This one is for Pip

 

Dear Pip, you couldn't imagine my non-woke Angela Davies Hairdo - I still didn't find the official photo on my old drivers license - but I found this   :-)     

Long time ago - dancing and singing... 

Sleeplessness

 

Since my private Tsunami my sleep is mega-bad. I am healthy (everything was checked with stunning good results, only my melatonin level was very low, as I had suspected - now that is ok too), I eat well, move a lot, am optimistic, thankful and financially secure, have many friends and the Flying Dutchman, and call myself happy. 

So why do I sleep so very bad? I fall easily asleep (I established a routine), then I sleep till 3:30 or four o'clock a.m. (round about) - then I wake up, pulse racing, and my mind starts to rattle, about things that look like piffle in the morning. And that I know at night too - yet I can't stop.(That cock in Bavaria either, and the dear sun tries without success to peek around the very, very darkening curtains).   

No sleeping pills for me, there I am adamant. My flawed way to cope: 

I go to the kitchen (in the dark), heat a cup of milk and add some honey, (I am convinced that my blood-sugar dives when I am asleep - maybe that wakes me up? I do not have diabetes), then I walk back, lie down - and the CD-player above starts to play his role as knight in shining armour. 

I put the ear-plugs in and listen to the soothing voice of a German actress, for half an hour she is speaking a meditation, I listen, slack...and if I am lucky, often doze away. Otherwise I have done a very fine meditation - but am tired the next day. 

 

Now I test naps at midday (together with that meditation). I am still not sure if that helps.  

What do you do when you can't sleep? 

Any suggestions? 

(Our Grandmothers cross-stitched a German proverb on pillows: 

"A clean conscience / makes a fine pillow" - but THAT I have, honestly.) 

  

My Cup of Tea (Little Stories of Your Life)

 

There are two favourites - and that tells a lot about me: very often between two extremes. 

The cup which I use most often is a mug. Relaxing cream white bone china, Wedgwood. Snagged from a discontinued line in the classy porcelain shop Lindemann in Hildesheim - a shop with intimidating older salespersons, clad in black, and the shop now closed long ago. (Do you know that prices for valuable porcelain as Meissen or KPM crashed deeper than many stocks now?)

As often I didn't buy as much as I "should" have bought - I had just become a young mother, and we had bought the huge Art Deco villa, thus money was scarce and I thought well before spending it.  

I only bought four mugs and added two round teacups with saucers (one long called from this mortal life, and I don't know whether the shards brought me luck, as a German proverbs promises). Those cups are in my Berlin apartment, the four mugs are justly divided between Berlin and Bavaria. 

The mugs feel so wonderful in my hands - glossy and unexcited, and you can trust them to keep the soothingly warmth for a long time in their bone(s) china. 

The tea I mix myself - but that is a different story. 

And that of the second favourite cup too. 

 I just bought this book and might follow its interesting suggestions.                                          

Query: are you content with this font? I like it because it looks as if I have written a letter to you - but maybe it is difficult to read? 

The Joy to be a GrandMa

 

I love to be a GrandMa, a Grande-Mère. The triplets call me me "Nana", and look blankly when some of the village people speak of me as their "Oma" (and I am not amused - "Oma" makes me feel a hundred and two years old). 

I only see advantages over being a parent (though I was an utterly adoring mother of One): 

I feel that I can give unconditional love. 

(I know that this should be always and everywhere so, but I confess: not always easy for me). 

If you know the Moomin novels by Tove Jansson, (if not: hurry and buy a book - preferable "The Memoirs of Moomin Pappa" or "Tales from Moomin Valley", or "The Moomins and the Great Flood"))" - you also know the "Hemuls" - the ones that always try to better children,  doing "educational games" with them, always watching out that the small orphan moomins hold their little tails in a 90 degree angle,... Hemuls paint the rooms of their strict Bauhaus houses in a "Pisi-brown" (Moomins love little turrets and many angles and curlicues) and play in the brass orchestra. Shudder.   

I do not want to play "educational games". As a GrandMa I am allowed to be childish, giggly, forgiving and utterly adoring. And to smell good with a powdery rose perfume, wear bright colours (preferably pink) and say in the evening: "More fun tomorrow!" 

Parents, even if inside they still are a poetical freedom-loving Mumrik, have to change a bit into the despised "Parkwächter" traffic wardens - parents have the heavy "Pflicht", duty, to educate their child (in our case three at once) to become happy social beings. 

I want that too, of course - but although I obey every rule my son and DiL give, I am more lenient, and more relaxed. 

And that is such a joy! 

Strolling, walking, a walk in the park...

 

I do not know whether the German painter Carl Spitzweg (1808 - 1885 - late (German) Romantik & Biedermeier) is well-known outside Germany. 

He very often did his paintings tongue-in-cheek - though in such a gentle mocking way that nobody felt hurt. 

Above you see my photo from a newspaper, Die Welt, which offered an interesting essay on the cultural history of "The stroll". 

You might call it "walking", if you are more athletic. Or call yourself a "Flaneur", who is more elegant than an athlete. A famous example of a flaneur is the Berlin-author Franz Hessel (1880 - 1941) - a silent observer. 

In the pandemic strolling in the park or woods became a new popular sport. The remembrance of the oh-so-dull Sunday-strolls you had to do with your parents (of that I have drawings in my early diaries when I was about 12 years old) vanished in the pandemic and gave room to a sort of "Lebenslust" - joie de vivre - zest for life - though I have qualms over the term "zest" when I look at Spitzweg's painting "Sunday Stroll" - that family seems more sedate...  

Maybe they are complacent antecedents for the Western discovery of Zen and the Art of Walking? 

Yours Truly - as you know by now - enjoys her brisk morning walk up the high route - through fields and hilly landscape, which gives me time enough to reflect about "Being Seen": only when I changed my clothes to a fashionable sporting outfit, the inhabitants of the Bavarian village, where I spend great parts of my life now with the triplets, noticed and talked about (and with) me doing "Walking". 

I did it before - in Jeans and a T-shirt - but the phenomenon "Who is she?" when seen WITHOUT the triplets (a phenomenon I noticed too when I was a mother)  - or without sport-dress came into the picture again. 

I miss being a Flaneur in Berlin (nowadays the word-police "created" the "Flaneuse", which I detest) - with little excursions into cafés where you can sit and listen (same blip as with the users of cell-phones: both believe they are invisible and inaudible :-) 

Well, I'll pick a quote from that essay by Claudia Becker in DIE WELT: 

"I can only think when I walk. If I stop my thoughts do the same; my head moves in unison with my legs." Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  (my translation - and hopefully that sentence is only a half-truth) 

If in doubt: Snatch your trainers! 

We've been there, to celebrate them: The Rolling Stones in Munich!

 

It was such a great show! A travel through time - and the Flying Dutchman and I enjoyed every minute. 

First it seemed that we would not be able to go there: over Munich ramped and raged a storm rainfall. I said: "I won't go if that continues - even the Stones are not worth as much as my health." 

The organisers posted that because of the rain the entry gates would be opened an hour later. 

And suddenly the rain stopped, and the Flying Dutchman (for once much more optimistic than I) said: "Let's go - and when we are at the Olympia Stadion, we'll see if we want to go in or not." 

(= "You can't always get what you want - but if you try some time - you get what you need!")

And so we did. 

At the moment to use Underground and city railway in Munich is no joy - and that will remain so for the next five years - construction areas everywhere. 

The 9 Euro-Ticket (I will write about that mad invention in another post) didn't help: more people on trains, busses and trams than ever. (Though it has funny aspects: the woman sitting beside me in the concert told me: "We came from Hamburg to Munich for 9 Euros - today! - and tonight we'll go back at 4 o'clock." You are allowed only to use the very slow trains - so they got very much travel for their money :-) 

In the stadium: masses of people - many wearing T-shirts from older Stones-concerts, and lots of grey hair - but a third of the fans were really young (and NOT daughters or sons). 

Munich's sky, which had sulked before, suddenly sent a beatyfying smile at the Stones when they started: 

And Yours Truly sang for two hours with the wonderfully alive Stones - bliss! 

And all evening it remained dry!  

Visit in Hamburg & Berlin

Two days in Hamburg, where I visited my friend Michou and his husband - we hadn't seen each other since two years! 

I did NOT spend the nights in the famous Hotel Atlantic above (yet love my photo so much that I wanted to show it) but stayed with them in the vivid quarter St.Pauli - you may have heard from the Reeperbahn? There a normal supermarket looks like that: 

                                                                                 

You see Olivia Jones, glittering German Drag-Queen on the Kiez, making a pun. 

The weather was fine, and the inhabitants of Hamburger are very ingenious to add what might lack - one glance at the Elbphilharmonie (in the background) and you know: Hamburg doesn't lack anything. I lived there for eight years and still miss it - though it was me who decided that we go to Berlin. 

And in Berlin I stayed for a whole week - so many friends to see, so many restaurants and exhibitions and shops that I almost felt like a tourist. 

"So happy it hurts!" (Couldn't get the original Brian Adams version in the last post, thus I deleted it). 

And after seven happy days I sat at the Victoria Luise Platz two streets away from my apartment with a glass of Rosé and thought: "What a beautiful city! I am so glad to live here. "

                                                                                  

Yesterday (after an odyssey with the train) I came back to Bavaria - which is also a sunny dream at the moment: 

(When I've landed on my feet again I might write something more substantial about an exhibition or the moral of the odyssey - but at the moment I am so happy it hurts!) 

Snippet: Sketch Journal

 

NOT an example of art - but I like the text of William James (yep, interesting brother of Henry) which I found on a page from my sketch diary on 4.9.2020: 

"To get into a good mood, one has to straighten oneself blithefully, and act in a way as if the good mood is already there."  

For me it works.  

                     What do you do to lift your mood if necessary? 

(PS: Question: I wrote  "as if the good mood were almost there", but autocorrection stubbornly underlines that with red. Would my word be wrong? Should it, good mood being singular, be "was"?)  

My everyday walk in Bavaria

 

My day starts with a nice breakfast - and everyday I admire the view from my balcony. I invite you to accompany me on my walk - as you see on the photos of today the weather is fine, so when I'm ready with everything I start my (almost) daily routine: 

down the road I walk, 

pass the church on my way left, then I walk through the village. 

The village is very neat, very tidy - though some old houses decay - the costs for renovation under monument protection are sometimes so high that people build new houses, and the old ones look picturesque, but are lost forever, I fear, like the one below: 

Then comes the sporty part: 

Up, up, up! 

When I am here, it gets easier.

Then down again - you see the bench? Hear the little wellspring? On some days I sit here and read a few pages on my Kindle.

Then down to the village: 

Then up again, and almost home.

I enjoy that every day very much - and make about 8.000 steps, and then from 2 o'clock pm I am with the triplets. Great! 

And in the evening I have a stunning view. No cinema needed. :-) 

"Such larks..."

 

The last days Yours Truly felt a bit under the weather - which, by the way, is exceptionally sunny and mild and so full of Spring. 

I tried almost all of the remedies I know for getting over the blues: take every day a long, long and brisk walk over the hills, eat healthy and well, e-mail or telephone with friends, read (last reliable resort: children books), make the household neat and organised, talk to my plants on the balcony, listen to the jubilating birds, write into my gratitude book and my diary - and, and, and... 

I see three reasons why it only helped a little bit - number four is a sort of solution: 

One every Sherlock can find in the text above: "e-mail or telephone with friends": for an unusual long time I felt lonely (the luxury version, I know: almost every day I enjoy the triplets, and the Flying Dutchman came over for a week around Easter, and I always have a long To-Do- list that makes people exhausted by just reading it. Yet...)

Second is a thing that maybe doesn't exist or only in my imagination: a few weeks ago I got the fourth shot of Biontec - and though I never suffer from side effects, (and am thankful for being protected), every time I feel LOW after it, really low in my soul and spirit.  

I noticed the same reaction in friends who got their yearly flu-vaccination. And I think: well, well, well, a vaccination rehearses in your body the - mild - form of the sickness it should afterwards protect you against. Right? Wrong? 

Third: the state of the world IS a reason to feel low. But then: I may ask my fees back from the studies of literature if I hadn't known that before. It seems nearer now - and thus more dangerous - but not new under the sun. Maybe some of my rose-coloured bubbles were bursting. Which normally is called growing-up. 

Fourth: An insight which led to action: 

I tried to adjust and stare bravely back into the face of my reality. It took two years of Corona-prison for making me willing to admit for the first time in my life: I am getting older. 

Shock. 

Yesterday I even tried to tinkle this platitude into the Header of my Blog. 

And then this morning I found the remedy. 

Laughter. Not taking myself so serious. No drama, please. 

I read Pips answer to my comment - and laughed heartily. 

And laughed even more when I looked at my honest attempt to accept reality by admitting that even I get older. I had  typed: "But older now" - and then I saw that Google had changed it (in very tiny letters) to: But Older No"

Hahaha. It made me think of the Sanskrit Leela (or lila) - "God's play" - which should not be confused with reality. 

In the Hindu view of nature, then, all forms are relative, fluid and ever-changing maya, conjured up by the great magician of the divine play. The world of maya changes continuously, because the divine lila is a rhythmic, dynamic play. The dynamic force of the play is karma, an important concept of Indian thought. Karma means "action". It is the active principle of the play, the total universe in action, where everything is dynamically connected with everything else. In the words of the Gita Karma is the force of creation, wherefrom all things have their life.— Fritjof Capra, The Tao of Physics (1975)

I thought of a (a bit superficial) book I own by Maigret/Mas with the fascinating title: 

        Older, But Better, But Older. 

Nothing to add. 

Violets

 

This morning my little breakfast table is surrounded by the sweet deep dark scent of violets. 

Back from Berlin I found them yesterday on a long walk - which cleared my head, and the violets soothed my heart - and I plucked a few, though all my long life I was told not to do so - and yes, that is right, but to be happy you sometimes have to break a few rules. 

Violets in perfume became rare - for years I chased them on many perfume counters, "Not a chance! Though you might find them in France". (The special one by Serge Luten is only sold in France, many of his others everywhere). 

But I am very perseverant and finally found two perfumes: the German one by "Frau Toni", made in Berlin - No. 37 "Veilchen" - which in the Twenties (of last century) was the favourite scent of Marlene Dietrich - and "Paris Balenciaga" (though Balenciaga was founded in San Sebastian they reside in Paris). This one is lighter, I wear it often, while I keep "Veilchen" for the evening. 

In Germany schoolchildren had friendship books - everyone in your class scribbled in a little verse or proverbial wisdom - and very popular was:  

 "Be like the violet in the moss,  - modest, demure and pure - and not like the proud rose - wich always wants to be adored."    

WELL - even then Yours Truly was tall, didn't want to be modest or pure, and my favourite flower is - the rose. 

And being till today very much interested in botany, I soon found out that this "friendship book wisdom" is a truism, false - based on an ideal without a glimpse at reality: violets in the garden or in nature are NOT modest - they invade quick, quicker than the troops of General Lee they dash through your garden. 

But they give you their beautiful scent. 

I Am HERE

When I was in Nürnberg last Saturday, I lost my way. 

Google map and I never are on good terms - though finally, after walking many kilometres, I found my goal.  

Same happened on my way back. 

It was a very long way, it was very cold (though bright sun), and I had to tell me (stern voice): Go on! 

Suddenly I saw that stone on the pavement - "Hier". (= Here). 

And I thought: true. 

I have to remember this: 

I am HERE 

The last days I was NOT with me - I felt like drowning in a sea of compassion for the refugees from Ukraine, asked myself in the middle of every night if I could do more for them, and at four o'clock in the morning whether it is OK to be happy when others fight to survive. 

And my best friend is struggling for life too. And seven years after my private tsunami I am not fully over it, though Taoists tell me that every 7 years your body cells are exchanged completely and you are "new". I didn't feel like that - I felt my cup is full to the brim, overflowing. 

Then I saw the answer on the pavement. 

(And took a photograph to be sure that my mind didn't make it up - I have never seen a stone like that before). 

But I feel it is the solution.  

As those instructions in an airplane say: 

"First put the oxygen mask over your nose - only then you can help someone else." 

I decided to do one step after the other. Try not to see only black and white. There are many people who can and will help. Together we will succeed. 

A few minutes after those thoughts I went round a turn, and I saw this, and suddenly knew where I was: 

HIER. 

Why I chose the - UKULELE

WOW - you've got it! 

And why did I choose the ukulele? 

1. With all the bad news of the last two years and the very bad news now, I needed something lighthearted, funny, a little bit of Marylin's pep against all this dark seriousness of the world. 

2. The best remedy against rumination I know is to move and/or do something where I have to concentrate. 

3. The grip on a guitar was physically too complicated for my small hands - the ukulele has only four strings, as Rachel remarked. I am not trying to enter the stage, I want quick results. The triplets too (though all family here in Bavaria does not know what I bought. Being me I practise secretly before I "perform"). 

4. This wooden ukulele looks so sweet and beautiful - it is shiny and lacquered in emerald green with mother-of-pearl inlaid work. More radiant and glowing than on the photos. 

5. I hope it trains brain and fingers, and know that it does not overawe my professional musical bunch of friends on the narrow boat trips. Or anyone else :-)   

6. I love to follow instant inspirations - this was one.  

7. And I love challenges. This might be one. 

 

Can you guess what I start to learn?

 

In spite of it all...

 

The morning-view from my window leads to thoughts about all the grief in the world, and the feeling like cats on a hot tin roof: 

 

But there is always something that is beautiful too: 

            In spite of all I wish you a beautiful weekend!

                Britta 

A quote of Steve Jobs

 Yesterday I saw the weekly German Sunday institution "Tatort" = "Scene of Crime". 

It exists since 1970 (!) and till today broadcasted more than 1200 episodes - the very special is that the detective superintendents are representatives of one of each federate state - as Bavaria or Nordrhein-Westfalen, scene always in the same city. 

Yesterday it was Munich's turn.

It fell into the category of: "Everything was better in the old days" - a sentence I disgust, but here it was true :-) 

Yet you also can learn by junk, and a little marvel I found in this scrap was a quote by Steve Jobs: 

"You are the intersection of those five people with whom you surround yourself" 

(as my translation sounds somehow bumpy I will quote the German version: "Du bist der Durchschnitt der fünf Leute, mit denen du dich umgibst."     

I look into the beautiful cold sunshine and brood: Do I believe that? 

And: Who are those five?  

Snippet: Quote by Dennis Meadows (The Limits to Growth)

Süddeutsche Zeitung (February 18th, 2022) : 

What do you think nowadays about the Club of Rome? (...)

Meadows: 

"I grew older. More and more I understood that most people rather do not need that I have an opinion of them. So it is irrelevant for me, what the Club of Rome thinks about me, and I am sure , that they do not bother what I think of them, so I did not trouble myself to form an opinion."

and: 

"One of the guiding principles (maxims) of my life is: 

"Play the cards you've got, instead of wishing you had got different ones."

(The article was in German, so I hope my translation to be correct). 

No milk today...

 

No, that's not true. I drink milk - in my coffee and in my tea (though for three days I followed the advice of a well-researched study to NOT drink milk in tea or coffee, because it stops the beneficial "clearing things" of coffee or tea - I forgot which, must be the result of my stubbornness ). 

I have discipline - but as the bitterness of the coffee soured my face, after three days I said: 

"Mumpitz! Balderdash! Poppycock!" or something like that . "I did not become ... mumble, mumble... a glorious ripe woman (that periphrasis might be the result of the three days fast...) to start with that nonsense!" That I said while I did some MIF or TIF - I do not tell you which... 

I am a person who ate butter when the world recommended margarine, and every morning I eat an egg. And add milk to my porridge. Oh, oh, oh...  

The cows you see in the picture are living on a farm near by - and life for the triplets is adventurous: there are also cats, hens, rabbits, and tractors. All equally exciting. 

How to "reframe" a molehill

 

Why on earth did I choose the photo above for a post I wanted to write about "reframing"?  

Reason most often follows my impulsive choices.  

Moles - as every gardener knows - are a nuisance in a well-kept garden.  On a meadow I can watch them without anger or worry - not mulling if the farmer shares my nonchalance. 

"Reframing" is a modern psychologic method which turns an old-fashioned adage into something that brings more money. Olden folks said: "Look at the bright side!" - now we "reframe". (Sorry, I know, dear psychologists, that my name is Horatio: "There are more things in heaven and earth...")

The well-advised gardener tells himself how valuable the fluffy worked-through earth of a molehill is (though preferably brought from a meadow, miles away from his garden). 

From the realm of metaphor to reality: 

Since yesterday I have to stay at home (in Bavaria) - only for three or four days, and just as a precaution. 

My dear friend Anne visited me on Wednesday, so glad to see her! 

Her daughter, a vet (horses mainly) and mother of three boys who go to school, lives only 45 minutes by car from me, and as Anne was visiting her she drove her mother to me. All three of us had a wonderful cheery evening. 

Son&DiL thought it wise that for 3 -4 days after that visit I shouldn't have contact with the triplets - Omicron is in Germany at its height, really alarming. All of us are 3x vaccinated (except the triplets of course) - and I can understand their concerns, especially as mostly school kids spread that plague now. 

When I told Anne that I have to stay at home (of course with walks and buying groceries) she said: "You should have told me, then we wouldn't have come..." "Exactly", I interrupted, "that is just why I didn't - I wanted you here!!"

 

And then her daughter used the technique of "reframing": "Well, see it like this: now you will have three days just for yourself, isn't that wonderful?" 

Knowing that it is only for a short time I agree with her: 

it is. 

Now I have a mini-holiday, a bulk of time to write, do Yoga, do my household, make plans, draw, think - wonderful!"

   

Snippet: When I get up in the morning

This is the view I have here in Bavaria early in the morning. VERY early in the morning. The earlier I go to sleep (hahaha - with the hens, we say in Germany and I feel almost guilty that it now sometimes means 22:00 -- but then: I am tired by highly amusing workouts with the triplets) the earlier I wake up - has some logic, come to think of it. 

Early sounds are: a cock, the little red train (hooting on unguarded railway crossings) - and some cars in a distance. 

So have a good morning and a bright day! 

My Quote of the day: 

Anthony Quinn: "Even with 60 you still can be 40 - but only for half an hour per day."  (rough translation by me)