I fell in love with this valley three years ago, in the summer.
What does it mean though for a place to be ugly?
Perhaps my first mistake was expecting that I would ever entirely grow out of it.
She said that God had brought us to her, that we were like her children, and that she could be like our Romanian mother.
But do we ever really comprehend what happens when we try to meet with God?
Still, I’ve never felt the same level of attachment in any of these places that I’ve felt in Romania. When I step off of the plane in that country, it feels like I’ve come home.
This was the year of living with my parents, with my best friends, with a stranger. This was the year of mint tea and French TV shows, of cooking for my friends and of touching the North Sea.
You are always you, always becoming you. You’re always your own first person, over and over and over.
They’re not always noble or pure, but then of course neither am I. We try our best, and sometimes people climb mountains just to see us blossom in the cold.
His dangerous trip had unearthed something remarkable: a fully functioning ecosystem that had survived without sunlight and with barely any oxygen for millennia.
