small measures

Dear S.,

on may 17th, last tuesday, was the International Day Against Homophobia.

I just felt the urge to do some little thing to support this important cause.




small measures- ridiculously small measures - but still: love is love, people.

Bye,

M.

long holliday absence...

dear m.,
time is rushing by...
just 2 month to go and i will leave uni behind me. and still so much to do.
besides this some canges happend in my private life, and i 'm really happy. but also have to get uesed to it.

so here are the last 2 weeks in pictures.
i was in genk ( an old mine city on the german-belgium border) to attend my masterclass. It was so nice to have a project and to give one week everything for it so it#s ready by frieday for visitors. much more my way of working.

one week of stiching, hammering, glueing... at the end i looked like a mine worker, all black from the coal dust...




from genk i directly went to the opsssit border of elgium. the coast. one weekend with my dear one in an appartement just at the beach. one weekend without stress, befor we both rush into the countdown. so we tried to get everything out of it because we'll won't see each other so much for a while ( especially not relaxed).
it was full of good food (incl. self made mayonaise on this very blurry pic), lazynes,fireworks, kites and beach walks.







monday we really went early to gent to get is eye checked ( he had an operation a week before, but all went good) , but had to wait there for ages, so like a soap bubbel the relaxation was gone. so the last week was buzzy buzzy again. i try to take my time to vistit people. and get everything done which needs to be done. to-do list are an illness from which there is no cure, i guess.

and my plants are growing. i try to take good care of them. i took them inside because it gets pretty cold at night, and i don't want them to freez. so now i water them and even talk to them so they will becaome beautyfull flowers and give me a bit of a nture feeling in summer.( by the way the grass in your garden is doing great )
and isn't it funny that there hide their heads still in their seedcaps when they come out of the ground...



kisses
and how are the mountains
s.

Randomness

dear M.,
my life is really random those days...
I feel like on a roller coaster of feelings.
I guess the things happens in japan touches every one of us. I never checked so often the online news than in the past week. I cant even imagine what it feels like for the people in japan. and every thing i want to say just seems not enough.

it also reminds me that we have to become more aware of nuclear energy and the danger behind it. I already wrote about the topic in november after i've been on a anti nuclear energy demonstration. So please everyone: get more aware of it. for the germans of the readers, this is a webside of the german anti nuclear energy movement: http://www.ausgestrahlt.de/. it can help you to inform yourself about what you can do about it.

There is so much happening right now. than also the revolutions in north africa keep my mind buzzy. I have been to marroco and tunesia and really love this area and hope for everyone that the situation afterwards is better than the one before.

Besides the world news there hase been alot of private action around.
a trip to germany, to meet family and friends, also in theire lifes there is a constant up and down of feelings and now that i feel quiete strong i tried to support as much as possible. than coming back to belgium and trying to reorganise my life little by little, because all at a sudden i have to keep two buzzy schedule in mind... well that speeks for it self i guess. and even if it is by times hard it also makes me incredebly happy . this weekend my uni had open day, and my mom came to visit me and have a look around school. it's my 4th year there so by now she nows alot of people there. and yesterday night you and n and g met here for a gals of wine ( and to try those super nice ginger cookies you made, mhmmm). iT's always nice to have her around but also intense. we had loads of hot chocolate, koffie, nice pastry, food and wine. of course we went shopping, too.

i got a mortar ( late christmas present), found a beautyfull bottle ( which looks good next to ganesha) on the frieday market and also frames ( i build an collection of empty frames, maybe because i studie painting so there are enough pictures in my life, i also don't hang them but lean them against the wall).





a special coffee called paris hilton, an old old backery( 125 years old) called goossens, isn't the madonna just nice in the shop, with fantatsic raisin bread and one of my all time favorites: gummibären ( i also love smarties, it's kinde of the same colour sheme..)




And some more pics of the last week: an old old doll i got for my birth, my god mother made it for me it's called Kasperle. the cover of a great childrens book. and a pot i made in ceramics. it's for garlic, which is called in dutch (koof-) look, and in english you read it " look" so it's funny for me i don't now if anybody else gets it ...








the first lady bird landed on my hand this year so i guess spring really is knocking on the door. probably i forgot a bout loads of things i wanted to write here, but well i'll return to post them.
now i need to eat yoghurt ..after 4 days of croissants, gummiebears and french fries...
kisses
s

ivy

Dear S.,

your tea pictures are so beautiful! And maybe I do have to go to Genk once, it looks so interestingly spooky :)

I am trying to catch up with my posting, I've been very lazy, lately.

Tea is only one of the many things we have in common. One other thing is, that we can both be very obsessive with things.. with removing ivy roots, for example!
Last weekend you and me spent hours in the garden of the house I live in (which is the house of the Tikis, the aunts of N.'s). They have a huge garden, in the middle of the city, but nothing much happens in there, for the simple reason that it is one big mess. Last spring and summer I already started to clean it up a bit, but it seemed such an impossible mission. Two weeks ago I resumed my restauration works, with the main goal of growing a patch of grass and sitting outside on warm summer's evenings. (Image in my head: A fabulous summer's dinner, with lampions, a glass of spritz,laughter.... kitch-sigh!)

So, here are some pics! (I know that it still looks really messy, but it is SO much better already!)



Oktober 09, the original state of the garden. It looks quite beautiful when everything is lusciously green, but as soon as the leaves are gone it feels like a massive pile of dirt.)



May 10, when some of the ivy on the ground has already been removed. Also, we had to cut the romantic willow, because it was all rotten.



now. I worked for three hours in the garden today. My (insert any body part at all) hurts. But I enjoy the work so much! Especially because today was such a sunny day. And I just couldn't stop. (this is the compulsive dimension to it: oh, here's another root. gotta pull that out. oh, and this one here needs some digging. done. oh, wait, these ugly dead plants here, and this root...)







green garbage of the day.

dear S., dear readers, maybe this is a really boring post. But I just had the urge to write it, with my garden-sore fingers.

kiss

I dare bake cake

Dear S.,

Happy new year to you!
I've been at home now for almost two weeks, and today is the first time I baked something. This is a very long time for me being creatively and bakingly completely inactive. My mum doesn't really appreciate cooking and baking experiments, I'm not so sure why. So, due to lacking enthusiasm, I kept myself quiet. And got myself 2 new baking books to survive this phase of abstinence. I planned to buy one for a long time now, and they are a good investment of my Christmas money. Of course I couldn't decide which one to get, so I got two :)



this is a book I have already seen in various countries in various languages. Now I just had to get it, it is one of the most beautiful books about tea and eating- culture books I know. Can we please have this party as soon as we're both back in Antwerp?



or this one?



or this?




Here's the second book:



I already have "Basic Cooking" from the same series. I love it, and I love the baking book too. I's really so much more than mere basic! I like the way things are explained, and, very importantly, I like the pictures for each and every single recipe. There are not only sweet bakings in there, but also plenty of recipes for breads and other savory baking dishes. You'll love it :)



And now, finally, here is what I baked today: Sandkuchen- sand cake. The book promised that it'll be sandier than the most sandy Ostseestrand.. and it is! Yummy, I tell you. I got so happy, seeing the cake in the oven while studying/writing my paper at the kitchen table. (But really, when I was searching for the baking tin, out of nowhere sounded the voice of mum: "what's going on here?"... "baking cake." door shut, from my side and on with the :) stuff. )

dear, I will write soon again. In the last four days I've been writing... soo much! 11 pages, many more to follow. About one of the most beautiful austrian books I know, "Die Wand" from Marlen Haushofer. I want to post a few quotes next time, maybe you should read it once.

love,

M.

Trying to be frederik

dearest m.,
i just come home from our festive activities at your place. together with l. and n.

It was a rather funny thing to do , we did things together on our own. which remindes me on a book titel " zusammen ist man weniger allein" of anna gavalda.
but sometimes i have to admit i even feel alone among the people i really care about. so some confession, today i felt inside as grey as it was outside. which makes me feel a very unlovabel person. and i get all tensed and closed, and don't enjoy my own company... which makes me feel incredible guilty to acompany other people. because usually i like to show my more embracing side.

there is stress in every little bone and fibre in my body, i have neck pain and abolutely no appetite. i don't know why...
to be honest i don't even wonder about it, because it always happens at this time in the year.

it's my master year and i start to be realy unsure if i choose the right way for me. if i should be an artist. in away it's in me and i just create things constantly in my minde. which includes the problem, my minde is this hughe space and there is just to little time in one day to do everything, besides i am not a genius in organising and i'm constantly tiered. and to be creative as a profession is extremly demanding, never a break, constantly aware that the inspiration can just disapear, never shure if ideas are strong enough, doubts; oh-so-manny doubts ...
maybe i just should have a little easy job to earn money, and do the creative stuff in my free time.

i also have the feeling again that i just want to disolve and disapear in my private little world in my head, and knowing that this is quite impossible... i want to travel to fare away countries. most people say you get closer to yourself when you travel, for me it's quite the opposite i loose myself and i enjoy that alot. losing fears, feeling strong, trying out how it would be to be a different person...

enough of ths wineness.
the message is greynes gets me, but than i have this storage of former adventures, travels adn stories ( you know i'm a story teller) which remind me of some other sides of me... like in the book " frederick of leo lionni, in which a litle mouse colectes, colours, sun rays and stories for the cold grey winter days...




conclusion, thank you that we can be alone together. and that we manage so often to remind each other of stories, sun rays, colours, smells and all.

let's hope the headaches and stomacpains will disapear soon, which will make that alot easier

kisses
s.

home? I am. I am. I am.

My dear S.,

sorry for not answering in a while.. I am now in Austria. And, as always, I had a lot of stress around going there. Sigh. I just hate leaving places and people and kitties and stuff. Even though I know it is only for a few weeks and that I can relax where I'm going to. You might think I got better at it after 4 (!) years of travelling back and forth, but no, I didn't. After a twelve-hours trainride I arrived, and brought with me a big thunderstorm, which accompanied me for at least five hours of the ride. (The most exiting things on the ride: a guy who asked me for a nailclipper because his toenails were so lang that they started bleading- yuk!, but my helpers-syndrome still made me borrow him mine (I already cleaned it); a policewoman stopping me at Munich and asking whether I had cigarettes and what I was doing traveling about Europe.)

And then there is arriving of course. Coming back home, to this old place of growing up. I remember, that always when I was a child and we went on a holiday abroad for two weeks, everything in my hometown seemed to have changed in that short time, everything felt so new when we came back. Now I usually spend three or so months away from home, and nothing ever changes. Only my brother, who's getting more and more grown-up every single time. He is such a cool guy, I really miss having him around.

SO, in your last post you asked me a really difficult question about "home". This is of course a topic that keeps me busy a lot of times. Until I was 18, there was only one home for me, in my small mountain town in Austria. Now I guess I'd say that Antwerp feels more home to me. There I can really be myself and go further in my life. Coming back here feels very much like going into a golden cage... (I feel very sorry for saying that somehow-- but this is just what it feels like at the moment.)

My past here, and what I used to be and do here seem so incredibly far away right now. I feel so estranged from my former self sometimes.. This proces is rather painful sometimes.

Hm. At this very moment I would say, that home is, where I am not obliged to hide any part whatsoever of myself. Where my love is, where my heart is, where my thoughts are able to circulate.

If you'd asked me this same question two years ago, my answer would have been a rather different one: for Antwerp I used the expression "zu Hause", meaning something like "living at" for me; Austria-home I would call "daheim" - "at home", where my heart lives.

So there definitively has been a change, a change of perspective. I am still trying to work out a durable solution though.

I think, that for us, who left their country for studying abroad and building up a whole new life there, "home" is exceedingly dificult to find and define.
You said, "home is where I am". This is a goal, a big goal I am aiming to achieve. I want to feel so good with/in/about myself that I can call myself my own home.



This thought is one I can connect to the last book I read, "The Bell Jar" by Sylvia Plath.
It is an extremely intense book about the breakdown of a young girl. Sylvia Plath lets her protagonist Esther describe her feelings so beautifully, with the metaphor of a bell jar, which in German you would call a Glashaube/Glasglocke.
I'll try to find that one passage online, since I left the book in Antwerp...
found. Digital age and all that.



"Wherever I sat - on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok - I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air. [...]To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is the bad dream."



So, I guess this is really so true. Home is only wherever you are ok with yourself. If you are not in one particular place, then it is unlikely that you will be in any other. This sounds a little dramatic and overgeneralising- but this is my experience at the moment.
(Plath compares feeling depressed to being locked up in a bell jar, you can see everything outside and are there, in the middle of it, yet you can only breath in your own sour air and think your own sour thoughts. Sylvia Plath was a very wise woman.)

It was so intense to read this book, at times I thought that I couldn't handle any more. Yet I couldn't put it away, it is so good.

The other main thought of the book, also related to the home-and-self- question:



"I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart: I am. I am. I am."

This is the life-saving thought. For all.
--
Some time ago you drew a plus- sign on one of your pulses. I wanted to have one too, and a minus on the other side. And now I want them always to be there, as a sort of reminder of how things go naturally. And then "I am. I am. I am" would fit so perfectly with it. of course other people had that thought already, look:

And there are plenty more to find on the interwebs. I prefer the plain six words though. And, yes, also still fitting to the topic (and with credits to N.), this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we_czU9sJ3g

Please do listen to it. It's Metric with "Help I'm Alive" and a heart-pounding film.

My dear S., this was a whole lot of emotional and semi-philosophical shit. My next post will be about crafty things, I guess. I wanted to add them here, but this as enough material for one read. Now I will enjoy listening to the heavy wind outside, lie in my own bed (the one of my two own beds that I had first- that is) and think about that I am and my heart is beating like a hammer

loads of love,

m