Look out for me

Not sure whether womazzle will continue.  Google seems bent on making access to it difficult.  

I will try to keep the site open, but this might just be my last post for now.   

I will be around though.  Somewhere.  

Look out for far out bits and pieces about this world and the one to come...

... IF.

PS Sunstruck

Years ago, our third child had just been born, I opened a gate to the outside world like a drowning person pushing open the door of a sinking car, and started a podcast with a friend. 

I did most of the editing at night, teaching myself Garageband and online publishing skills while frantically working away at my stories. 

I loved it – that sacred space of creativity and seemingly endless potential which I shared with my soul mate at the time, even though it meant adding to my already deadly fatigue and restlessness. 

We managed to publish four one hour-long episodes much in the format of This American Life by the irreverently funny Ira Glass.  

The domaine name has long since expired and so has the site that was hosting Sunstruck.  But the memory of the moments of crazed commitment working on a project with a friend and sharing the product with the world has stayed with me.  

What a great energy we had going!

Love you loads, Susan!!

After all

When I initially set down to write the last post a few minutes ago, I had a story in mind.  Some string of thoughts and events that tie twenty-one years of marriage together.  

But then, all of a sudden, twenty-one years of life, kids, countries and all the challenges and triumphs, that propelled us along the way, seemed to merge into a tiny speck, a minuscule singular event, called Matt and I.  

One more year.  

Twenty-one

...twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four....  Maybe it is time to stop counting.

'tis

The other day, J. told me that he overheard someone at a family reunion last summer say that it was good that I did not come.  

It hadn’t been easy to let M. and J. go off by themselves and the departure had been rather tearful, but the flights were expensive and so the girls and I spent the summer riding bikes up and down the Rhine while M. and J. flew off to the States.

The memory of that strange remark must have been on J.’s mind for a while, gnawing at him and now that  summer has arrived and we are all going back to Michigan together, he felt he had to share it with me. 

Maybe it was out of a sense of loyalty, but maybe it was also out of a sense of grief.  Something had been lost that he could not replace, something had been taken from him and he was sad about that.

I consoled him and told him that he was not alone, Z. had gone through a similar experience. 

I also told him that every time something gets taken, you also gain something.  

I am not sure whether he treasures insight as much as trust, however.

Just so

All my life I have tried to fit in.  I have tried to figure out my parents so that I would not get into trouble while also not having to move along with every one of their whims and moods. 

I found friends along the way and – while often feeling more at ease around them – I have had to learn that friendship too is an ever-changing map.  

Over time I have come to call some of my friends my family and quite a few of my happiest moments have been with that hand picked family, when I am carefree.  When I don’t have to fit in, I simply do.  

Eventually I decided to start my own family with one of these friends, a family where once again I hoped that I could simply be without having to try too hard.  I think it is working out.   

But there are moments, when I am my very best company.  Just in the here and now.  Sitting at the table by my window, as the yellow light turns a soft orange while playing between the petals of the roses which I placed on the table earlier.  

Just so.

Not from Now

On December 1st, my great grandmother Johanna was born.  She died age eighy-six in 1972 after helping me learn how to walk and talk.  She had big, veiny hands which had seen lots of wood piles, hand axes and water buckets.  

With these hands she planted seeds in the spring and harvested cabbage and carrots in the summer.  She stictched me a pillow case when I was little, which, tattered and torn as it became over time, still remains one of my most treasured possessions.  

Together with my granpa’s old paper scale and my great auntie’s candy jar, it links me to a time that was mine in many ways more than the one I inhabit today. 

Not just Anything

After another round of who done what (and who didn't) around the house, I lost my calm.

All that boring stuff about getting the trash to the curb on time, emptying the dishwasher, not leaving food out over night and smelly socks throughout the house, sometimes makes me want to leave and join the Bedouins.

What would happen to the trash and the socks then, I wonder...?  

Instead it's the weekend and this nonsense keeps  creeping up on us and making me fester with arrrgh.

J., now nine, came over to me after M. had left with a huff.  "What happened?" he wanted to know and I told him that I had lost my calm and that his dad didn't really do anything.

"You mean 'anything' both ways, right?"

Hm.

Glass Clear

Often it feels like I am skipping alongside a clamoring digger.  My squeaky voice not even as much as a chirp against the monstrous roar of our time.  And it is true, the marvels of this generation have mostly passed me by.  It seems that I lost eye contact somewhere around the third to last bend...right around when Twitter entered news broadcasating and when Facebook became the new schoolyard of the 21st century.  

It’s been a while now, but I decided to join neitherTwitter nor Facebook.  With the help of my dear friend Susan, I did however add my soliloquy to those of other bloggers, simply because it cut down on the amount of illegible notes I left on napkins, notebook borders and phone pads.  

Being an admitted technoskeptic, I nevertheless try to understand the underlying momentum of an innovation.  Twitter did indeed come in handy when demonstrators where being rounded up and gunned down across the Maghreb during the Arab Spring.  What happened in Tiananmen Square in 1994, when the Chinese military clamped down on pro-democracy protesters and ushered in another quarter century of icy censorship and political persecution seems much less likely now thanks to social media.  

I also do realise that kids need hide away places where they can meet, chat and act stupid.  But nonetheless I am really really happy, that my kids don’t use Facebook for that.  

All in all, despite an occasional oncoming of geriatric helplessness, I feel more stable where I stand.  I prefer not to follow every whim, because more often than not, they have turned out to be nothing but variations of the old (and rarely improved) theme.  

Online banking may be quicker when it works, but the time one ends up spending securing accounts and figuring out problems that crop up outweighs the weekly walk to the local bank counter.  

Credit cards do come in handy - especially when one travels - but usually we end up spending more than we should and leave a pathetic trail of bad habits visible to a much wider world than we would wish.  

But then, I had to realise that people seem to like being transparent at times.  In fact, in seems that soul stripping (and all other forms) has reached a new level of popularity!    

This, however, also seems nothing but a variation on an old ritual in the old world:  confession.  So nothing new really, despite all the hype.  

Just more money and energies spent

Message of Fall

I follow the rising mist downhill.  But as I am closing in, it lifts.

September Shadows

It’s still warm in the early evening.  The damp air envelops me like a towel taken out of the dryer as I lounge on a lawn chair in the shadows of the descending night.  The air is rich with the laden smell of decay.  

In the growing darkness the walls of our house seem massive.  The bright windows are like cut outs.  I always thought that houses resemble lanterns at night and I like their warm glow and the intimacy of life inside.  But for a moment longer, I want to remain where I am.  

On the outside looking in.  

On Days Like This...

…life finally slows down and comes to a standstill like a cloud on a late summer evening.  It lingers like a bee on purple lavender. 

Happy and absorbed. 

I have not left the seaside today.  Through the window of my room I have been watching the waves batter the pebble beach, the foamy green churl and heave under the whipping wind before crashing against the rocky bay.

 

Thanks be to all you nymphs and mighty trident bearer!! 

I needed that!