Recently, I have been looking for a word. Something like the Danish word “hygge”, to describe the feeling of being in the Mediterranean. A word that can describe the full body experience felt in this land with the proximity to nature, the unadulterated food, clean air and water.

I think I found it.

As far as I have known myself, I have spent my summer vacations with my mom’s side of the family near the infamous Aegean city Bodrum. I remember being a nerdy city girl, with growing awareness of my body that usually felt restless and uneasy. Arriving at Bodrum meant my pale skin would start gaining some color and my hair would visibly become shinier, maybe more profoundly, there will also be a softening, a relaxation that will occur in my mind.

The days would mostly be spent being in salty water, playing pretend water ballet with my cousin and my sister. After the day in the sea, we would head home around sunset, first to shower, often with cold water if you didn’t get to the shower first – an attribute of having a sun powered water heater- then to put on some sort of coconut vanilla body lotion and dressing up in skimpy clothes to join around the dinner table. If you were lucky, a gentle sea breeze would caress your skin as you indulge in one of the best cuisines of the world prepared by the women of the household, savoring the freshest fruits, vegetables (the juiciest tomatoes!), olive oils, dips, and daily fresh baked bread: The glorious Mediterranean diet. 

If you were ever bored of this routine, or picked a fight with your mom whatever, you occasionally stayed home, which meant you would sit between the bougainvillea flowers and do nothing hanging out in front of your house. Maybe make new friends with the neighbor’s kids, scribble on a piece of paper the art you will never finish or just slumber away.

Somehow this unhurried pace of life there encouraged moments of genuine connection with people, and the perfect setting to hold our inner soft sides along shared meals, walks along the beach and swims in the pristine waters of the Mediterranean sea.

At the end of the vacation there would be an overall healthiness and glow to my system that would become visible wherever I checked myself against the mirror or on a random polaroid. The collective time spent in that region speaks to my heart even to this day as something distinctive to the land.

Reminiscing all of this, I started to look for a word. Not in the streets of course, but in the white pages of Google’s listings of etymology pages.

First words that I searched for were “leisure” and “ease”, the etymology of which led me to the word “laches” meaning negligence in performance of legal duty, used first in 1570s, to mean slackness, negligence, want of zeal.

Searching further linkages of these words, I found another word which I thought sounded delicious: “Laxus”, meaning loose, wide, spacious, roomy;” used around late 14c. Laxus later evolves in meaning to say, luxuriant in growth as first used by Shakespeare, related to being lushess, luxuriance, voluptuousness. Imagining my thriving teenage body in nature, I felt this was a close home run for me. I mean, whatever age you are, if you are in the Mediterranean, you are literally luxuriously existing in nature. That must be the description of the coveted Mediterranean lifestyle in my opinion!