‘look granny, we made it all ourselves, aunt sara was only helping a little bit!’
how lucky for the birthday girl and not to mention her sister that they didn’t need to fry all those pancakes in the morning since (even though not physically present) those little ones apparently did the work. happy birthday dear! and a beautiful last day of 2010 to all of you.
remember my dream? about a portable home? now i wonder, how i will manage to stay warm if i will be standing in the mid-winter cold? tål att tänkas på, as we say in swedish.
a night through the clouds. landing on snow. with thin summer sneakers and a tweed jacket. a bag lost somewhere on the way. again. the sun takes ages to rise. rice-porridge for breakfast. sprinkle some cinnamon on top. familiar smells. hyacinths. electric and real candles. snow. more snow. flakes flowing in the air. most lovely family. walking for 10 km and only meeting one car. wearing layers. a friend knitted my hat. playing in the dolls house. going to bed in my old room. like a sleepover party on the floor. ironed sheets. very sleepy. oh bliss. sweet dreams.
there we go, it is christmas again, it has to be my favorite festivity of all of them. i am having a baking frenzy. baking and thinking. thinking and baking. both merry and less merry thoughts. fair enough. and i officially have vacation! what a bliss in this intense period. looking forward to digest life a bit the coming week. wish you all a lovely christmas weekend, and all that jazz.
här är det ju redan efter midnatt, därmed din födelsedag! vi är lagom anonyma bakom flug-glasögon, tycker du inte? och det här begav sig ju på den gamla goda tiden när vi båda hade kameror någon storlek mindre. tiden går. ännu ett nytt år. tur är väl det. önskar dig en fin dag. och en god natts sömn.älskade syster. p.s din födelsedagspresent ligger i paketet!
my sister is having her birthday! happy happy happy!
jasmin, this was my little tea moment the other day. i left the plate with the peel standing, my room smelled sweet like passion fruit and the ants were very happy. the morning coffee routine has gone lost and i drink buckets of earl grey with milk instead.
two more days. i decided to take a holiday next week, now that i have the option *which we usually wouldn’t*. i ignore my economical situation, life is too precious to make decisions only based on the fear of being broke, right? or the fear of anything for that matter.
winter solstice, the shortest day. days will become longer from now on. and so it goes. the never ending cycle. i wish you can drape your shortest day with a long,warm embrace and long but calming thoughts. i am happy you are here.
i am going to another funeral tomorrow. the mother of a colleague passed away. the forth time cancer hits within my circles this year.
all of a sudden the topic death is all around. so present. and it feels foreign and unknown. which connects instantly to my fears and uncertainties.
but after all, it is not for nothing we say all those clichés like ‘life is dynamic’, ‘the only thing which we know for sure is death’, ‘seize the day’ etc etc. we said them so many times that we created an inflation of their value, and most of the time the death stays far away on the horizon until the sky falls down over our heads and we can’t believe it happens and we won’t believe it will happen again and we rather keep it over there, on the horizon,as long as possible so that we can do our little thing down here as if we will live forever and ever.
what i am trying to say is that death is neither foreign nor unknown, unless we chose to put it in that far away drawer which is not allowed to be opened. the pandoras box of death. with a huge piratescull and a ‘open at your own risk’ sign.
and i might sound like the fluffiest hippiest weirdo, but i feel i somehow need to embrace death because all the other ways are not doing any good. by embracing death we will embrace life and vice versa. am i on the right path here?
and what has the oranges and my little baby plant and a stack of christmas presents got to do with it? well nothing or perhaps everything cause they are all a part of life just like death and i think this subject will drive me slightly mad if i don’t admit that, so i decided not to censure and not to just share with you the happy go lucky side of life.
phew. that was all for now. please stay healthy.
i woke up feeling vertigo and something suspicious buzzing in my belly and i dragged my long, weak limbs to the studio and tried very hard not only to stand on my legs but to dance for the first few hours until i dived with my head down the toilet and emptied my guts inside out, went back to the studio and fell asleep for three hours on the floor.
but now i have dragged myself home again and it is weekend and i will rest and rest and rest if i manage.
wishing you a great weekend. love and kisses.
i had my dear friend yuko for a visit, and she made my life feel a little bit warmer and then came the rain which later turned into hailing and then something snow-like which covered the ground for a night and the temperature dropped to 2 degrees! and i listened to the rain and the thunder throughout the night.
we cleaned and prepared the house for the homecoming of the family who’s wife and mother passed away. i cried into the soup i cooked for them, blending my tears with the vegetables.
and today was the funeral and the concept of death seems even more surreal by each minute that passes. i wouldn’t mind discussing it in depth with you guys. perhaps one fine day, while drinking a glass of something?
thank you all for your supporting and loving comments.
this night a friend of mine passed away. she went with her husband and three little children on a trip, to the other side of our planet. saturday they discovered that she has cancer again, and today she is already gone. she has moved on.
trying to grasp and understand, the mind desperately seeking logic to all what happens in life. but there is nothing to understand, and there is no sense to be found.
last night, while knowing that her body was slowly giving up, we went dancing for her. it became our earthly goodbye. a few hours of dancing and hugging.
she has been saying that she is ready to leave. after her first cancer, with that close knowledge that it can all just end, at any time, she has lived her life so fully, every little moment, true to herself, and so present. she did a huge work, through meditation and vipassana. i have the feeling she managed to accept, and to leave with a smile.
it is as if she has finished her task, and she left us an important lesson. actually a very beautiful gift. and next to that there is the grief and the missing. i am thinking that a year hasn’t passed since my other friend left us. and i realize that this is part of growing older, it will only happen more and not less. death as a vital and inevitable part of life. so why then must it be so painful?
when you do not have a complete weekend, then by monday you feel like it is thursday but you still have to go on until saturday. this is reality when you have a boss who is a whork-a-holic. may it pass in peace, this week. love to you.
five days have passed already. and it has been officially announced, i have winter-abstinence. as simple as that. give me a injection of snow and a huge dose of lussebullar. last year i had a bit of both once i went to sweden in the end of the month. and here it finally rained enough for mushrooms to pop up. so there is still some hope.
i feel it is more legitimate now to complain worry about the heat when there is a whole burning forest dying to get some rain. and obviously the grass is always greener on the other side, or the snow is always whiter, cause most of you out there keep telling me you’d love to switch with me.
and today is the 2nd of advent and i have had some sad news. as the evening evolves i hope and pray for a more positive turn.
cheesy perhaps, but the best we can do is to seize the day. stay present.
no big fan of doughnuts but i still feel like eating them when i see how they get prepared. and i am very impressed by the jam-squeezing machine he has. i will make a print and bring the doughnut man his picture…
today i went for lunch and met this woman in her 70’s who is very interested in dance. we talked about this and that, and in the end of the conversation she gave me her phone number and told me to come to visit her.
i wish it would always be this easy to make new friends, and especially while ignoring boarders of age and paths in life. just like it happens in the blogworld. i wish i would feel just as free when i am in sweden for instance. and that people would approach me just as freely there, as they do here. or is this my misconception, the distance i experience elsewhere? did i get it all wrong?
..from me and the ants. they live in this plant when they are not busy eating my cereals.
i am worrying about the fire. such a terrible loss, all that amazing forest which is burning. and all the wildlife in it. one of the few real forests in israel. another sign that the climate issue is a SERIOUS one.
also i was on fire today, but by now i am calmer. no need for international help. but it is always welcome.
my sister is having a theme-week, and the theme is 2nd hand. so this is my contribution. i estimated that about 80% or more of my belongings are second hand or ‘heritage’ from my friends.
like my old, soft and nicely worn out sheets. some came from my grandmother, some from the kibbutz second hand store. you might think i never change sheets, since i posted so many pics of them. but i do wash them in between, no worries.
the camera. my probably most loved item. used to be belong to the photography department of the newspaper in my hometown. a dear friend gave it to me.
a collection of old postcards. and the other most loved item, (it shares the first place with the one above), was second hand and also a present from someone dear to me. it takes beautiful pictures.
my favorite ‘work clothes’ are usually t-shirts and pants that i got from friends. they already lived a long life before that, and i wear and tear them until they almost de-compost on my body.
the squared shirt used to belong to my father (!), the flowery dress came from a 2nd hand store in budapest, the red with white dots from a 2nd hand store in rotterdam, the bag is made from old sheets and i got it as a barter, the jacket used to belong to some grandfather in the kibbutz.
the bag was made by girls in a tiny village in laos. did i buy this one though?
even the dog is 2nd hand. abandoned by it’s previous owners. but i do not consider him mine, he is more his own….
just some of all the stuff i accumulated throughout the years.
and now to something else: on my way home from the studio today, chewing on a cucumber, my tongue piercing fell out. it happened a few times already the past years. sometimes i even swallowed parts of it. but now i felt it was the sign to get rid of it. and i am so AMAZED by the sensation of my naked tongue in the mouth, i can’t stop playing with it…
have a swell wednesday evening, enjoy your tongues and take care.
a few weeks ago i went to eat chinese and with the bill i picked a fortune cookie with the above illustrated message in it. how encouraging! two weeks later i entered my bank only to find out i went minus on my account. this due to an accumulation of bills and credit costs happening all at once.
it was quite fascinating to see how i reacted. my ego was very hurt. i am usually very responsible and i have never been a big spender. so i kept feeling like a looser. in fact, the feeling of failure was stronger than any worries about how to manage without a cent.
getting around without spending money actually became like a challenging game. no more ‘oh i feel like goats cheese tonight, lets buy some’ but the first rule of the game of being broke was: only eat what is in the house. be creative.
and man, i can be creative if i have to! i haven’t been this broke since….i was a student? and i am not proud to say it. but hell, you guys don’t mind me telling the truth, do you? you will still like me a bit, won’t you?
soon enough it is december, which means a new paycheck and a tougher pirate. amen.
update 16.37: the ants have occupied my box or cereals. i draw two conclusions from this, 1. never buy sweetened cereals if you live in an ant infested area 2. no cereals until the new paycheck.
friends. i have mine nicely spread all over the world its seems. this week i had a few days off and went to my old workplace&home to visit. how great it is to spend time with people you love, and haven’t seen for long. we spent hours talking talking talking. and eating. just like in the good old days. and my brain was on fire, jumping between dutch, english and hebrew.
right now i am listening to christmas music while burning candles. how cheesy. i can’t help it. all day i long for winter. and outside the sun is burning hot.
so please do try to enjoy the snow, and think of me while doing so…
