So Bath They Named It Twice

Baden-Baden is built on magic, has celebrated several millenia of birthdays spinning, winding and handing out this magic, and is completely conscious of it. You can be sure, though I have found no mention in our post-Imperial literature, that people of all fur, feathers, and feet have been bathing in the springs of this valley since the beginning of the world. It's too beautiful, too protected, altogether too perfect to have not threaded its magic into all organic history. The Romans made it official with stone, however, and Baden-Baden has been in the business of bathing ever since. I wandered over some of its 54 sq. miles of Black Forest river valley, through falling snows and along the river Oos, in a kind of steamy trance. An Entire City Devoted to Bathing.  

And casinos. 

But who cares about casinos?

I don't know if I've ever shared this with you, but I'm a sucker for bathhouse t-shirts. I don't really understand it either, and it's not like most bathhouses sell t-shirts (but the ones that do are awesome!) It might be some bath-geek equivalent of sport team support. Or maybe it's just poorly translated enthusiasm. I don't usually wear clothes with logos, or words. I don't often wear band t-shirts. They make me feel shy and unprepared for coolness. But somehow I'm totally charmed by the thought of someone designing a t-shirt to talk up a place filled with hot water and naked people. I think it's fabulous. And wearing them makes me feel like an underground superhero.

So I keep my eye out for bathhouse paraphernalia. And on my last day in Baden-Baden I found myself in a situation I had never encountered before – desirous of a "I ♥ Baden-Baden" t-shirt. You know exactly the one I'm thinking of, it's the same shirt hanging in every eye-rollingly touristy souvenir shop on the planet. (My only defense is that I do have an awful lot of enthusiasm, even if it is poorly translated.) I looked high and low, everywhere from the shops where they sell postcards to the train station newsstand to the Christmas market to the supermarket. I found silver-plated Baden-Baden spoons, and enamel-painted Baden-Baden plates, and even swarovski-crystal-bedazzled Baden-Baden totebags. After going through a dozen bewildered shopkeepers in a dozen different shops, I am forced to concede that Baden-Baden, city of historically relevant baths and big old money, is simply not mundane enough to make tacky tourist t-shirts. 

And, for the life of me, I don't know whether to be annoyed or relieved.

Some Baths That Aren't Yet

Most of the baths I've visited have had historic precident, gracing their cities as original facilities if they were not actual founding reasons for putting a bit of civilization a particular where. When new baths come along, they are made from equal parts inspiration and obsession. Some borrow from history and culture, some forge ahead, but all are intentionally reinvesting in bathing.

Berlin's once-and-future Stadtbad Oderberger  thrives during renovation as a venue for concerts, conferences and locally-made craft markets.

Kultuurisauna is being built as part of Helsinki's year of recognition as a World Design Capitol, with goals of sustainable design and materials-use, and intentional revitalization of sauna culture.

A Prelude To All This Bathing

I love bathing. Soaking. Sweating. Steaming. I love bathing of all sorts. I love giant claw-foot cast iron tubs. I love dinner-plate cascade showerheads. I love wooden rooms with black stoves breathing the scalding perfume of forests. I love pale smooth tiled rooms veiled in curls of warm mist.

I love camping solar showers and watertank farm showers and jumping in rivers. I love exfoliating with beach sand and painting myself with mud. I love homemade salt scrubs and candlelit tubs and chromotherapy and fragrant, herb-infused water. And yes, if it's all I've got, I also love rickety prefab shower cabinets and thumpy fiberglass tubs.

And I love bathhouses. All-wood and tatami, onsen-inspired ones. Romanesque marble-and-echo ones. Mosaic bellystone ones. YMCA gymnasium ones. Hippies-on-the-beach ones. Forest retreat picture-window ones. Strip-mall imported-salt-chunk-and-plastic-seahorse ones. Sanitarium scrub-down ones. I am radically pro-bathhouse. I want more in the world.

I want you to know this, so you know where I'm coming from, when I talk about what I've been doing. I read through guidebooks and travel forums, and people are reviewing bathhouses like the opening of a new fast-food chain. I've been to bathhouses that weren't my style, and bathhouses that didn't function, but I don't believe in bad bathhouses. I'm not looking for perfect. I'm not looking for fancy. I'm not even looking for effortless. I don't mind a bathhouse that takes me an hour to find, that's older than I am, whose traditions I have to learn, whose cleaning crews aren't compulsive. I've got reams of theories about bathing and enjoying life, about health and happiness and the right to both. I want bathhouses that make people happy. I'm looking for living, vital bathhouses that are loved by their patrons, cared for by their owners, and are improving people's lives. I believe in bathhouses that work. I believe in lots and lots of bathing experiences.

And the bathing experience we're discussing right now is saunas. Because this is Scandinavia, full-on Finland, where they made up the word Sauna. So, our language is sweat and stove and stone and wood and fire and steam. For the rest of the chapter, we are all sizzle and bench and endorphin rushes and this beautiful idea of löyly (which is a word I can't pronounce, and neither can you, but I like to read it, and to hear Finnish people describe it as near-sentient steam, the soul of the sauna.)

Oh, and a word about temperature. I'm using Celsius as my sauna-heat measure, because it underscores for me the whole complete and unique tactile environment in the stove room. (I can't hear “110 degrees Fahrenheit” without thinking of that vacation in Texas, or my childhood summer egg-experiments. Too prone to hyperbole. Even (hitherto) imaginary temperatures like 180.) Celsius gives sauna heat it's own authority. So, let's just remember that 100 degrees boils water, yes? And 40 is a dangerously hot summer day.

The PLAN

In a couple of weeks, I'll take rides on a couple of airplanes, and jump a couple of hours into the east. I'll set foot in Scandinavia, Mother of Winter, and a renewed desire for the perfect bath. I will spend a couple/few months travelling, bathing, living across European winterlands, and will return much rejuved!
I have nursed a dream for many years of creating a place for wellbeing and hot water for the place in which I live, the kind of neighborhood haven we could all use when the days get cold and the nights get long. I think there is a whole world of good to be had in a soak, a sweat, a nice long bath. The kind of good that can chase the winter blues away. I love public baths, and I'm excited to see what public bath culture looks like in Europe.
Soon coming, regularly-updated epic adventures, impressive pictures, tales of daring-do, and a great many bathtubs!

My statement of intent for the vision fast

Dear brightly shining path lately disillusioned,

When I was quite small, in all the stories I ate, I knew exactly where the crossroads lay. The moment when the Trickster spills his riddled challenge, when the Crone offers her rigorous medicine. The moment when the Seeker stands in balance between ordinary past and unimagined future, and decides to take that next fateful step. The door through which the Seeker journeys to revelation after trial that he is a Hidden Prince, she a Magic Princess. The bowl in which the epic ingredients of any life (a mere mortal, a long walk away from home, a perfectly impossible task) catalyze into the stuff of myth and truth.

I looked everywhere for these doors, when I was quite small. I was disappointed at first that they were not obvious. That opportunities for adventure and transformation were not offered by every stranger I met, that riddle-solving and medicine-accepting were not taught in school. I adventured in the front yard and learned what I could from story books, and waited.

When I was a little taller I learned a secret. The crossroads are not only for heroines; they are everywhere, and we carry their doors within us. These can be opened, and cannot be closed again. Some we must open, and some we may choose to open. We must choose with care. If we pass through these doors without intention, if we pass the crossroads without wide-open eyes, a sense of moment, a sense of self-defining -- we will not hear the riddle, not receive the medicine. I stopped looking so hard for my own doors as began to feel them rising in me, to feel the Seeker awakening.

Growing tall, I found those doors and met at those crossroads all the riddles and medicine of growing up. In my first menses, first loves, religious taste-testing, teenage cutting, first sex, psychedelic exploration, world travels, self-identifying, I have seen the landmarks which herald the crossroads and showed me the directions of paths into my future. I have stood at these crossroads again and again, and chosen my next steps with as much presence and grace as I could find. I have tried to keep my eyes and heart open, and my feet on the path shining before me. At some point, having reached my full height, I realized my bowl was full also of lessons learned and boundaries crossed. I felt the need to seek transform into the need know. I stopped feeling for doors to open, stopped to use the tools I'd gathered, and deepen my eyes and widen my heart.

Now, I know I am again standing at the crossroads. I recognize this open landscape, this sensation of the familiar and precious falling away, this rising eagerness for the next step on the path. I know I am seeking again. But I cannot see my way. The heralds of this crossroads have been heartbreak and doubt, confusion and clouds across my eyes and heart. I think the door in front of me will take me far from knowing and what I have built, far into being, and seeing, and feeling. This door has a threshold made of fear and love, and I do not know it's name. And I remember the seeking secret I had forgotten in my years of knowing -- that to step through the open door is to step into faith, into unknowing with trust. That every Seeker starts out simple, that revelation begins in clouds. My bowl has been filled and I have eaten, my bowl has been emptied and scoured clean again.

The Goal

To find, via internal and external adventure, a clear path into the future and the compelling inspiration to walk that path with a whole heart.

After more than 7 years of immersing myself in a brilliant cooperative workplace, focusing on offering access to health/care/options to everyone I meet, I know that it is time for me to dive more deeply into the world. To seat myself more comfortably with learning, into the skills of healing. To reconnect with the roots of my activism and refocus the light I want to carry in the world. After more than 5 years of giving myself to a radiant relationship, opening to building home and intertwine with those closest to me, I know it is time for me to inhabit more fully my own heart. To infuse myself in sensory self and learn to trust experience, insight, intuition. To establish a balanced position between feeling/thinking/doing, and strengthen the sureness of being.

And so, I'm taking leave -- of contract and obligation, fear, habits of control, familiarity of surroundings, illusions of permanence, and the self-dampening insistence that I do not know what to do with My Life -- and for 3 months I will explore. To places I love and places I've never been, to deepen practices and begin new practices, in community and in solitude, with joyous noise and simple silence. This is the way I know to clear my eyes and discover new stories with which to live.