I have tons of material for blogs, but rather little time to make them into real posts…! So I concluded that I should just post what is going on – open, honest, reflecting. Like a blog should be!

There is my sister and my little nephew who I met for the first time this week, and how they raise the bar when it comes to going nappy-free right from the start…

There is the BHW, a community of people who restore old buildings from the northern German region and hold cultural events, keeping history alive…

There is Thorsten, the soulful, interesting chef from Sommerhausen’s Ristorante No.12 who opened a restaurant catering for people with food allergies in 1990 (before it became a thing), and who ensured that we had the best wine fest food ever with vegan Flammkuchen, Burgers and Sweet Potato Fries with Avocado dip…

Then there is the pioneering nun from the Vogelburg who began to grow organic grapes for wine making 60 years ago, after she got really sick from using insecticides…

There are the ‘Radwanderer’ who explore Europe by bike, riding over 100km on a good day…

But for now, there is now, and the stories can wait, as today’s much-needed rain invites us to be still and just chill…