What is more remarkable: our capacity to forget suffering and darkness, or our capacity to remember it?

 The good news first.

We are approaching Imbolc/St Brigid's Day but more on that on the weekend. Needless to say, it lifts my heart to hear the blackbirds singing before sunrise.

Things are looking rather messy in the vegetable garden. It's the time of the year when we've lost the will to harvest even more Brussel sprouts and turnips. Although the latter did taste great when I roasted a few of them yesterday. But my taste buds have begun to hanker for rhubarb, asparagus, freshly picked radish and so on. All in time. Anyway, apart from the green manure growing in the front right, all the rest is for the birds and the squirrels and will be dug up soon enough.

Meanwhile matters are coming along indoors . And this is only the beginning.

As for the covid patch, we've cleared all the self seeding wildflowers and various grasses/weeds to turn this into a patch for a variety of caterpillar food plants. It's all very well to enjoy butterflies in the summer as they feed on buddliah flowers, we need to think of them as caterpillars. I sat in a workshop some time last autumn and have now managed to find a seed bank sharing local seed for suitable plants, got the soil tested and found to be too rich in nutrients. So we are mixing in sand and stuff to reduce the nutrients, which is supposedly allowing the soil to be more welcoming for these plants. I am actually very excited about this, the seed packet includes over 50 species.

The dead wood hedge around it will grow in time and is currently home to wild bees and at least one hedgehog.

This morning we attended our city's memorial event for International Holocaust Remembrance Day. A large section of the program had been prepared by local high school students (year 10, 15 years old) who had studied the life stories of ten local persons who 80 years ago were liberated from concentration camps and prisons or who were able to leave their hiding places at the end of the war. The students had contacted consulates, schools, museums, archives, universities, churches and relatives worldwide and presented a very moving collection of images, memories and eye witness reports. In between, there was live music, and as expected, I had to cry during a Beethoven cello piece that I would normally probably never even listen to. I am sure I was not the only one in the dark auditorium. Not even hitler and his henchmen could survive on hate and terror.

two quotes for the day

The president is currently selling caps, wrapping paper, blankets, football jerseys, boat flags, pickleball paddles, necklaces, earrings, silk ties, chopping boards, Christmas decorations, slippers, tie clips, door mats, aprons, pyjamas, socks, Advent calendars, Christmas stockings, mugs, keychains, sweatshirts, note cards, bracelets, scented candles, beach bags, flip-flops, bathrobes, towels, sunglasses, corkscrews, water bottles, stickers, jogging pants, wine and champagne glasses, earbuds, hoodies, jelly beans, cookies, chocolates, honey, jewellery boxes, whiskey decanters, trays, wallets, flasks, wines, coasters, umbrellas, golf bags, plates, ashtrays, sports bras and dog leashes – all with his name on them.

Also available are a $100,000 gold watch, a $11,000 autographed guitar, digital trading card NFTs featuring the  president in heroic historic tableaux, God Bless the USA Bibles, Never Surrender High-Top Sneakers, Fight Fight Fight Cologne for Men (‘For patriots who never back down’) and a celebratory Victory Cologne, which comes in a bottle in the shape of the president’s head.

Eliot Weinberger

If you’re feeling despair over Trump’s second regime, which begins today, I understand.

Yet I remain hopeful about America. Let me explain why.

Not since the gilded age of the late 19th century has such vast wealth turned itself into such conspicuous displays of political power. Unapologetically, unashamedly, defiantly.

This flagrancy makes me hopeful. Why? Because Americans don’t abide aristocracy. We were founded in revolt against unaccountable power and wealth. We will not tolerate this barefaced takeover.

The backlash will be stunning.

I cannot tell you precisely how or when it will occur, but I expect it will start with average Americans helping their communities and protecting the most vulnerable.

It’s unfortunate that America has come to this point. But, as a friend put it, the authoritarian forces that have been building for years are like the pus in an ugly boil. The only way we work up enough outrage to lance it, she said, is for the boil to get so big and ugly that it disgusts all of us.

Robert Reich

more than halfway through winter

The other day I walked in thick fog past the Spanish creche and through the park behind the UN buildings and as I came out by the river, the world looked like this.

And right there and then thanks to the magic algorithm of my cellphone's playlist Jeff Buckley's voice started to sing inside my head.

 

Today, the fog has disappeared and I cycled into town to exchange my library books, R refused to come along, too cold, he shrugged. In the library, I stuck to my list of selections and preorders, and with great willpower stayed well away from any of the interesting covers and titles that seemed to call out, pick me and me and me, too. Back home, I stood by the kitchen window, warming my hands on a cup of coffee, watching the jays pick up their daily dose of peanuts. The sky today is wide open, a perfect clear blue. In six weeks, there will be leaves on the trees. 

 

Last night I could not fall asleep and finished reading "A Woman in the Polar Night" by Christiane Ritter, the account of an Austrian painter who accompanied her husband on a year-long hunting trip in the Arctic islands of Spitsbergen, Norway during the 1930s. "Our hearts are light, our thoughts are in a permanent state of upliftment. Nature seems to contain everything that man needs for his balance." She wrote during the darkest weeks of eternal night.

 

This morning, I heard woodpeckers.

heated mittens

Yes, there’s darkness—in this world and in your one, small life—but there is also light streaming in from many directions. Some is coming from so far off, it hasn’t reached you yet. Turn your face to it as often as you can. No darkness deserves your full attention.

Maggie Smith

This was the snow situation three days ago. We had a pleasant walk, the way pensioners amble around the forest and climb a hill to marvel at the view.

It's all gone now, today we are enveloped by a thick mist, just as cold, and the ground is frozen, which makes walking a tad risky. I will gather my inner and outer strength eventually to brace the elements and get a move on, partaking of the sticky foggy air and so on. Yesterday evening we went to a public lecture on democracy and how it can fail and it took me several minutes to warm my fingers so that I could put the key into my bicycle lock. R looked on impatiently and has now ordered an expensive pair of heated mittens that apparently charge via usb stick. 

The lecture was in one of the big lecture theatres at the university, packed to capacity. It was a weird deja vu experience sitting on these fold up seats, wooden desks with that neat groove for the pencil and faint scratched graffiti. And so we listened and were told that democracies are delicate structures and that not everyone likes them. This is because it is not the strongest who wins, but usually the community in the form of majority relationships. And the wheeling and dealing of politicians and lobbyists and that you cannot sue politicians for not delivering on their promises. The positive message for me was the large audience and the mix of ages and the lively discussion at the end.

Cycling home in the cold and dark was another story. Hence the heated mittens.

This weather makes me slow down, not in a nice way. In fact, it makes me feel my age, also not in a nice way.

The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transposed into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.

Albert Einstein

snow is shit

 

We cannot know the future, but remembering the past with care and accuracy equips us to navigate it.

Rebecca Solnit 

not my snowman

 

It's been a tough week, winter doesn't help matters at all. I don't care about the brilliant intensity of the sunshine on snow and however blue the sky is to some when the ground is crunching and slippery with refrozen slush and also it's too damn cold. On the worst day, I had an early appointment with the regular experts and after carefully following the predictions of the weather app, I had concluded that it would be ok to cycle there provided I wrap up and put on the reflecting gear as it involved starting before sunrise. Well, the weather app, in fact all the weather apps, got it wrong and I woke up to roads frozen solid after a rainy night. To add some excitement, snow was starting to fall. In this part of Germany, this kind of weather always comes as a complete surprise to the road traffic departments with predictable results. My initial reaction was to just stay home but after much deliberating, I remembered the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism which emphatically state time and again that we must accept another’s generosity otherwise we are interfering with their ability to generate good karma. With that thought, I joyfully accepted R's offer to drive us there, knowing that he simply loves a challenge. (This is a man who in his younger days drove a dilapidated Austin Minor across East Africa.) Let's just say, he had fun. And after he spent an interesting morning sampling the various coffee options on campus until I had been told what I knew they would tell me, we crawled back home on the icy roads.

 

Apart from that, things could only get worse better, and so they have. As the saying goes, modern day fascism is not shouting: Look here, it's me, fascism. Modern day fascism grins and says:  Come on, it's freedom of speech.

Modern day fascism wants you to think that it's the new, fresh way of understanding the world and the people who still insist on issues of justice and human rights are just yesterday's fluffy goody-goody bores who haven't heard the shot. We have a general election in eight weeks and it looks grim.

All I can come up with that I need to stand sturdy, holding onto my morals and my humanity, to live as I feel we should be living, to remain defiant. To not go into internal emigration. To be aware that in a dictatorship, you are not allowed to tell what you see, you are not allowed to say what you think and you are not allowed to write what you want.

Open our eyes to the beauty of things, however imperilled, degraded, or difficult to love the world may appear to be.
We do not look away from the world, we look directly at it and allow the spirit of hope - the necessary driver of change - to inspire us to action.
Hope has an earned understanding of the sorrowful or corrupted nature of things, yet it rises to attend to the world even still. We understand that our demoralisation becomes the most serious impediment to bettering the world. In its active form, hope is a supreme gesture of love, a radical and audacious duty, whereas despair is a stagnant rejection of life itself. Hope becomes the energy of change.

Nick Cave

Spring cannot come soon enough.

there's a power in hope

In hopeless times, we can never afford to lose hope. When we feel beaten, we can take a breath and love: a word, a view, a dog, a dream, a person, a hope. We can act and work and hope like citizens of a better country, a better time. We can make 2025 find out there’s a power in that.

 

AL Kennedy

Knackered. I am starting this year knackered. Spent too many hours sitting down with siblings talking, talking, talking. Trying to sleep in unfamiliar cold rooms and to crown it driving four hours through swirling snow, aka mini blizzard, on the motorway in Germany. This in itself is madness even without snow as speed limits are minimal and even when they are, nobody pays any attention.

Before the snow started to fall so furiously, we stopped for a while in another small Franconian town, dating back to the 11th century. Everybody was asleep, every door was closed, no food was available, just pertrol on the way out.

 

It took me several years to actually get the meaning of the word 'knackered' despite the fact that I used it regularly. Actually, there are many words I use in English that I couldn't translate into my first language. In the early days when I was introduced to R's family, when my English was really limited, they had great fun playing charades on a Sunday after lunch and my first test was to act "Deliverance". To this day, I haven't a clue what it means in German and I haven't seen the movie - I think. Of course, I failed, there was much laughter but somehow I must have passed the test because my next clue was "Casablanca" - which I delivered with great skill. They were just as rough with each other. This was a long time ago.

 

I have cleared the paper stacks on my desk, I have defrosted the freezer and got rid of the out-of-date stuff from the medicine cabinet. I am ready for 2025.

    So hope for a great sea-change
    On the far side of revenge.
    Believe that a further shore

    Is reachable from here.
    Believe in miracles
    And cures and healing wells.

Seamus Heaney

And a hopeful lecture to listen to, here: