evening sky

Felt like shit all day with a heavy head and so many new noises in my wonky ear and sinusitis all over with the usual headache/pins and needles feeling inside my forehead but I cycled all the way up the hill to see Dr F who was a bit shocked when she heard about the liver values but let's not jump to conclusions and do another lab test on Thursday. At work I went on autopilot and got through it and surely all will be so much better and the sinuses will clear because it's not autoimmune but only a nasty little virus with the chills and so on.

And on Sunday I want to sit in the car next to R and drive to France and someone will email the lab results to me.

Because this is nothing, really.

where is the deputy

The immune system is not something that sits at a specific place in the body; I cannot point to it or put my hand on it like I would on a sore tummy.

In a generally healthy body, not one like mine, the immune system is a well organised team of different cell types employed to destroy viruses and bacteria which try to attack the body from outside.

Imagine your body as a quiet little town of friendly neighbours where everybody knows each other. Obviously, sometimes it can get a bit noisy and restless when the virus gang or the bacteria boys come into town. That’s when the sheriff, the big helper cell, rings the alarm bells to call the posse. And everybody knows what to do: the phagocytes shoot without asking and clear away the dead bodies. They quickly put up wanted posters to warn the whole town about the attackers, while the good citizens start repairing the damage. The sheriff instructs his courageous team of killer cells to search all over town for any intruders trying to hide.  Another group of the sheriff’s team, the plasma cells are also active right from the start, firing off a canon of powerful antibodies. So that the next time the gang comes into town, they get marked right away and are easy to eliminate. But sometimes the cowboys in the posse are a bit unruly and things get out of hand. That’s when the deputy steps in, the regulator cell. He calms everybody down. Usually, that is.

But there are also bad days, when the cowboys and the sheriff had too much to drink and start to run riot in town. And sometimes even the best deputy has enough of it and slinks away while all hell breaks loose.

My liver has started to complain, the lab work points to some unruly behaviour. The sheriff must be drunk again.

bye bye summer

We have the same job that we have always had, to say as thinking people and as humans that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no supreme leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, a world of idiotic bliss will be yours. 
 Christopher Hitchens

and the day was dragging on

I think I slightly messed up one of the bright young things today. He is so very keen sure of himself and already sees the shiny future of international conferences and prizes for his eventually outstanding research. If only. 

So there I had edited out all his "cirrhotics" and replaced it with "patients suffering from cirrhosis" and - to be generous - the odd "cirrhosis patient" and now he was all huffed because this messed up his word count. Oh dear. And my little lecture that medical expertise must always be about treating patients and not about treating diseases went in one ear and out the other. I offered to set his word count right again with a few changes elsewhere but he went off in a huff. 

And so the day dragged on and my phantom teeth started to ache and the stupid automatic blinds went up and down because the wind was blowing from all directions.

When I leave these days the sun is already way down behind the buildings in the west and when we turn the clocks at the end of this month it will be dark when I get on my bicycle. I am already excited about racing through the dark forest. Today it looked like this:

And tomorrow I will make a big pot of shufta just for the heck of it.

it sure helps to pass the time

I hear that expression more and more. When people are playing euchre or assembling a jigsaw puzzle or listening to the radio, they say they are passing the time. As if time were something to get through and be done with. But if one regards time as finite, then would one not want to slow it down somehow and savour its every moment? Impossible, of course, but that might be an ideal worth striving for.

Richard B. Wright (Clara Callan)

The wind is strong today and the clouds in the west are black. Suddenly the signs of autumn are everywhere but what a weird late summer we had. Delphiniums shot up to flower a third time, our neighbour's lilac burst into bloom last weekend with three mishappenly huge blossoms and R even picked a handful of strawberries. All this while the trees started to drop leaves. At my usually quiet place in the forest where I stop on my way to work, there was a cascade of noise around me when with every little gust beech nuts and acorns were showering down. The ground dry with crackling needles and leaves.

And soon, very soon, the rain will be here.

almost forgot

deep breath

It's done, in the end I raced through the paragraphs and after I did my final edit I felt pretty washed out, enough to take a day off from work. And although I tried to take it easy I found myself much too preoccupied, still. My head overflowing with the terminology of human rights abuse, land grabbing, right to water and denied access to land and livelihood, Monsanto crimes and farmer suicides and like a bright shining light in the middle of my doom and gloom mood the postman drops a battered postcard in my post box from Mustang where SC has been staying with her dedicated Nepali friends, a women's co-operative involved in the education of girls and women, income-generating measures, promotion of hygiene and health, and the cultivation of vegetables and medicinal plants in the upper regions of the Himalayas far away from the trekking tourists.

we are on the road to nowhere

Here I have been sitting hunched over the keyboard of my fancy new laptop for the best part of the day translating and editing an endless paper on human rights violations to indigenous communities at the hand of large multinational corporations (those with the shiny ads for the glamorous and easy life, gold jewellery, diamonds, oil, cars, the works, you name it) where one unimaginable cruelty is followed by yet another even more horrendous one. 

But here is the catch: when it becomes too much for my feeble imagination and when my neck and shoulders are all stiff, I can get up and make myself a lovely cup of (fair trade, organic) tea and walk around the garden for a bit and lie back in a deck chair and let the sun shine on my face. And I try and chase away all thoughts of how futile this all seems, how many years I have been reading and translating these reports from NGOs and all those dedicated human rights advocates. There is no end to inhumanity.

my life of luxury

Tomorrow is bulky waste collection and all day the treasure hunters and scrap metal peddlers and their friends have been cruising the neighbourhood. We put out stuff and the old toaster which is slightly banjaxed. I got too nervous using it because it gets too hot or nothing at all and I had visions of flames coming from it one day and I was looking around the kitchen figuring out how quickly everything could burn down incl. the cat and the me. So the minute we put it outside this man jumped out of a dishevelled van - with Hungarian/Polish/Romanian registration - and took it out of my hands and politely said thank you. I still feel woozy and quite ashamed, actually.

delightful life

To lead a life that goes beyond pettiness and prejudice and always wanting to make sure that everything turns out on our own terms, to lead a more passionate, full, and delightful life than that, we must realize we can endure a lot of pain and pleasure for the sake of finding out who we are and what this world is. 

Pema Chödrön

harvest time

Suddenly the evenings are cold a bit chilly, it gets dark too soon and the air smells of wood smoke. Plus all that other stuff: falling leaves and ripening pumpkins and spiders inside the house and a cat that wants to sleep all of the time. And figs to pick and eat and delicious fresh grape juice every other day.

when I first heard this silence turning into music some years ago I sat and cried for a good while

my lucky girl, cont.

gossip

My neighbour across the road tells me that 'they' have been robbing his flowerbeds. They? I ask stupidly, you mean it's more than one person? No, no, them, he replies. 

Them are the riff-raff, lay-abouts, foreigners, kids with no manners, maybe even foreign kids with no manners, or possibly eco-communists like us with the no nuke stickers. So now he has erected a sign warning all and sundry that he is counting the cosmea flowers and should he catch the culprits (incl. children) he will prosecute.

So there.

He is out there now with his fan club of blue rinse ladies all tut-tutting about the dramatic demise of the neighbourhood. Godlovehim, I'll sneak out through my back door, he gives me the creeps.

cheer up

to get a sense of proportion once in a while

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. 

Carl Sagan  1994

A friend wrote me an email wondering how I can manage with S being so far away right now implying that she would find it very hard if that was happening with her own daughter. Others are surprised that I haven't booked the flight first thing.

But no, I don't find it harder than any other day. It's still the same feeling, heavier at times, but generally there always, like a scar. Maybe it's better with me out of the picture. I know I would do the heavy control thing, not outright but scheming all the way like that time after Xmas when I sneaked into that flat in town when she and all her flat mates were away and I actually cleaned her room and - yep - the bathroom and the kitchen and afterwards carried bags and bags of trash down the four steep flights of stairs. It was very messy and very dirty there, probably borderline health hazard but she was already above 18 and well, I have no reasons to be proud of having done this. But lots of excuses, obviously.

Anyway, no one noticed I think.

my crooners

Driving up the hairpin bends from Baie Lazare after a day on the beaches. S is sitting in the back between her grandparents, they are teaching her to sing Fly me to the moon  and Swinging from a star.
On top, we stop for a while and get out to enjoy the view and S performs her new songs with granny and grandad dancing to it.

reading a bit of Joseph Conrad

The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is – marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness.

There are things in life we don't understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is leave them alone. Sounds reasonable.

music for late summer

So it's hot again and clear and a big big sky but I feel like coming down with something, headache, weird pressure in my ears and of course I am checking my hearing like mad. Felt like a beetroot on fire all afternoon. Cycled into town and then to work (25 k round trip back home) on Monday and basically collapsed after dinner. So there is a limit. For the moment. Wait. WAIT, stupid woman. This is not the end of the world. Just a bit shitty right now.

Booked us into a gorgeous rustic B&B in the Cantal en Auvergne for late October and I am already super nervous and lots of what-ifs (S's health, my health...) run around and around my head, while R just shrugs and gets on with it. He is already overworked after only three weeks of school and we are back to skimming along the surface of things, work always hovering at the back of his mind. Late in the evenings I hear him yawning in his study where he is marking home work, preparing lessons with some loud music blasting from the speakers.

I mentioned S and her surgery to my father when he called but all he wanted was for me to book him online tickets for an exhibition in Berlin hey presto (and I did). He is so scared. I remember him passing out at the sight of blood from our scratched knees when we were small.

Making predictions is difficult, particularly about the future.

smells from the kitchen

Half moon hiding in the clouds, my darling
And the sky is flecked with signs of hope
Raise your weary wings against the rain, my baby
Wash your tangled curls with gambler's soap

The cat is jealous because I am looking after the two bunny rabbits from next door for a week. Every time I climb through the hedge with my carrots and a handful of hay she hisses at me and whenever I sit down she climbs onto my shoulders and digs her claws in before she gets on with the purring - very loud and very uncomfortable.

Made lots of tomatoe sauce from the massive harvest. And there are more, lots more. Tomorrow.

S made it through her surgery and as a reward she went to see Dylan Moran live. That's the spirit, good choice. She also fell in love with her doctor and the nurses.

And now it looks like we have little bitchy battle with the fancy health insurance outfit on our hands because - aah what the hell. I am postponing all thinking and arguing and basically all mental stress until we get the final results.

Yesterday when I went to work the thermometer said 34°C, this morning it was 13°C. Weird, weird and cold.

My teeth are hurting - again, and it's really only a small bit of sore gum, I think, I hope. 

All in all, I am hanging in there like a limp sack of beans.

weekend

We harvested the last of the sweet peas and when R spread out the compost, he found a mango growing in it. It is now potted and on the patio.

Last night we drove up into the hills to watch the stars but a cloud blanket was moving in just then. So we looked at the lights of the city reflected in the river and when we drove down again the moon was a huge orange slice in the sky to the east.

After breakfast this morning R and S exchanged gardening news over skype and then he said, we will phone you again on the big day, love and we all held our breath for a second.

When R was making coffee he was whistling along to Neil Young.

I discovered that the online rain radar is quite accurate and useful to check before hanging up the laundry to dry in the sunny garden.

In the afternoon I sat in my deck chair and watched the figs ripen. And then my guts started to react to the kilo of apricots I have been eating in the last 24 hours.

So when R set out his pizza plans - zucchini, tomatoes, peppers, mushrooms, sweet corn, anchovies, two cheese... I suggested a more minimalistic approach.

my lucky girl

It rained heavily last night after a very hot day. I am curled up in my bed listening to the sounds of dripping water feeling the wet air coming through the window. Inside of me, deep in my belly and sometimes in my chest and even in my throat is this smooth cold dark heavy stone. I am trying to accommodate it as best I can while I am thinking of how lucky and happy her life has been so far, my daughter with the golden hair and the laughing eyes.

Remember, I say to her over skype, how you were twice within minutes, hours of death and how calmly we all knew you would pull through and how you had looked at me with your wide baby eyes full of concentration and trust? But of course, she cannot remember her birth or the time when she almost died of meningitis.

And remember the dangerous escapes we have had, from dodgy planes with bombs discovered onboard after a safe landing, or coming down the hairpin bends in paradise one heavy monsoon rain day when first the wipers gave in and next the breaks? And you in the back in a car with no seatbelts or doors? 

I know her life has been so happy, I know it because it shows: in her eyes, her smiles, her chuckles and her sharp remarks, the way she observes the world around her, makes friends and adapts to every new situation. Whatever unhappiness and even personal hell she has had, she knows that is all part of the deal. And I know that.

Remember the time right after we moved to the house?, I ask her. All that winter you were hiding inside your dad's big red winter anorak. I would watch you walking home from the bus stop, all skinny legs and lanky hair huddled up in this oversized bag of a coat with your hands hidden inside the sleeves, trodding along, eyes to the ground and your shoulders pushed down by your schoolbag. And all I could do was watch you and hug you and wait for you to leave this cocoon, which of course you did, eventually.

When I was around that same age I would sit in my father's car on my way to school in the mornings, dozing in the back and listening to the car radio. That was long before iPods or even tape decks and there was no debating the station my father had picked. So I would listen to big bands and what we called movie music, soppy stuff warbling on with violins and simpering choruses, but once in a while there'd be Roy Orbison or the Carpenters or even Leonard Cohen and every morning I waited with expectation and increasing certainty for those gems.

So this is a bit how I feel at the moment, waiting through the dreary bits, for the next gem to pop up.

I looked up the website of the hospital she will go to for the surgery and I find comfort in every thing I see. At least they did a great job with the web design.

And, as it is the case so often, I suddenly meet women who have had that exact diagnosis and surgery years ago, not a bother, fine since  and a couple of the medical staff have come forward with reassuring expert talk and latest statistics from renowned oncology studies.

Of course there is a voice inside my head hissing away: not fair, she is so young!
Yes, the drama of it, hence the stone in my belly.

Here we are, this is life, we take the next step. You are in my heart, my wonderful wonderful girl.

legless

bursitis in my right ankle joint
something like bursitis, dunno, heavy stiff and painful, in my left knee
I am floored like a beached whale

It's a bit like a punch in the stomach, this news from so far away and fuck you skype, you are no help. I want to hug and hold my child across the widest ocean and all that I can try to do is stay calm. And grateful that she is not in some jungle without doctors and that the great and wonderful B is with her.

Oh how I wish I could be harder, let stuff bounce off me and not let it come so close, so overwhelming and all consuming.
Some people can just stay calm no matter what.

off with the ghosts

Too gloomy, too many memories. The garden smells like a gigantic compost heap. Summer today is heavy grey skies, silent birds and the humidity makes the little hairs on my arms curl up.
Time to cheer up.

I was only trying to take the easy way out, to cross off another item from my list of unpleasant things that have to be done. And of course I thought I was  really smart, calling the intensive care ward on the day after surgery, talking to a nurse in a hurry or maybe a doctor. I am the other daughter, I am calling long distance, etc. and they would reply with some of the medical talk  reserved for next of kin and a bit of concern and regret that I live too far away to be with my mother who had to get a triple bypass, her poor heart.

But instead the nurse said, hold on, I'll  just put her on to you  and then there was her voice in my ear, her real voice, not the usual drug/booze slur - ten days in hospital and major surgery, what a way to get clean! - and before I could catch my breath there was my mother from long long long ago saying, hello my little one, what a lovely surprise.  And we talked and I realised that this was the first time in my adult life that she was totally sober.

About six hours later her lungs, paper thin from a life of chain smoking, collapsed and when my sister arrived the next morning, she was hooked up to all sorts of gadgets and gagged with tubes.

She never spoke again and my sister was mad at me for a very long time, maybe still is, that I was the one who spoke to her last, that it wasn't fair, I was the one who had run away, never visited, hardly called and basically had never shown any Responsibility for Family the way she did.

On my first visit she was stretched out, small like a child with beautifully smooth skin and large open eyes. When the nurse told me that they often put on a country music station "to keep her entertained" I thought I saw a flicker of despair in these eyes. Back home I recorded tapes with some of the music she liked but when she was moved to another hospital they got lost.

By the time I managed my second visit, she had shrunk further and there was nothing resembling my mother and yet everything was so recognisibly her more than ever, urgently and furiously. When the young doctor with the shiny earrings told me that they have to sedate her more and more and even strap her in at night because like a naughty child she tried to pull out the tubes, I just lost it: Who are you, I shouted in her face, how dare you let this woman suffer on and on. Have you no shame? Look at her, look what you are doing, this woman was a research scientist, you have a copy of her living will in her files. You know perfectly well that she never wanted medical technology to prolong her dying.  How can you act so disrespectful?  

I remember being very loud and that tears were streaming down my face. Later on R told me that they could hear me shouting out in the hall and that the nurses came along tut-tutting ready to sedate me, too.

A week later my mother developed pneumonia and some merciful doctor decided against antibiotic treatment. She was allowed to die that night.

Sunday afternoon in Paris - if only

hate is not the answer

Bano Rashid was 18 years old and had many plans and dreams. She wanted to become a lawyer and a member of the Norwegian parliament. For the upcoming local elections in September 2011 she was standing as a candidate of the social democratic party. On 22 July 2011 she met her role model Gro Harlem Brundtland on the island of Utoya and they had a lively discussion. A few hours later Bano was shot dead by an extreme right-wing killer. 

With her Kurdish parents, Bano had come to Norway as a refugee. 

At the specific request of her Moslem family the memorial service was held in a Christian church attended by an imam and a priest. Her mother said at the service: The answer is not more hatred but more love.

it's hard, I know

the world tickles my heart

Real fearlessness is the product of tenderness. 
It comes from letting the world tickle your heart, your raw and beautiful heart. 

You are willing to open up, without resistance or shyness, and face the world.  

You are willing to share your heart with others.

Chogyam Trungpa

After the hottest May on record and the stormiest June on record we are now seeing the end of the coldest and wettest July on record with the forecast of a heatwave starting Monday.

I cycled home through lashing rain, which seemed to hit me from all sides and a steady trickle was running down my back through a hairline crack in my raincoat, soaking its way through my shirt and down into my jeans. 

Now the sky is a glorious pink, the rain has stopped (obviously, now that I'm home) and I have burned my gums with the hot tea R has made me.

I have been thinking of my mother for days now, a jumble of memories and ghosts and shivers down my spine. It is 13 years now since I saw her last. Only that time she was so zonked out of it she did not recognise me at first. My sister stopped me from running out the door and eventually persuaded her to remember that she had two daughters. She tried to hold it together the next morning and brought us for lunch to the restaurant on the corner. She was very slim, wearing a purple woolen dress and silk stockings, did not touch any of her food, instead she smoked one fag after another and bit her nails. We hardly spoke. 

I know there are good memories somewhere. But not these ones. But I think I must make the effort. Maybe. Tomorrow.

oh you sweet girl, what a waste

I made a really elaborate cake for my birthday man this year, all chocolate, pity about the weather, all rain and cold winds. Last night I watched a stupid talk show where a Zen master did a short meditation demo with the round of guests including a nasty comedian, two Sikh taxi drivers, a food critic and an Italian actor famous for a series of silly ads for instant coffee. Weird. Just be here, no striving, no rushing, he said and then someone coughed.

after the first hour

The dusty path endlessly ahead of me, deep forest to one side, the lake sparkling down a deep slope to the other. The sun is hot and there is a high wind but I don't mind. From time to time I break through a dense cloud of minute flies, sneezing and keeping my mouth shut, blinking to clear the eyes. 

On and on I follow the rhythm of my legs pushing the pedals, the wheels crunching along the dry track. I am humming my breath tune, my cycling mantra.

Around another bend, the track goes on and on and look, here I come and I am moving along, I am flying. I am laughing. My tears run backwards into my ears. I punch my fist in the air and shout to R, this is the life, look at me!

away we go

Tomorrow morning after a lazy Sunday breakfast we shall pack the red bag and load the bicycles in the back of the car and we will pretend all is normal because the cat smells a rat as soon as I lift the shampoo bottle from the bathroom shelf and we will let down most of the blinds to make sure the house stays cool and the cat will start biting my heels at this stage while I tell her reassuringly that H will take good care of her as well as the tomatoes and aubergines in the greenhouse and then we will probably remember some last minute stuff and run back and forth for a bit and then we'll be off for a week because longer could spell disaster for R and his garden. Oh, yes, we will also pack the telescope because we are going to the hills and the lakes, the nature reserve, away from roads and city lights and we will cycle a bit and swim and at night we will look at the stars.

and now what?

Resting on my comfortable sofa looking through the window into this clear evening sky after a brief shower, birdsong, the this-is-summer aroma of the flowering buddleia mixes with the smell of rain evaporating from the hot patio stones, and while I am licking my spoon after I finished a bowl of organic yoghurt with - would you believe it-  rose blossoms, the voice on the TV tells me that 12 million people are threatened with imminent starvation in north east Africa.

tail wind

Well, first of all he paid up. Surprise. Surprise. And with most of the money I bought myself wings, my wonderful new set of wings. A pedelec is not a little scooter or whatever, it is a bicycle with a little electric motor that is activated while pedaling. It feels like cycling with tail wind. When I switch off the motor it is simply a snazzy trekking bicycle.  

And it's so, so liberating. I am back on two wheels and my mind races and I am thinking of all the trips we had planned: crossing the Alps, continuing on along the Danube from Vienna to the Black Sea or the one we were about to start when I got sick, from the Rhone glacier in Switzerland to the delta in France - or maybe only as far as Geneva.

But that's dreaming.

I am dreadfully nervous, afraid of overdoing it. And I am knackered at the end of a day with only 20 km done.

Patti Smith all sweet