09. Green, Blue, Gold

9: GREEN, BLUE, GOLD

I lunge for the guitar, nearly knock over the keyboard. G minor this time—yeah, that’s it.

Sigh Break time.

Last month I was hitchhiking through Belgium.

Now I’m holed up in a Warsaw guestroom, making demos for a film musical.

When you’re on the road, one thing leads to another.

You remember those two filmmakers from Soren’s concert, right? The Americans? Well, sure enough, that conversation turned into a collaboration on Jules’ next project.

Jules is tall and sharp-featured. Her dark hair’s always swept back like she’s walking into a headwind. There’s a drive in her that vibrates under everything—like she’s running on fumes and pride and just enough sleep to get by. I’ve never seen her break pace. I want that kind of forward momentum, but it seems like you have to sacrifice something to get it, maybe something important.

These days I wake up and my life is in the shape of songs. Jules likes my rough demos—she says they have "edge." If I play my cards right, she’ll bring me onto the production team. A real project. A real team. And so far from home!

What a rush to be productive again.

This could be the start to a very different chapter. I imagine myself hired on a film gig with a six month lease on a flat. My own little corner of the world. I’d take the bus across town to see Soren. I’d start dating a pretty Polish girl.

My phone buzzes. Basia again. She’s been pestering me to visit her family in the countryside.

I cave. I text her: “Thursday,” .

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of discovering how to live.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike around the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because it’s never too late to begin your next adventure.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. The adventure is right in front of you.

Let’s go and find out.

The bus rushes through the open fields and thick forests of Poland. Basia sits across from me with her laptop putting the last touches on a project for her marketing job. Basia’s cool: she’s got bleached blonde hair and writes music journalism and hitchhikes around Europe. She’s chomping at the bit to make her big intercontinental trip. But at heart, she’s a country girl.

As we get further and further from the city, I don’t feel so good. Like I’ve been cheated. I’m reduced to sitting and looking out the window without an instrument or a song. I try and breathe deeply, hands gripping the armrests.

“Why have you stayed in Warsaw so long?” Basia says. “You should be seeing other places, that’s what I’d do.”

“I don’t want to just see places. I want to make things. Right now, I’m making something. I’m finally of some use.”

She says: “But you’re on a trip. It might not be the time to ‘be of use.’”

A tightness rises in my throat.

“You wouldn’t understand, Basia.”

I feel a buzz in my pocket. A message from a different Polish friend named Weronika who lives in another part of the country.

Tomasz keeps asking about you.

Yeah?

Mhm. When are you coming?

Not sure yet, but soon. How’s he doing?

Up and down.

I sigh, resting my head against the window. That sounds like Tomasz.

Restless?

Always. When are you coming?

I don’t know

We’re in Mleckowo right now. At my parents. Come soon, since Tomasz leaves in a week.

I sit and stare at the screen.

I type back: “I’ll try”. I hate saying no.

What am I possibly going to do at a farm for days? What about the music? I was contemplating the possibility of a chicken and rooster choir, maybe an ambient record: Coop Tunes Vol. I. when the bus arrives in the closest town.

So we get off the bus and Basia’s uncle is there with a small car of faded red that looks like it’s from the soviet era. We drive along the country roads, and past cows and past a pond and the whole time my hands are sweating because I’m thinking about the proximity to instruments. In the world of first aid, anywhere more than an hour’s travel to a hospital is designated ‘wilderness.’ Now, I don’t keep track of distances to hospitals, but distances to instruments? Yes, and this was most definitely ‘wilderness’.

Even a few weeks earlier I wouldn’t have cared about this, because I was ‘on my trip.’ But something had changed, and the possibility of being productive had sneaked its way back into my psyche.

Basia swings her pack over one shoulder and calls out to her uncle in Polish.

Her whole family’s here—layers of generations, smiling away.

She shows me around: three stone barns, a muddy courtyard, and fields that stretch out into soft hills. We’re not in Warsaw anymore.

Nobody speaks English. At first it’s a relief—like dropping your brain to 30% CPU load.

Then the jokes start flying in Polish and you remember: oh right, I’m the dumb one.

Apparently our arrival was the main event, and now the main event is over. There’s really nothing to do. So I start meandering around the farm.

The heat clings to everything. Flies spiral over sun-warmed wood and manure and rusted tractor parts.

I follow the gravel path toward the pond.

What can this time be? I hadn’t found any way to be productive, so I’ll take another tack. Maybe I can aestheticize this, like ‘and now Jonny has a deep encounter with the Nature’ (as Europeans like to say) that brings me to, I don’t know, enlightenment? And then I’ll go back to Warsaw and write the best music of my life.

I’m really trying to be open to it.

Ahem:

‘The pond is a green and fecund thing, wide but shallow. It’s rimmed with reeds that sway in the lightest breeze. Frogs plop from the bank into the water, sending out small, pulsing ripples. Insects hum, filling the air with a constant, vibrating presence.’

Okay, Jonny Attenborough, settle down.

I pull out my phone to find a voicemail from Jules, the filmmaker. “Hey, I was thinking—your stuff has this rawness that’s hard to find. Let’s not lose momentum. I booked studio time next week. We’ve got something, Jonny. Don’t drift.”

I stare at the phone. My grip on it tightens. This could work. This could be something.

I text a reply: “can’t wait to be back.”

Then I see a message from someone else. That girl, she was also at Soren’s concert. Strange girl, looked like she’d stepped straight out of an anime. She lived a few hours away from Warsaw. “Come visit,” she wrote.

Huh. I should just reply ‘no thanks.’ I don’t want to open that can of worms. There’s something weird about that girl, although I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t…intrigued?

I go back to Jules’ voice message. Play. Pause. Play.

So many choices. I crouch down and drag my fingers through the water. It’s warm on the surface, cool underneath. I watch the ripples disappear.

“Drift”?

Am I drifting?

I mean, out here I can feel myself thinning out.

The sharp edges are softening.

Basia finds me staring at the algae. “You okay?”

“Yeah yeah. Just testing the water.”

“Come on,” she says. “My uncle's lighting the grill.”

The family’s set up a barbecue outside, next to the old house that's now used as a two-story bike garage. As the sun sets, Basia's niece and nephew trundle around with their rideable toy tractors, miniature versions of their dad's, which he'd been fixing earlier that day. Parents and uncles watch the kids' antics, telling stories from the family archive.

Parents scoop up children for bed, and as Basia and I sit by the fire, the lights in the house blink out one by one. Soon it’s just the two of us, enclosed in the ring of orange firelight. In the dark, the farm changes shape, the silhouettes of barns and hills shrinking to miniature size, and the animal sounds somehow closer than ever.

Two more days until I can get back to work.

“Tell me about Finland” I say to Basia, just to fill the space.

“When you get out there, the trees are so still and silent. There’s no one for hundreds of kilometers except for the trees. They don’t need anything from you.”

“Well that’s nice.” She doesn’t pick up on my sarcasm.

We stare at the fire and in the flames I see the shapes of those tall spruce and pines.

She says, “Tell me about America.”

“Oh, it’s not really much to tell. These East coast cities all have the same flavor. Except New York. It was really…strange as I was leaving. This billowing, pink smoke over everything. People…running across the streets. You felt like you were on another planet. Like a place from your dreams? A place you never knew you wanted to go.”

“Tell me where you want to go.”

Out of the tongues of flame leap snow-capped mountains and rain-soaked huts. The names of cities we’ve never visited. We speak them slow and reverent: Kathmandu, Skopje, Izmir, Bergen. The names bring images, and the images bring feelings.

We know better. But still: Tokyo, Bombay, Kuala Lampur.

And the flickering scenes continue to unspool.

The fire crackles and a cow loes from the barn.

I feel something I haven’t felt in a while: that giddiness in my chest. A sparkly kind of energy. I try not to feel it these days because it doesn’t mix well with work.

Basia looks at me. “You should leave Warsaw”

I look away. “No, I have a job to do.”

She says, “Well then, why did you come all the way to Poland to do it?”

“It’s not so easy, Basia! I don’t want to just traipse around. I need something to show for this.”

Then she asks, “Who told you that?”

“I just don’t want it to be meaningless.”

“Well, then do what you set out to do.”

I try to remember the last time I stuck my thumb out. When was that? Belgium?

No, don’t think about that. Stop it.

“Stop telling me what to do, Basia!”

Basia doesn’t answer. She just looks at me for a long second—like she’s wondering if I even hear myself—and then stands, brushing ash from her jeans.

The house breathes with the night. In my room, the windows are open, and the sound pours in— a whole thick and rhythmic world pulsing just beyond the walls. It’s loud, but inside, the loud becomes a kind of bed to rest in.

I sit on the floor next below the window and sigh, trying to forget the conversation. I stretch my legs out, checking my phone in one hand, and holding Baledine’s foam tooth necklace with the other. The screen glows in the dark.

A message from a friend far away. I’d wondered if this would show up. The message read: “Here are the coordinates. Be there before the full moon.” and a series of numbers.

My heart starts to pound. I plug in the coordinates to Google Maps and they come up as a patch of raw, mountainous land in North Macedonia, about four countries away and a thousand miles south.

The full moon, that’s in three weeks. The gathering. My legs tense up.

A fire, bigger than the one tonight, much, much bigger. Bodies, glowing in the firelight, moving, waving, whirling.

“No, I can’t”

Drums, louder and faster, drums that your body can’t ignore.

“No”

Everything blurs; the strange, smiling faces, the hands waving through the sparks.

“I don’t want to lose it!”

I see her—standing at the edge of the flames, the girl with the painted face. Behind her: the New York skyline, wreathed in pink smoke.

The night moves through the open windows, steady and alive. A tide of sound, swelling and retreating.

I lie back on the bed, the foam tooth pressed against my chest. Three weeks, a thousand miles, that fire reaching up to the stars.

The next morning, I look around. The farm’s still waking up. A cat slinks across the yard, nose to the ground. A dog stretches its back, then plods toward the barn. The cows are shifting in their stalls, the warm scent of hay and manure drifting from the open doors.

Basia comes out of her room, and pretends not to see me. She walks straight outside.

In front of fresh butter on toast, my fingers fidget with the tablecloth. It’s too much. All these possibilities and voices are more than I can think about. Weronika and Tomasz want me to visit, and there’s that strange girl Hande with her painted face. And then all those visions from last night’s fire wriggle around my head, mixing everything up.

I can’t think. a message from Soren comes in: Excited to announce a new performance of my piece! A message from mom: “how are things? Thinking of you.” Another text from Jules: “Lots to do! We’ll dive in when you get back.” ECHOES: “lots to do”

The mooing cows jerk me out of it, and I stumble out the door. One of them looks at me like she knows I’m not coping well.

Basia and I have stayed away from each other the whole day. She pokes her head into my room. “Let’s walk.” she says. “Leave your phone” My mind jumps around like a caged tiger. I’m strung out on possibilities, torn in different directions. Why does it feel like I have to choose between productivity or everything and everyone else?

We walk along the old tractor paths through the fields, Basia’s face stern but calmer. We reach the forest lit up with sweet blueberries underfoot. But to me it looks like mush; what’s pressing is all these voices calling out:

A big German shepherd runs ahead and back as we go. The forest ends and opens out to a wheat field on one side and corn on the other. We walk the division between the fields towards a hunting platform, the wheat and corn rustling around my waist. Ahead, all I see is a triptych of green, blue, gold. The blue is Basia's tee shirt as she walks in front of me.

Green, blue, gold. To work, to stay, to go. Duty, drive, and something else, like that figure back at the Abbey. Yes. The three roads again. Green, blue, gold.

We arrive under the hunting platform. As I climb its ladder the voices rush in, the possibilities tearing at me. “Lots to do!”

But I keep climbing.

Then I reach the top, and everything is suddenly still.

Birds call out from the nearby forest, but the land itself rests. The simple and infinite shades of plant matter and soil. Lines of roads like threads across a quilt.

It’s like a thick, good mud, has started to swallow me, silencing everything else.

The air is thick with the scent of wheat and damp earth. The gold of the fields burns against the deepening sky. The wood of the hunting platform feels boyant under my feet, and the land spreads and spreads.

I try to take it all in.

Again, that sharp thought: you should be working.

The wheat breathes around me. Still, the thought presses in: Work. You should be working.

I look back at the land. Why do I feel caught between two worlds? The world of work, and this, whatever this is.

Just choose work, I say to myself. Don’t worry about the rest.

At that moment Basia turns to me, as if to say: Didn’t you choose to travel? What are you doing, getting caught in the same pattern you decided to leave?

A shiver runs through me.

She’s…right. I hate that she’s right.

I’ve started to trade the unknown path for the known.

There’s something waiting out there. A fire.

Basia shifts next to me, stretches her arms over her head. “What do you see?” she asks. The wooden platform creaks beneath us.

“I see gold. So much gold.”

The road hums, steady and rhythmic. Out the window, the fields roll past, folding back into forests, then small towns, then city outskirts.

My phone buzzes. A message from Jules in Warsaw.

Singers are available next week. How long can you stay?

The familiar pull is there—the unfinished projects, and the potential of the work, as well as the comfort of staying in one place a little longer.

I stare at the message, feeling the weight of the decision, then lock my phone and lean my head against the window.

I’ve already made my choice.

Three weeks till the gathering, and a thousand miles. I’ll start my way south. And on the way: the philosopher, and the artist. And her. The girl with the painted face, Hande.

What did she ask the night of the concert? “what are you avoiding?”

“Come to Lodz” she said. “But I’ll warn you: what you find here might not be what you expect, or what you want.”

Ok, Hande, I’m listening.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me unless otherwise noted.

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But more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

The only real adventure we have is right now.