HOMECOMING
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BETTINA AND GEORG’S STORY IN 4 PARTS
PART 1
Once upon a long time ago Bettina grew up in the city of Hamburg in Germany. The war had not yet ended, the country lay buried under heaps of rubble and the people carried the heavy burden of collective guilt, shame and denial. The atmosphere of Bettina’s blood family was shaped by a sense of disconnection, disharmony, and isolation from the world around. A sense of melancholy pervaded the atmosphere. She turned out to be a bad and unwilling pupil in school, for her mind was turmoiled and wandered elsewhere, busy trying to understand the world, and carrying a deep longing for something better.
She was pervaded by a sense of hopelessness and the wish to be rid of the collective shame she had taken on. Consequently, she felt alienated from her homeland. She came up with the plan to travel the world to find joy and belonging elsewhere. She acquired the necessary skills for earning a living through office work, working in various countries and large cities to pay for a roof over her head and scheme new plans to get away from any place she tried to settle, but basically from herself, which at the time she was too young, too driven, too ignorant and unconscious to realise.
In her late 20’s she felt that she could not uphold this life style any longer, as it did not bring her the longed for peace and happiness. A change was needed. She returned to Germany, Hamburg and her mother and moved in with her. She managed to save the necessary money and went to live in Munich for a few years to take therapy time out. Here for the first time she felt a sense of belonging to her home land. A few years later, her therapy ended, her mother died, the family home sold and completely demolished by the new owner.
Bettina had no home anymore to return to but found herself in the possession of what seemed at the time like a big lump sum of money. This was the moment when Bettina and Georg’s paths crossed.
Once upon a long time ago Georg grew up in the city of Vienna, in Austria. He always carried a deep love and a sense of pride for his country and the culture of the city in which he grew up and identified with. Consequently, he decided to become an architect with the wish to beautify the world. He grew up in the post war era in a turmoiled family. His plan to be free from all the conflicts he encountered was to study and build a career and not follow in his parents’ footsteps. He studied hard and lifted himself out of what seemed a desperate situation. He married at a young age and had big dreams for himself and his young family.
By the time his second child was born his carefully crafted plan as how to save and free himself from all unresolved conflicts and disharmonies fell apart and just 30 years of age he faced a divorce. He lost everything, his two children, a planned luxury apartment and the shelter of a small family. He found himself feeling homeless and lost and feeling victim of this new situation. Yet at the same time, he also felt that an entirely new door had opened up for him and a new life of endless, unknown possibilities seemed to lie beyond that door. Having lost a lot, he started a new job and began to taste life and women and a sense of freedom formerly unknown to him.
PART 2
After Georg and Bettina met each other, for neither of them life was ever the same again. They each felt as if hit by a flash of lightening. Nothing they had known and lived to this day could be upheld any longer. For a short moment in meeting they had encountered a deep sense of peace, as they had not known before but both had longed for all their lives. They would build their future life on the foundation of the peace they had encountered, even if it had only been for a fleeting moment.
Within a few months Bettina moved to Vienna into Georg’s old apartment and they both felt the urge to start anew and afresh. Having decided to take each other as companions on their journey into a new life, they put both their money together. The only thing Bettina was convinced of at the time was a vision she held that in future she wanted to create a place for them and other people with her inherited money. There was nothing for them in Vienna to hold them back. Georg left his work place, his children, his parents and his beloved city.
Their joint journey into the unknown had begun.
They had a lump sum but no permanent home, no work place, no network of people, just each other as companions on their ‘journey into the unknown’ and their joint vision to get to know themselves and find lasting peace and happiness.
They wondered if they could find all that in the quietness of the country side far removed from all past reference points.
Two months later they were on their way to find their own place. They found it in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, 150 km away from Vienna, in the midst of a soft, hilly landscape of cultivated green meadows lined by fruit tress in full bloom at the time of their search. They fell in love with a small, old farm house leaning into a hill by the road side. It seemed to call them into its bowels. They felt bewitched and did not hesitate but signed the contract without thinking of the consequences this would have for their life. Shortly after moving into the small house they became fully aware of the state it was in and how much clutter of old it held and how many things needed to be fixed. Little did they know that they had embarked on a spiritual journey.
They were to live in that little house for 4 years. In the beginning Bettina had a dream that the house came as a teacher into her life, teaching her to be grounded, to return to basics and to a long forgotten simplicity. After some initial resistance to what life offered them, they took to work, de-cluttered, cleaned, scratched, installed a new water supply, repaired the old well, brought in a new stove, filled holes, removed old paint, took stones out of a field, dug the soil, established a new garden, sowed and planted, fenced another field, held a few sheep and chicken, collected first eggs, plugged fruit from apple and plum trees, witnessed the natural cycles and learned from them about their own cycles. Country life taught them to take responsibility and take care of what was around them.
Bettina got pregnant and 9 months later they welcomed their first child, a girl. From her they learned all about natural rhythms and in many moments saw her as their teacher about things they had forgotten very early on in their lives. They found books on shamanism and got to know shamans. These teachings opened their eyes to a new and exciting world of connection with nature and how to access it in a totally unfamiliar way. They often walked deeper into the distant mountains where they met untouched nature and took in new impressions, which roused a longing in them to know more of this wilderness and access it more deeply.
At the end of their stay, together they wrote a book about their experience of leaving city life behind and their first encounter with nature which was published under the title ‘ Aufbruch ins Ungewisse’ (‘Departure into the Unknown’). The experience had filled them with new strength and confidence but it also made them realise that knowing oneself deeply and finding and living the sought for peace and happiness on a continuous basis was not as easy as they had hoped.
The book was published, the house was emptied and cleared of old and unfinished business, and there was no room to expand further. They had done what they could. They had gained in strength and conviction, forged a new dream to leave the past behind, start anew from scratch, be with wild untamed nature, build a home of their dreams and find connection with source. The original vision of a place serving themselves and others was still on their mind. The money Bettina had inherited lay idly in the bank waiting to be used for this dream.
Everything called them to a new shore.
PART 3
The whole world seemed open to them. Finally, looking at various options, the West of Ireland offered itself. Here they found a bare hill surrounded by undeveloped infertile wet bog land, situated by a small lake in a lonely area outside a small but busy rural town, an expansive, untouched empty space on which neither a tree nor a bush grew, not even a common daisy, a neighbour to their left and a neighbour to their right.
A harsh time of trying to make impossible dreams come true had begun, a time of pushing through and past any obstacle coming their way, but they were strong willed and had a vision. They built a road where there had never been a road before. They brought a caravan up their place, in which they lived while building their future home. Over the years they planted over three thousand trees. They started by planting tiny trees which were meant to provide future shelter on the land exposed to wind and rain. In the very beginning, as there was no path yet, they stumbled across the wet land which cows had trampled on for many years, while carrying their little daughter on their back with spades, buckets and trees in their hands. The tiny trees seemed as lost as themselves in the wide open space.
Despite their vision to build a home and transform the land in their very own time and rhythm. They were driven by pure survival instincts as they found themselves in unknown territory, just as an animal might do. The imagined sweetness of abundant wilderness they had encountered in Austria that had inspired them was not the reality of settling on a piece of bog land in the West of Ireland beaten by rain and wind. Conflicts arose between them. The rough heather, the dark, wet and impenetrable moor land seemed to take them back centuries in time and confronted them with an unknown lineage of ancestry, their own and that of the ancestry of the people of the new land whose life had been characterised by immense hardship and lack. They were too frightened and driven and desperate to admit to themselves or each other how lost and directionless they felt. They never considered the option of returning back.
They received help from others and yet felt utterly lost and abandoned and alone building their home from scratch and creating a first garden in their need to anchor themselves in the foreign territory. Many a times they felt beaten and discouraged and filled with conflicts, but they did not give in and instead kept going, strangers to themselves in a strange dark land holding onto dreams which seemed incompatible with the land they had chosen. The outer mirrored the inner. The empty desert like brown landscape reminded them of lack, famine and the dire need to survive war times - energies which had already driven their parents and their parent’s parents. Their own unacknowledged story, stored deep inside, seemed to arise from the bog, which is said to be an archive of sorts that stores memories.
They felt caught in a web of victim hood and isolation when all of a sudden they were confronted with land burdens they had not been informed of when buying the land. These had caused hidden conflicts with the neighbours who again saw in them the former English landlords who had once taken their land. Years followed dissolving these burdens, which they did not only see as legal burdens but as a mirror and a symbol of all the unconscious inner burdens they had brought with them to the new land. The story of their own ancestry came into focus, which had weighed down those before them and themselves during their childhood. They had looked for happiness and peace elsewhere, outside themselves.
Now, they realised, it would be up to them to take responsibility for their lives in a much deeper sense, which also meant to clear these burdens, as nobody else would do it for them. This process taught them endurance and patience which they had not known prior to coming to Ireland. This period of time also taught them much about the history of the new land and thus brought them closer to its people. Everything became teacher, these burdens, the dark land, the harsh climate, their children - for in the meantime Bettina had given birth to their second child - the land burdens and the absence of the old culture they had grown up with and had left behind. The heavy chains of shame and guilt they had carried for what their countries had done and they had run away from came to the fore. Sixty years after the war Bettina was finally able to make peace with her country of origin wanting to re-connect with it.
Since they had both met they had thought nothing could ever be difficult for them. They had reached for the stars and had forever after wanted to dance light footed, easily and peacefully on earth but instead the poor bog land had called them into its wet arms and had made them aware of all they had avoided to feel and look at before. They felt their moods wearing them down, their feet getting heavier, pulling them deeper into the ground.
Years of retiring from the world around them followed, forcing them to turn their look inward and stop seeking answers outside themselves. Instead they were forced to face their inner shadows which they had not wanted to meet. As if caught in a trap they had to feel their inner emptiness, lack, fear, anger, envy, shame, guilt, sadness, loneliness and isolation, their humaneness. They also became aware of and discovered other qualities they had not known they owned like persistence, inner discipline, endurance and creativity.
Years later, their neighbours to both sides, which in the beginning had given them a sense of belonging, moved away. From one day to the next they found themselves even more alone than before. In the meantime, all the money they had inherited and earned was spent on the building process and on clearing the land burdens. They decided to sell their car, educate their children at home and retreat even further from the outer world into themselves.
A new cycle of exploring their minds had begun, investigating the destructive belief system they had inherited and carried on which had become the foundation of their lives and caused all their inner conflicts. This process of inner exploration, connection with the land and closely connecting as a family turned their life upside down from outward to inward.
This focused intense period came to an end when their children decided to go to the public school for the last few years before passing their final exams which would allow them to go to university a few years later. Georg began to work as an architect. Bettina became a net worker of her own creation, reaching out and creating varied community groups. Simultaneously she decided to write her own memoir which years later turned into a poetry compilation telling the story of her life as voluntary exile in poetry. Georg wrote and published a book on energies of man and places.
By now their children have left the country and are forging their own lives in the old world and Bettina and Georg, after spending the past years renovating the house and looking after the land, are now looking back on a period of 40 years since their initial meeting, 35 of those years spent in Ireland.
Initially they had set out on a journey to get to know themselves and find inner peace in the country side and later set out to encounter wilderness in an unknown country. They had envisioned it to be an easy and joyful process and an adventure into a new abundance.
To achieve this, they had to meet their inner shadows, the wilderness of their minds, and the disconnection from themselves and others, from nature and their source but they also discovered a strength they had not known they possessed. What once was an empty infertile dark wet desert, is now a place where trees and flowers grow and which offers a home to people and animals. It has the potential to help others to go inward and re-connect with themselves and their own story in order to find inner peace.
PART 4
A cycle of exploration and dissolution of the old is closed, a new cycle is opening.
Bettina and Georg are ready to open and share their place with the world. This handing over will bring the land and themselves to the next level.
Once more they are facing the unknown which calls them further inward to explore yet deeper levels of themselves still wanting to find the longed for peace and make it permanent.