Day 359-361 Mikrokozmosz and The Gift of Happiness

I am so happy to be able to stay at The House with The Garden. I know I keep going on about it, but after having to live in flat shares and halls of residence abroad for 12 years it is so amazing to live in my own house in my own country. I love Hungary! It doesn’t matter for me what is in the historical past any more. All I need to do is to let God work through forgiveness and love within. And He does it so gently. There was no dramatic culmination so far just progress. He just brought me in contact with an elderly foreigner couple living in Hungary and made me listen to their historical negativity during a dinner party. At the end of the walk we took after the meal and discussing the long list of 20th century misfortunes Hungary had to face from Trianon to communism and the transition economy we still live in I very calmly just said I felt it was time to leave all that behind and do the best we can in the present whilst looking in the future with hope and simply by doing this we need to forgive and learn once again to live with dignity. And I didn’t only mean it for the rest of the walk. I meant it for my whole life and for that of my country. And this is pretty much in line with the book of Ecclesiastes I’ve been reading since I got home. I cannot fully enjoy my life here if I feel resentful towards those people, who are long dead, but made decisions which has heavy and long lasting effects on a nation of 15 million chopped into pieces, oppressed for almost a century and dramatically decreased in number. The children and grandchildren of those got nothing to do with their parents’ and grandparents’ political views and acts. And who can judge a child to pick up on his parent’s patterns? Nobody, apart from God Almighty. And we should remember that there were also times when Europe feared us. I just want to enjoy the present and look into the future with hope. I am actually relearning to appreciate my history and culture. There is so much to see in this little country. I’ve been watching the a series which was done 32 years after Pal Rockenbauer and his team filmed the ‘One and a Half Million Steps in Hungary’. It started in 1979 from Nagy-Milic to Irott-ko and the crew walked more than a 1000km on the ‘Kek Tura’ (Blue Route). I remember watching this as a small child with great excitement and it is so wonderful to see what happened after 32 years on the same places. We had an amazing time with Ruth, visiting the spa in Gyula and eating Munkacsy cake in the Kezmuves cafeteria. On the way to the airport the shuttle bus driver asked if she liked Budapest. ‘We didn’t stay in Budapest’ I said. ‘But there is so much to see in Budapest’ he said. ‘I know and in the rest of the county, too.’ The sky is vast and blue at the Great Plain (Alfold). There is nothing like the flat land for one who was born here. There is no hill our heart would long for so deeply throughout a life time no matter how long we stay in cosmopolitan cities and on sea sides, but the ‘puszta’ with its herds and cornfields. I love the trees greeting braches and the Lilliputian shades of the bushes. It is home.