Sylvia's Journal

Axel is learning more about what ails him. The symptoms of Vocal Cord Dysfunction (VCD) – an ailment I didn’t even know existed – match his experiences exactly. I wonder if that is what living in Kabul produced. It sometimes is mistaken for asthma and sometimes accompanies asthma, so we are still in an exploratory phase. The amazing, and good thing, about this ailment is that the treatment is yoga, meditation and generally stress reduction. One might think that living in Lobster Cove would, by itself, be a good stress reduction method, but the last years of breathing problems and doing the specialist circuit have been very taxing on him.

And so we are now stepping up the yoga, the meditation and understanding how the brain mediates between a sense of comfort and security and stress. We are learning about techniques that activate oxytocin production (and suppress cortisol production) and are in awe of our clever brains. We are reading about resilience and what the brain has to do with that and begin to see connections that make some far out things less far out; like the team of yoga and meditators that went out some years ago to the US army in Afghanistan. People made jokes about it, but these folks were on to something.

I also now remember how in the 60s and 70s there was much talk about managing your brain waves through meditation and realize we, human beings, have always known how to do this, going 1000s of years back, until specialized medicine promised easier solutions, like popping pills or surgery. Learning to meditate is hard work and long work, requiring perseverance and starting over again. This in itself is a good foundation for resilience, showing that everything is connected to everything and all happens for a purpose.

Yesterday’s dinner came out of the garden, except for the Boca Burgers; the night before it came out of the sea. On Wednesday, when I arrived home, tired and hungry, Axel jumped in his boat and checked his five lobster traps, then returned with one keeper. The lobsters are moving away from shore and something else is eating the bait, so this may have been the last gratis lobster of the summer.

Last night was a land-dinner night. While Axel was completing our taxes, a dragged out and painful chore, I clipped the kale and dug up one plant of potatoes, providing more than enough for the two of us. The leftover kale and potatoes will be transformed into one of my favorite Dutch dishes, Boerenkool, a winter dish that comforts as the evenings get cooler and the nights colder.

I arrived at work yesterday morning to the sad news that one of our Dutch princes has died. It was a blip on the American news scene, not important here, but somehow touched me deeply. Not because he is a prince – princes always die, usually in battle or devoured by dragons – but I remember his birth and I grieve as a mother. He died after 18 months in coma after having been buried in an avalanche, deprived of oxygen for 25 minutes. This happened in Lech (Austria), the royal family’s ski resort of choice.

Sometime in the early 70s I found myself there, resting on the side of the slope next to the royals, including our then queen Juliana who remarked to me that my ski boot clips were loose. I remember blushing and being all flummoxed, the queen talked to me, imagine! With the news of Friso’s passing all these memories came flooding back.