I get the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile.

Still waiting for the deluge, we have been spared so far, while less than one km from our little road, people are clearing their flooded basements. I spread the different weather forecast in front of me on my desktop like a deck cards, shuffling them until I find one that makes me happy.

Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where,
And we don't know where.

The towels in the bathroom won't dry, the doors make squeaky noises when we try to shut them and the basement no longer smells of the river, it's basically rotting away under our eyes. All week a string of very heavy thunderstorms has caused many flash floods in the benign and cozy suburbs around us, with the grounds saturated beyond capacity small tinkling streams that normally just go up to your ankles are swelling into mighty forces that wash away cars and entire houses. While the big fat river moves on quietly. It's not me this time, he seems to tell us, it's rain like Never Ever Before. (And midges like never before.)

Our house insurance keeps on sending frantic messages about orange alerts and this morning, we finally prepared for the worst and after clearing off everything of the entire basement floor, I put my welly boots and the two buckets and the broom at the top of the stairs. I suppose we are ready for whatever. Keeping fingers crossed.

Meanwhile, the ants have burrowed deeper and deeper below the patio stones but their  basements - unlike ours, but the next storm is rumbling - must have flooded already because they stubbornly try to access the sitting room. Picture me sweeping them ever so gently back outside. I trust they are clever enough to find a better hiding place.

In paradise it rained every day. Short sudden showers mostly, hammering on the corrugated tin roofs, the dripping water leaving a neat line of small craters in the soil around the house. Minutes later, a short steamy interval and back into the heat. Repeat that several times every day and you get an idea of life on a tropical island.
But there were also days when the rain would not stop and we sat inside playing scrabble and listening to the Dexter Gordon tape.  Outside, small puddles slowly expanding into big pools and  a water fall cascading down the concrete steps leading to the old plantation house. The hot air thick and humid.

the estuary with Joel driving his bus

One rainy morning during breakfast, the hill behind the kitchen window washed down into the estuary in one long deafening roar, filling the stream with dark red soil and all the western rubbish that the people had been burying for years, batteries, broken kitchenware well meaning relatives had sent years ago from overseas, old toys, car parts, and various animal skeletons. A couple of days later, when the river had returned to its normal size, the remains were duly collected from between the mangroves and buried once again. The locals were extremely clean and proud home owners and first thing every morning after sunrise, Joel from next door, in his spick and span uniform (he worked as a bus driver), would sweep up the dead leaves and dropped hibiscus and frangipani and bilimbi petals in a neat pile ready to be burned. You had to watch him because more than once he had cleaned our yard before I had a chance to finish my first cup of tea. I tried to dissuade him but he felt too sorry for us inept Europeans to get the message.
Of course, the next shower would send more leaves down and soon enough, someone would have to sweep them up again and again and again.

kids and dogs playing below the breadfruit trees

And yet, with all this rain, water was always short. Quite regularly, someone would call across the rocks between the houses or send a child with the message to fill the buckets and the bath tub because the water would be turned off in an hour. It was usually announced on the radio and since S had learned to speak in Creole in no time, she usually told me in time, but we Europeans had to be taken care of nevertheless.
The same way that the tourists in the very expensive hotels need to be taken care of, what with their twice/thrice daily showers and extravagant pools right next to the regretfully salty water of the gorgeous Indian Ocean (which is why the water has to be turned off for the mere locals).

a working day

It has rained most of the night and the basement smells of the river. Or at least that's what I try to imagine. In any case, it's a very damp and wet first of June. The kind of weather that makes my hair all frizzy. The kind of weather that with a bit more heat could remind me of paradise, sticky and dripping green forest. Almost. 
In between showers I run out into the garden to save the fattest peonies from obliteration by rain and grab a handful of strawberries right from under the watchful eyes of the blackbirds.

Of course I put the bowl of strawberries there just for show. Forgive me, Martha Stewart. 

Afterwards, I brought the bowl to my desk and ate the lot and spent the next hour reading and editing a paper on social synchrony, ("the temporal concordance of behavioral and physiological processes among individuals") which in recent years has caught the attention of neuroscience research.  I think this research is so positive and enlightening for a change. Maybe because I can actually understand some of it as opposed to all that intricate DNA sequencing stuff.
Admittedly, I could snigger at these guys (in this case and in previous ones I edited, the cast of experts is all male) in their lab coats examining brains and saliva samples with and without oxytocin, testing their hypotheses about why and where humans show romantic feelings and what brain section rewards trust or why and after which stimuli we actually behave in a social manner. 

My sarcastic mind wants to suggest that all this research is simply due to the development of new imaging methods (the latest versions of functional MRI) which must be fun to play with. And that social synchrony is such hot news because it can be used to show yet another evolutionary advantage of our infallible species. 

". . .groups of insects, birds, and fish synchronize their moves and speeds, a social phenomenon called swarming, flocking, schooling, or herding (Xuan & Filkov, Synchrony in Social Groups and Its Benefits, in: Handbook of Human Computation, Springer 2013). In humans, social synchrony has been documented across a wide range of settings and contexts, ranging from choir singing  . . . to the concerted behavior of stock market traders (Xuan & Filkov 2013)."

See what I mean? From swarming gnats to the wolves of Wall Street in just two sentences. We are the pinnacle of creation after all. 
(Don't copy that quote up there, the paper hasn't even been published.)  

A bit further on in the text there is more exciting stuff about collective intelligence and various dull experiments involving video images and facial expressions and more tiny applications of oxytocin or placebo via nasal sprays and the usual endless bits on methods and statistics but I keep coming back to the choir singing and later on, I find this perfect and beautiful example of wonderfully inspiring human collective intelligence: 



"Recorded on May 31st at Clinton's Tavern in Toronto by Choir! Choir! Choir! featuring Aaron Comeau on mandolin. C!C!C! meets twice weekly to learn original arrangements of songs we love. There are no auditions - singers show up only knowing what the song is and, over the course of a couple hours, parts are learned and then we record a video. Check us out at choirchoirchoir.com/@choirchoirchoir on socials."

Sometimes my father took me along when he went on his field trips on a Saturday. He did not invite me as such and I don't think I ever volunteered. Mainly because I always got so car sick. It was probably more a matter of getting me out of the way at home. Anything from infectious siblings to my mother refusing to get dressed.

A typical field trip involved endless driving along country roads with my father pointing out the various field crops and their state of maturity. He would nod his approval of properly harvested and stacked bales of hay or shout out his dismay over some obvious neglect. He especially disliked "those young lads" who ran the risk of bad weather damage for one more week of growth.
When we finally stopped he pulled out his small pocket diary to write down his cryptic notes and figures. The diary was a give-away from the local pharmacy, the type with a fake leather cover and a pocket to hold a small ballpoint pen. At the end of the week-to-a-page section, there were lists of the different German car registration plates and their corresponding cities and districts and postal codes, a world map with time zones and international holidays, annual school holiday dates, and one of those tables of distances between large European cities. At the very end were a couple of blank pages which my father used to draw maps and directions to remote villages or motorway intersections beyond his range. These maps were really just a set of lines, crossing or parallel, unlabelled except for initials but always with a small arrow indicating north at the bottom. On one of these trips, he explained to me - briefly and unsuccessfully, I was barely five years old - how to determine the position of the sun and all that.

Usually, he then would be off into a field or a barn or a farm house, while I was left with strict instructions to not leave the car and I spent what seemed small eternities looking at these lists and imagining wondrous scenarios from his lines and notes.

I don't think he had the slightest idea what to do with me and I tried to be good and quiet but I have memories of sobbing my heart out in that lonely car.  Sometimes, the farmers whom my father was meeting in some field or farmyard or barn, discovered me and called a wife or a daughter who would try (and fail) to get me to talk or even just smile with the help of kittens or piglets or other small animals. Eventually, I would end up sitting in a farmhouse kitchen watching the women cooking and talking.

Many many years later when I was an angry student in Heidelberg, my linguistics professor was lecturing on connotations and language learning and he explained how sometimes, not always, specific words will bring back a short memory or physical reaction (smell, taste, fear, hunger etc.) from the time when we first discovered that word. Immediately, I was back in one of these kitchens where the women were baking Kerwa Küchle (Franconian deep fried pastries traditionally baked only for church fairs and deeply disliked by my mother for being too common and unhealthy), dipping the dough into hissing fat, whispering that "she was trying to hide a pregnancy".

Later in the car, with one of these flat bread baskets on my lap, filled with pastries wrapped in a striped dish towel, I asked my father what a pregnancy was but I don't remember his reply.

Photograph: David Mercado/Reuters 

Watch me climb. I am getting there.

Seriously, this is such an amazing picture, and the most wonderful story. 

For years, Lydia Huayllas, 48, has worked as a cook at base camps and mountain-climbing refuges on the steep, glacial slopes of Huayna Potosi, a 19,974ft (6,088-meter) Andean peak outside of the Bolivian administrative capital, La Paz.
But two years ago, she and 10 other Aymara indigenous women, ages 42 to 50, who also worked as porters and cooks for mountaineers, put on crampons – spikes fixed to a boot for climbing – under their wide traditional skirts and started to do their own climbing.
These women have now scaled five peaks – Acotango, Parinacota, Pomarapi and Huayna Potosí as well as Illimani, the highest of all – in Bolivia’s Cordillera Real range. All are higher than 19,500ft (6,000 meters) above sea level.

Life at the moment is hollow, fragmented, boring really. I try and fill it with small bursts of anger and activity here and there but my fears of overdoing it and thus extending this dull slog even further are too strong. I am still hopefully counting the days of this sick cert, ignoring any thoughts of having to renew it next Monday. I try to occupy myself doing little things. I watch the sky, smell the wet garden with its slight whiff of rotting voodoo lily blossoms. I work curled up on my bed, reading through long articles of UN resolutions stunned by their simple beauty (right to safety and health at work, right to land and natural resources, right to maintaining traditional knowledge, right to seed, right to land, right to social security and so on). But mostly I wait. I try not to, but underneath it all, there runs this strong current of watching and listening and waiting.

Of course, there is the protocol and I followed it beautifully to the letter this time, lab works, ecg, lung function, and the eternally repetitive 'you need to rest'. 

I could remove myself and observe it all from a distance, add some irony and make it sound funny. I could shout and wail how unfair life is treating me - again. But all this requires an effort I don't seem to be able to come up with. Not again. 

There are times when I very much want to not be able to cope. Thinking what a relief it would be to abandon all hope of recovery and with it all fears of disappointment, loss.

This, of course, is not something I am capable of. I am one of those creatures who look at the shadow on the cave wall fully convinced of its reality. In the main staircase of my secondary school,  I walked past a mural of Plato's allegory every school day morning for eight impressionable years. It is true that most of these mornings I was far too sleepy to actually look at the thing but there you have it, the powers of subconscious perception and now I am living with the results of enforced study of classic languages and antiquities.

And yet, and yet:

Don't strain yourself, there is nothing to do.
Whatever arises in the mind
has no importance at all,
because it has no reality whatsoever.
Don't become attached to it. Don't pass judgement.
Let the game happen on its own,
emerging and falling back - without changing anything -
and all will vanish and begin anew, without end.

Lama Gendün Rinpoche

This afternoon it finally started to rain. Watch out, I whispered to the ants on the patio, you had it coming. The temps have dropped from hot, humid and sticky still to cool, damp and very birdsong noisy.

I am working on the ultimate test to determine whether I will be fit for work tomorrow. So far I failed all attempts to iron or go for a bit of a walk. And washing the kitchen floor just now was quite an effort and has produced a level of shaky exhaustion that in no way corresponds to the size of our kitchen or the area within it covered by floor tiles. Maybe I'll recover dramatically over night. There's hope. At least I have been sleeping a lot since Thursday.

Whatever, I am resting in splendid extravagance. While R is downstairs in the clean kitchen, preparing delightful meals, from time to time running upstairs with a fresh cup of tea for me, I am reading through my next assignment, this one on the human rights of peasant farmers, the effects of exporting dumping our agricultural surplus in African countries thereby destroying viable local markets. Just one statistic: 60% of the world's hungry are women and girls. Actually, the correct term is 'suffering from chronic hunger'.

One of the accepted definitions of chronic hunger:  

a perpetual hunger, starvation, or famine due to unequal distribution of wealth or other social injustice

Sometimes it feels like some form of penance - if I only knew what that actually entails - us here in this house, safe and comfortable, harvesting our own excellently tender green asparagus, listening to the rain, and the absolute luxury of having the means, the time, the skill and the interest to translate such information so that people with far more dedication, time, skills and, most of all, conviction may use my minimal contribution together with whatever miserable means are at their disposal to try and make our world a better place.



 Jean Ziegler
in an excerpt from We Feed The World. 

We need to welcome genius. To understand that disruptive change and technological revolutions can spread both immense good and harm. To celebrate diversity and overcome prejudice. To raise public and private patronage. To embrace change, and strengthen public safety nets in ways that embolden us all. To build new crossroads and welcome migrants. To tear up the (mental) maps that unhelpfully divide people. To stoke virtues – especially honesty, audacity and dignity. To champion collective endeavours as well as individual freedoms.

This is our age of discovery. We can succumb to its pressures, close our borders and our minds to new people, ideas and technologies, and thereby surrender the possibilities inherent in humanity’s present circumstances. Or we can seize this moment, navigate the crises of our own time and co-create a blossoming that the world will still talk about in 2500.

Flounder or flourish? The choice is ours.

Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna in last Sunday's Observer.

After my brilliant achievement of an actual proper walk (i.e. boots, backpack, packed lunch, rain gear, map and compass) earlier this month, we thought, what if this actually works, what if this drug enhanced immune compromised body has once again figured out what it takes. After all, it's only been seven years since this was our regular twice a month Sunday adventure.
And this time, why not double length, altitudes to climb, hours and difficulty. Which we did. It was fabulous despite the occasional lingering feeling of being run over by a truck and the two bloody blisters I discovered afterwards on my right foot.

Never mind blisters, I thought and I got carried away, cycled longer and steeper distances every day this week, worked overtime, registered with bikes vs. cars,  ordered decent maps for our Alpine summer walking adventure, cooked elaborate dinners and filled my calendar with a string of exciting events for the coming weeks.

(Little did she know . . .)

Just after I had filmed that little video from my last post on my way home yesterday, my knees started to buckle and after struggling for a while with my stubborn ego, I gave up and called R who without much fuss (thank you) picked me up, bicycle and all, while the volcano began to erupt inside of me. In our adult voices, we reassured ourselves with pleasant chitchat about virus infections and allergic reactions to the pollen overload in a dry windy forest. We did a fairly decent job drowning out the whiny voice inside my head, the one that kept on hissing, told you so.
When the first wave of nausea hit me in the early hours of this morning, I groped for the dramamine in the dark, skilfully avoiding the worst of the sea sickness, aka vomiting. By the time R woke I was well and truly back into my boring chronic illness life, shivers and fevers and vertigo, contemplating the Alpine summer adventure in a deckchair instead. In other words: Back at square one. The usual.

But it was such a great spell and although - of course - I overdid it, I'll do it again and again. There's always a next time, R cheerfully confirmed as he left for work. He is always ahead of me.

I had a shitty day at work. The kind of day when I wonder what on earth etc. But then on my way home, this happened. It actually is like that every evening at the moment. Spring is noisy.

The thought that one day I will just stop communicating with my siblings. I wonder how long until they notice? Maybe never, maybe with the same huge relief that I will experience.

Don't, says R, it would be a shame. 

To which I reply: We don't have to like each other at all. But for now we need to look after the stubborn old man in his shiny car. And even that has become a competition. Sometimes, I imagine that my sister is keeping a tally sheet on who he calls more often. She is so mad at me, her emails are like little explosions. This family is my ongoing source of sarcasm and arrogance. We goad each other on and have become experts in snide remarks, well hidden in best wishes and little anecdotes. Whatever it takes to be just nice, I haven't got it.  We never try anyway.

Sometimes I swear I can hear my mother hiss and clamor from her non existent grave. I told you so, you are all good for nothing. 

Meanwhile, the Ice Saints are upon us, today is the feast day of Sophie with a harsh wind full of pollen and the odd drop of rain. R is out there weeding and digging and planting like there is no tomorrow., while I drink pots of tea working my way through the translations of the myriad novel approaches to breast reconstruction. Please, dear women: never miss a breast scan if you can help it.

Yesterday, I did a bit of my civic duty and stood behind a police barrier watching a handful neo nazis shouting their convoluted slogans of hate and fear. I tried to remain all dignified and grown up but when this grey haired hippy behind me started to shout, Oh shut up you assholes, I found myself joining in with wild abandon. I know, I know. It doesn't change a thing. But it cleared my head for better things. I hope so.

This is my mother before she became a botanist.

purple rain today

This is the view from the kitchen window this morning. The plumeria is not doing too well. And one of the small fig trees has not survived this mild winter. The roses are late but I forgive them.

While chopping some fresh strawberries into my porridge, I listen to the news, the road works and the birds, considering whether I should douse the evolving ant hills on the patio stones with boiling water or let them be. 

Bad karma. 

Years and years ago, we called on a friend living at a Tibetan Buddhist place in the south of France where we not only shared the bedroom with seven nesting swift families flying in and out of the windows, but also had to carefully accommodate various ant colonies in the shower. It was all done very orderly, the ants were provided with safe passage to and from the soap dish and stayed well away from the drains. 

Only two years before that trip, I daily spent a good amount of time killing large civilizations of ants, thick red ants, which ran along my washing line and nested inside the door frames and the box with S's colouring pencils and basically everywhere. Not forgetting the cockroaches, spiders as large as your hand (the smaller ones, the larger versions were higher up in the trees) and of course, mosquitoes. The geckos and the skinks and the giant millipedes, however, S wanted to keep as pets. Life in paradise was not without challenges.

her blue body

I didn't go for mother's day stuff - we lived in a commune, it was the 1980s, my child was introduced to other things about life, we were serious hippy rebels.
There are vague childhood memories (mine) of colouring cards for my mother but that must have been before I went to school. And the teenager I was then would not be seen dead with a mother's day memento or a bouquet. And thankfully, my mother did not like the idea either. But I only found out this week that it was not a nazi thing after all, this day to idolize women as mothers. See what I mean, my teenage anger etc.
Still, my child called on Sunday - by total coincidence, of course. 

Anyway, in the words of Alice Walker:

We have a beautiful
mother
Her hills
are buffaloes
Her buffaloes
hills.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her oceans
are wombs
Her wombs
oceans.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her teeth
the white stones
at the edge
of the water
the summer
grasses
her plentiful
hair.

We have a beautiful
mother
Her green lap
immense
Her brown embrace
eternal
Her blue body
everything we know.

Way past my bedtime I am sitting here with my old friend gastritis. Life is full of surprises and every 30 minutes the timer of the dimming app on this computer reminds me that morning is on its way. In future,  I shall not mix fresh strawberries with coffee. Or don't eat strawberries and forget about coffee in general. All this scar tissue in your intestine is not helping either, the expert said earlier this year. So what. Fennel tea and a hot water bottle, while I attempt to edit a pile of manuscripts for the wealthy (and well paying) aesthetic surgeon. So far, I have worked my incredulously ignorant mind through ten different surgical procedures to improve the appearance of the humble hand. I had no idea and frankly, I am glad I didn't. Now I just hope that all this knowledge will rapidly fade from my memory.

The good news is that I went on a proper walk, for a couple of hours (!) and what a delight it was. My energy is coming back, never mind the nausea wars in my abdomen. But shhhhh, don't get carried away. Let's not brag about it. Not yet.

a small town in Sweden last Sunday

Photograph: David Lagerlöf/Expo/TT News Agency/Press Association Images 

 The lone protest of a woman defying a march of 300 uniformed neo-Nazis.

that plus sunshine = today


The only thing - apart from maybe a bookshop - that I missed when we lived in paradise was the change of the seasons. During hot tropical nights with the screams of the fruit bats and the boom of plopping breadfruit, constantly barking dogs and roosters crowing whenever - I would dream in slow motion of crocus and tulips, opening fruit tree flowers and the first strawberries, swallows nesting and bright evenings.

Our first spring back was a bit different, or rather, like actual spring when everything basically happens at the same time, explosions of green and colour and soft fruit.
Well, this year has been somewhat slow motion up to now - ignoring the fact that we did pick raspberries on x mas day - but it looks like the show is on the road.

May arrives with heavy April showers and a distant promise of warmth. There is hope. Thursday is a public holiday, would be nice to spend it less wrapped up, both in- and outdoors.

Things related to my job security and chronic illness related disability are finally happening. If my boss finds the time to sit down with the various people representing me. He is such an important man, of course, and well, I am not so important but the smell of money may just be too convincing.
The best case scenario could involve a skilled and pleasant underling person working for me, the worst case scenario would be life as it is right now, i.e. absences and backlogs and overtime at home.

Meanwhile, I have been very crafty. After I completed these two pillows

I am now working my way through the left over wool, mittens in May.

And since R has been ingenious as ever, in this very cold spring, we are harvesting our daily salad overload from the inside walls of the greenhouse.

We made the huge mistake of watching That Sugar Film which was followed by a hasty search through our cupboards and guilty disposal of admittedly only very few items (mostly tomato sauce mixes). By disposal I mean that we rapidly ate the stuff, we don't throw food away if we can help it. But the future here is going to be extremely holy and healthy. Watch me.
And watch the full movie online here. While the link works. Great fun if you are into self torture and gruesome pictures of too many sweets and bad teeth and lots more stuff we should all know.

Stormy, cold and wet. Outside on our quiet street, the kids from the primary school down the road are doing their cycling tests. Never mind the weather. It's all noisy chatter, bells and colourful raincoats as one after another cycles in lines and circles, practicing their turning and indicating and stopping skills under the supervision of an elderly police man, a couple of teachers and several mothers hiding under large umbrellas. I have been told that next, they will cycle on real streets with real traffic in long single file to the Italian ice cream parlour to celebrate their achievements with great cheer. This is the future.

Sudden spring has been replaced by sudden winter - but we hope only briefly. While R hastily covered his vegetable beds with various elaborate sheets of plastic (it now looks like Christo was here), I said soothing words to the flowering lilac, which has been replanted to the left of the picture above. I think it will survive.
And now I am debating with my weaker self whether I will cycle to work, i.e. face nature in all its beauty and strength head on wrap myself in ill-fitting, leaking waterproof covers, or sit in the car listening to lovely music cursing and gnashing my teeth while looking for parking.

Ok, people die. Brilliant artists also die. It's sad, yes, but also a reminder. Life ends in death. Mine and yours and all others.
Malick Sidibe died earlier this month.

Janet Jackson once made a great video based on his photography. But I always hear this soundtrack here.




I think I will cycle. Life is too short to spend it sitting in a car.

And so, here we are. Sitting around the breakfast table with friends, home made bread, home made jam, coffee, a fat vase of tulips, the first strawberries, spring sunlight, reminiscing about our young and wild commune days, our children, the babies and toddlers now adults, talking about our aches and pains (knees and backs and ears and eyesight) and our fears of old age, illness, loneliness and dreadful old folks homes, when suddenly, we look at each other and all we need to do is smile. We have done communal living, home birth, we carried each others' babies when they were afraid of the dark, we should know how to do this. Of course.

The Room in Which My First Child Slept

After a while I thought of it this way:

It was a town underneath a mountain

crowned by snow and every year a river

rushed through, enveloping the dusk

in a noise everyone knew signaled spring—

a small town, known for a kind of calico,

made there, strong and unglazed,

a makeshift of cotton in which the actual

unseparated husks still remained and

could be found if you looked behind

the coarse daisies and the red-billed bird

with swept-back wings always trying to

arrive safely on the inch or so of cotton it

might have occupied if anyone had offered it.

And if you ask me now what happened to it—

the town that is—the answer is of course

there was no town, it never actually

existed, and the calico, the glazed cotton

on which a bird never landed is not gone,

because it never was, never once, but then

 

how to explain that sometimes I can hear

the river in those first days of April, making

its way through the dusk, having learned

to speak the way I once spoke, saying

as if I didn’t love you,

as if I wouldn’t have died for you.

 

Eavan Boland

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the human race.

H.G. Wells

My luck has come in again and I have been that adult on a bicycle for the last two weeks now. This is what it looks like every day when I have managed to survive 8 km of busy city traffic. This forest is my antidepressant. What you don't see - and why can I not take a picture on my phone that shows how steep it is? - is that right at the top here in this picture is where the first of two very steep hairpin bends begin.

Once I have managed these two tough bends, it gets easier and after about 4 km, it is all easy peasy level.

Right here at the t-junction I could turn left and cycle on through thick forest, vineyards and more forest for a couple of weeks, cross the Swiss Alps and the Pyrenees and eventually arrive in Santiago de Compostela because this small road is a branch of the Camino, the Jakobsweg. There was a time when we were seriously contemplating this trip. Well, maybe in another life time.

But here I turn right and go on for another 4 km through the most gorgeous lush forest, complete with small bridges and streams and very noisy birds, until I reach the university campus and my desk.

I started cycling when I was 5 years old. This bicycle here is actually a fancy electric bike. I have just completed 10,000 km on it (since 2011). It has saved me from a life of miserable chronic illness.

The lawn is speckled with daisies and everywhere, forget-me-nots and lady's smock are sprouting out of the ground between the fancy tulips and sturdy pulsatilla. They're just weeds, complains R - but with a smile. He will not touch them until long after they are finished flowering. The fruit trees are slowly opening their blossoms. The wind has lost its edge. The garden is gentle and secret and beautiful all of a sudden. Spring is here.
All weekend my energy has been sputtering like a badly tuned engine and I mostly wandered from bed to sofa to armchair, crossing off things from my to-do list either because I actually managed to do them (bake rhubarb crumble, ironing) or because I've suddenly decided resigned that it doesn't matter (sort out tax files, clean fridge).
Meanwhile, R is digging and planting and moving entire sections of the garden to new locations and so on. I watch him fling that spade like a paper kite and I close my eyes with relief.
Last night when I reminded him of the time, he looked up from correcting exam papers and sighed, oh jeezus, they still haven't understood. I don't know how to teach this stuff any longer. Treating viruses with antibiotics! Why don't they listen in class.

 

From Paul Salopek's article yesterday:

More than three years ago, while researching this long and very slow journey, I visited the remote Kenyan camp of the famed paleoanthropologist Meave Leakey. I recall setting out one morning for a nearby village.

“Is it within walking distance?” I stupidly asked Leakey.

She stared at me, astonished. “Everything is,” she replied.

(and if in doubt, I shall take my bicycle)

Found this today on Beth's blog
 
Charles Bukowski was born a short distance away, it's a pleasant enough cycle along the river from where I am right now. 
One of these old towns dating back to the Romans and with a medieval fortress right in the middle.
It's pleasant and picturesque, I sat in one of the cafes eating Italian ice cream. But one New year's day we walked around in search of coffee and found only shut doors. These places are hell for teenagers. He would have hated it there, never mind the whole nazi thing which would have shaped his youth had the family remained in Germany.


No leaders, Please
by Charles Bukowski

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
don’t swim in the same slough.
invent yourself and then reinvent yourself
and
stay out of the clutches of mediocrity.

Invent yourself and then reinvent yourself,
change your tone and shape so often that they can
never
categorize you.

Reinvigorate yourself and
accept what is
but only on the terms that you have invented
and reinvented.

be self-taught.

And reinvent your life because you must;
it is your life and
its history
and the present
belongs only to
you.

The paraphernalia of chronic illness surround me, rule my day, whether I am able to work and play or whether I am folding myself into blankets and soft cushions, there is a little box of medicines beside my bed that starts the day, there are excel sheets with lab data, folders of pathology reports, letters of discharge, certificates to show to the various agencies that finance my existence and so on.

Not a day without the effort to distinguish between being well and being ill but the boundaries are vague some mornings, I swing back and forth, almost violently at times, my mind wants one thing and my body dictates another.

Why do I continue to write this down, why this constant urge to find more words, another metaphor, a sharper description. Some times, all I want is spitting it out, in disgust and with anger. But on other days, I am simply driven by the need to document, to observe and to report, to myself, to the person I may be in weeks, months, years to come. To find a focus and not allow the impact to fade. 

The impact on body and mind. Before it all gets blurred and I should forget my healthy self completely. To let nothing stop me from being in love with my life. Being attentive, memorizing where I am today so that it all makes sense later. Because I forget easily how complete it all is despite the struggles and the sleepless nights, the exhausted evenings. There is no fight, no challenge, really. It may sound dramatic and impressive to some but no, I am simply alive, I am not fighting anything, there is nothing to win (or to lose). In all its difficulty, being ill has not really changed me, the way only I know myself. Maybe not yet, maybe it's too early. Maybe in the future. But today, I don't care.

The German translation of Good Friday, Karfreitag, means Friday of grief or lament or wailing (kar is old high German for any of these).

It was a rainy and cold Good Friday this year.  We went to Dachau.

On the way, we had one of our minor squabbles, the way you argue about anything and nothing when you have been married for a long time. We hissed back and forth for a while and then went silent until R cracked a joke and I tried to remain insulted. That's the way we try to hide being nervous.

 

Two days earlier a friend had given me a beautiful soft pashmina shawl and as I walked across this bare stretch of gravel, I wrapped it closely around my head, hiding inside as much as possible, afraid to be found out. I was ready to deny everything: that I am German, that my grandfather was a nazi, that I loved him when I was small, that my mother was afraid of ghosts all her adult life, ghosts of her childhood in nazi Germany and ghosts of a war that she desperately wanted to forget, a fear she drowned in addiction and hate and cruelty. But none of it has any significance in this place.

And yet, they are my scars and my responsibility. 

The dimensions of this place are overwhelming, trying to fathom the numbers, the lives lost and the suffering, I felt like running and for a while, I lost sight of R and hiding my crying face even deeper inside the shawl I walked around like a lost child among the Chinese tourists texting on their cell phones right below the no phone signs, the Italian families with balloons and prams, having an impromptu picnic on the steps to the infamous wash house, next to another sign in four languages asking to respectfully refrain from eating or drinking. 

No, I did not point it out to them. I did not feel equipped with that kind of indignation. I was inside a black cloud of wailing and lamenting and I did not feel ready to lift my head ever again.

You can spend hours and hours here, reading and gathering information and watching footage and going through thousands of photographs and documents. And we did. We stayed for a very long time. At least that.

And everywhere reminders of what we need to know, especially now, about hate, about xenophobia, about racism, about fascism. These are not innocent times, we must allow history to teach us, we must be aware.

Brussels 23rd March 2016

 picture credit Valentin Bianchi/AP     

The stars now rearrange themselves above you
but to no effect. Tonight,
only for tonight, their powers lapse,
and you must look toward earth. There will be
no comets now, no pointing star
to lead where you know you must go.
Look for smaller signs instead, the fine
disturbances of ordered things when suddenly
the rhythms of your expectation break.

Dana Gioia 

We are packing - or rather, I am packing our going-away-for-easter stuff in between short breaks or vice versa, while R is being noisy in the kitchen, listening to the radio, from time to time he shouts something or other upstairs that I fail to understand. I don't understand anything right now. 

study to be quiet

My GP would say that there is some activity. A misleading expression I think but nevertheless. I am not yet ready to see her for a sick cert. This is my day of grace, my employment regulations stipulate a doctor's certificate from day three onward and I usually settle on day two. A compromise of sorts. If I give you one day off the record you give me one too. But only in my mind.

Whatever the activity, it is diffuse. I am restless. I drink herb tea and eat three small chocolate easter eggs. I cough a bit. I sleep for long hours during the day and more all night. I am cold and I am hot. It is whatever it is. 

I want to lie down. I want to get up and sort the laundry. I make phone calls. I empty the dish washer. I need to lie down. There are mixed messages here. Or maybe it's just me.

When my father calls his voice reaches a plaintive pitch, howareyou and dontsayanything, all in one sound. We quickly move on to compare our agendas. Mine so disappointingly open and disorganised while he knows when and where and with whom he will have lunch in six weeks' time.

I lie down again and listen to the gurgling sounds from my busy abdomen, my heart beat skipping here and there and the almost reassuring booming noises from my inner ears. All that life.

I close my eyes and recall my daughter's tanned face, her skype smile from this morning. I drink more herb tea. Birch leaves. Lemon verbena. I walk to the window and watch R for a while, putting down potatoes. So much energy. I need to lie down again. I try not to fall asleep.

Occasionally, not often, moments of clarity when it all makes sense. Not beautiful sense, no eureka moment, just a clicking into place, the voices in my head briefly full of meaning, forcing me to stop for an instance, facing what I am running away from most of the time. I still do, I should know it better by now, but who am I to fool. Every morning a short period of blissful nothingness where I am just me, or what I like to think is me. Before reality wakes me up.

It's nothing dramatic. I can handle it. I am fine. But I wonder when did it start that I took my life for granted, with all the safe comforts that have crept up on us over the years. There was always ambition, curiosity, energy. Stuff I wanted to do, see, influence, change. Endless.

I was ambitious and I was busy. Things were going on, I was always making plans, small projects, travel, visits, ideas, work.

It feels like another lifetime now. I was another person who felt this strong conviction of being a maker, a doer, someone who could influence and achieve simply because I wanted to.

Whereas now. Constantly having to remind myself of this. Over and over and over.

By hard work I cannot make it happen, by being good I cannot make it happen, by self-sacrifice I cannot make it happen, by being clever I cannot make it happen, by being more creative I cannot make it happen. My previous ambitions, reliant on skill and will, are rendered mute, inert, of no interest.
By no effort or will can I change the terms. All I can do is change the approach.

Marion Coutts (The Iceberg)

I have no problem
I look at myself:
I have no problem.
I look all right
and, to some girls,
my grey hair might even be attractive;
my eyeglasses are well made,
my body temperature is precisely thirty seven,
my shirt is ironed and my shoes do not hurt.
I have no problem.
My hands are not cuffed,
my tongue has not been silenced yet,
I have not, so far, been sentenced
and I have not been fired from my work;
I am allowed to visit my relatives in jail,
I’m allowed to visit some of their graves in some countries.
I have no problem.
I am not shocked that my friend
has grown a horn on his head.
I like his cleverness in hiding the obvious tail
under his clothes, I like his calm paws.
He might kill me, but I shall forgive him
for he is my friend;
he can hurt me every now and then.
I have no problem.
The smile of the TV anchor
does not make me ill any more
and I’ve got used to the Khaki stopping my colours
night and day.
That is why
I keep my identification papers on me, even at
the swimming pool.
I have no problem.
Yesterday, my dreams took the night train
and I did not know how to say goodbye to them.
I heard the train had crashed
in a barren valley
(only the driver survived).
I thanked God, and took it easy
for I have small nightmares
that I hope will develop into great dreams.
I have no problem.
I look at myself, from the day I was born till now.
In my despair I remember
that there is life after death;
there is life after death
and I have no problem.
But I ask:
Oh my God,
is there life before death?

Mourid Barghouti 

(translated by Radwa Ashour)

The school boys from down the road. AnnenMayKantereit.

The Greek philosopher Epicurus lived a very long time ago (he was born 2357 years ago on the beautiful island of Samos where people fleeing war and persecution and poverty are arriving everyday, if they survive the short crossing in these overloaded rubber boats having paid several thousand euros for the privilege. Should you ever find yourself in one of the many harbour bars in, say, Kusadasi in Turkey, and you fancy a quick trip to one of the Greek island so enticingly shimmering on the horizon while you sip your sweet chai, all you need to do is walk down to the pier and pay 40 euros for a round trip ticket. You get on to the shiny white ferry and let the wind ruffle your hair while you look at the blue sea and the fading Turkish coastline. That's your privilege because you own the world.). 

Anyway, Epicurus, he wrote lots of wise stuff. I know of him because my father insisted on a classical grammar school where the bored teenager I was then - dreaming of Woodstock and Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones - would spend hours translating and reciting and interpreting ancient Greek literature. I may give you a run down of Plato's cave allegory one day. But that's another story.

A friend of a friend died last week. Suddenly and quite avoidably. He thought he was strong and invincible and he never really needed to see a doctor before. Men tend to be like that in my experience.

He was wrong or maybe fate was waiting. Who knows. It is dreadfully sad, one way or another. 

And we who knew him, we who hear of his unexpected death, we are all now silently contemplating our health, our plans, our futures, our children's futures, our lives stretching in front of us.

Ten more summers? Fifteen? Two? Or is this it?

In his Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus wrote:

For life has no terrors for him who has thoroughly understood that there are no terrors for him in ceasing to live. Foolish, therefore, is the man who says that he fears death, not because it will pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect. Whatever causes no annoyance when it is present, causes only a groundless pain in the expectation. Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no longer.

Idomeni is a small village in Greece close to the border with Macedonia. At the moment, about 13,000 people, mainly Syrians and many of them women and children are stranded there since Macedonia has closed the border. They are stranded in the rain and mud with only very basic support from NGOs, individuals and a pretty helpless UNHCR. 

Menawhile, European politicians have decided that the seemingly never ending streams and constant images of people fleeing war and poverty has a negative effect on their powerful positions. People in Europe, they say, are sick and tired of seeing all this misery. Not our fault, they say. Don't come, they say. Turn back, they say. We don't want to share our wealth with you. We don't want you to mess up our good life. We don't want to help you. We had enough, we are shutting the doors.

So they are working on a clever deal with Turkey, which will involve shipping contingencies of desperate people back and forth like containers loads on heavy goods trains. 

This is the same European Union that was awarded the Nobel peace prize, btw.

Idomeni is another word for shame.

Just two images from today's papers:

After a weekend with tooth ache I went to the dentist and the sky did not fall down. He was very reassuring and even made me a little drawing of the gap between the two molars that got infected because the world is not fair.
I think I will survive. But. Of course, I don't believe he is right and that my last remaining upper molars are quietly rotting away in all their shiny whiteness.
Still hurts but I am ever so cool and brave and grown up. Last night I read about Napoleon and the battle of Austerlitz until the dawn chorus set in. Not in my wildest dreams etc.

I am now the age my father was when he retired. He was offered a golden handshake in one of those corporate takeover scenarios. It took him a year to settle his things and then he walked away from his old life and disappeared for a while. Many years later, he told me about those months. Mostly reading, walking, cycling, museums, listening to music, photography, lots of sleep, he said (he forgot to mention the women). My parents never met again. Lawyers did the talking. Phone numbers were changed several times. The biggest mistake of my life, he often tells me, marrying that woman. I used to shout at him then. Don't speak like that, I am your child and so on. But he never listened to me anyway.

The last time I met my brother, his face went white for a second. You look a lot like her with this haircut. For a moment I thought . . .

I turned to my father and asked, do I look like her? How much do I look like her? Tell me!

I have no memory, he replied. That woman is dead and gone.

 

My parents on their wedding day. 1954. Not quite nine years after the end of WWII. Two young scientists with big ideas and bigger plans. Soon life caught up with them.

altruism

not all is lost

Human infants as young as 14 to 18 months of age help others attain their goals, for example, by helping them to fetch out-of-reach objects or opening cabinets for them. They do this irrespective of any reward from adults (indeed external rewards undermine the tendency), and very likely with no concern for such things as reciprocation and reputation, which serve to maintain altruism in older children and adults. Humans' nearest primate relatives, chimpanzees, also help others instrumentally without concrete rewards.

These results suggest that human infants are naturally altruistic, and as ontogeny proceeds and they must deal more independently with a wider range of social contexts, socialization and feedback from social interactions with others become important mediators of these initial altruistic tendencies.

from: Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, The roots of Human Altruism, British Journal of Psychology, Vol. 100, Issue 3, pages 455-471, 2009