expectations will kick you every time

i am in need of a bit of wonder woman's fearlessness at the moment.

i put myself in a situation this evening which made me realize that i'm still feeling pretty wounded. i went with a friend to sing with a little countryside gospel choir. i went with high hopes to be energized and filled with happiness by soulful gospel music and i'm afraid that didn't happen. and to be honest, i didn't know that i expected that until it didn't happen. expectations can really ruin things.

it started with the usual round of shaking everyone's hand, which always wrong-foots me. it's an aspect of danish culture that i never really get used to or comfortable with. going around a room, shaking hands with strangers and saying your name is, in fact, a really good idea, but it makes me wildly uncomfortable, even after all these years. then, i ended up standing with my friend, who was standing with the sopranos. i'm an alto and was told, rather rudely, in my opinion, that i needed to go to the other side. we hadn't been singing in parts at the time and crossing the half circle, in front of everyone, after being rather summarily sent over there, felt like a statement on my singing ability. "get over there because i can't stand the sound of your voice next to me." it probably wasn't meant that way, but it definitely felt that way.  and it took me awhile to talk myself out of my prickly reaction. truthfully, i never fully shook it off, especially as it felt like the part of the circle i found myself in kept pushing me back and kept me a step out of it.

the songs we were singing didn't help. they were all unfamiliar, difficult arrangements and for the first one, we didn't have the music. i'm a music reader. i need to see the actual notes on the page, i don't do well just listening and humming along at first. and it wasn't like the others knew the songs either, they were new for all. and it wasn't the warm, familiar songs i had expected. see, there're those expectations again. they creep in, even when you don't even know they're there, spoiling the experience.

the second song should have been familiar (happy day), but it was a new arrangement that was very different and difficult. at least we had the music to look at, but with three parts - soprano, alto and tenor, and varying ability of those there to follow the sheet music, i felt bewildered at times, thinking i was the only one in the room reading the actual notes on the page and that all of the others were in on this alternative method of reading music that i didn't know about. leaving me once again feeling vulnerable and slightly rejected.

not what i wanted to feel at the gospel choir.

i wanted to enter a room of people who were open and warm, or who had been opened up and warmed through by the familiar, energizing gospel music of my cultural background (this was a reasonable expectation, right?). because although i am a midwestern white girl, i do know gospel music when i hear it. and i wanted to give myself over to that energy and soul and warmth. and it simply wasn't there in a little parish house in denmark full of middle aged white women and a couple of men. and i am undoubtedly a middle-aged white woman as well, so maybe i shouldn't talk. but, i think you can take the gospel out of the US, but you can't retain the soul of it so far from its origins, especially if you have danish composers creating their disjointed version of it. one song was seriously like four very different genres smooshed together into one and it was downright disorienting. again, not the energy and comfort i was looking for.

tonight, i was reminded that i am wounded and it made me sad. and left me with that old familiar mid-atlantic feeling. i'll grant that i would be too white trying to sing with a real gospel choir in the states, but i can't even fit in with one here. so i'm left alone, somewhere in between.

i don't know why in these moments that i can't summon the energy to dive in and sing along on the happy day solo part, giving some of the energy to the room that i was wishing it would give to me. i don't know where my confidence has gone. and i don't really know how to recover it.

my inner wonder woman, where are you when i need you?

august wanes and the season changes

what a month it's been! planes, trains, ships and cars. edinburgh, london, dover, hamburg and copenhagen. the culmination of a very big and very healing (for my wounded soul) project that resulted in a world record. a couple of days away with all of my co-workers. we sent the child off to the states for her year of high school. a bit of time in the garden here and there. as the garden produces its abundance, all of the other more metaphorical seeds that were sown over the past year have also come to fruition. i feel sated by the bounty of it all.

we've had the best weather of the whole summer in the past couple of days but right now, it's raining with biblical intensity. husband is helping the child with her algebra in the other room, via facetime. there are two teenage cats racing back and forth, playing a bit too rough. we had a roast chicken for dinner. i served it with a squash gratin (i'm using squash in everything, since the plants are going like gangbusters in the garden) and a broad bean mash (also from the garden). a simple salad of plum tomatoes and cucumbers from the greenhouse rounded it out. it's so satisfying that most of the meal came from our own garden.

i made it to yoga entirely too little during august. i saw friends too little. but on the whole, it's been a very exciting and happy month. it feels like i'm entering a new season of happiness, just as autumn, which is always my favorite season, comes around. a balance has come, an equilibrium. it's borne of spending my weeks doing work that makes me happy and being home on the weekends in this place in the countryside that makes me happy. it's the best of both worlds. long, deep conversations with husband make us both appreciate the time we do have together. meals eaten together, a glass of something cold in the garden in the late afternoon, musings about garden designs. life is full and good as august comes to a close.

2015 :: another year, another 365 project

taking a photo every day is just ingrained in me at this point, it's part of who i am. and i'm grateful i've continued to do it. looking back on this year, it felt darker and sadder than it appears in the photos. dad's death the previous november and the disappearance of my wonderful job after only one year were tough blows and it felt, for much of 2015, like i've been in mourning, and i suppose i have. top it off with the intense pain of a sudden back problem and subsequent surgery and it felt like the longest year of my life. but, my photos of the year, overall, are bright and cheerful. and that somehow makes it less heavy here at the end of the year. it's like the darkness is lifting. and that fills me with hope for sweet '16 - 2016.

january 2015

the year, as it always does in denmark, started with fireworks. and i can see that towards the end of the month we had actual snow! i didn't remember that. i was clearly in minifigure mode and they lend quite a lot of whimsy that i don't recall feeling at the time. but i must have been seeking it and taking comfort in it on some instinctive level.

february 2015

i found that royal typewriter on husband's favorite auction site and had to have it. we had one just like it growing up and it somehow, the clack of those green keys became connected to my dad in my head and i just needed it. as i recall, it went for a song, but i spent more than twice the price on the bridge getting there and back to pick it up. my old iMac gave up the ghost and i needed a new one. that was a definite bright spot, as there's nothing like a new apple product. other bright spots were time spent art journaling and in the company of cats.

march 2015

the light began to return in earnest. i went around with the sparkle unicorn fairy in my pocket, still obviously seeking some glimmer of magic. for my birthday, i got a chemex coffee maker and i'm convinced it makes the best, cleanest, smoothest coffee.

april 2015

april began with a trip to hamburg that got extended by a day and an unexpectedly lovely experience in a charming little hotel overlooking the otherwise seedy reeperbahn. we began working in the garden and we put the first of many coats of red paint on the kitchen floor. we had a batch of baby bunnies as well, because spring. a footbridge in sweden was named for my late father-in-law. that last photo? it's my precious frieda's pretty feet, perched on the edge of the sink, waiting for me to turn the water on for her. wow, i miss that.

may 2015

oh, the glorious color of green of a newly sprung beech forest. there's no better green. we hunted and found, at last, two pairs of the ferrell williams adidas - one for me and one for sabs. the first kittens were born and the glorious yellow rapeseed fields were in full bloom. an artist friend began to paint hens on our kitchen island because the red floor was finished at last. it was a rather glorious spring, i realize now, looking back on it. i was also super busy with my freelancing job, but oddly, that doesn't show at all in this mosaic. perhaps i was already distancing myself from the creeping feeling that lego had pockets of nastiness and i had managed to stumble into several of them.  i didn't realize it at the time. or perhaps i did and that's why i don't have any photos of the place.

june 2015

june was filled with kittens and lilacs and parties and visits and a couple of fun photoshoots. i seem to remember it as more rainy and dreary than it appears to have been. there was a danish election and the government changed from left to right (tho' the right is called left. don't ask.) and from slightly more forward-thinking to much, much more xenophobic and bigoted and even unfriendly to the environment. so disheartening.

july 2015

after our rather cold early summer, the strawberries finally appeared in july, a good couple of weeks later than usual. but on the bright side, they lasted longer. i made 20 liters of strawberry juice and filled the freezer with countless bags. we also ate strawberries and cream every night until we couldn't eat any more. i made strawberry ice cream and strawberry sorbet. and once the strawberries were done, the red currants began. our artist friend finished painting the kitchen island with whimsical chickens and a friendly fox. the first veggies appeared in the garden and the greenhouse.

august 2015

i was obviously a little obsessed with that little dinosaur in august. he was small and easy to keep in my pocket. the kittens were growing up and they went off to give an injection of new blood to a friend's barn. we made yet another shopping trek to hamburg (that was becoming a theme). sabin started at her efterskole (a kind of boarding school, emphasizing gymnastics).  it was a very good decision to send her there. she is thriving and growing so very much. oh, and there was that taco truck coming to town (well, to billund, which i will generously refer to as a town) - with real corn tortillas. heaven. a welcome visit from a fellow legographer rounded off a pretty good month. at the end of august, after coming in first runner-up for a new job in lego for the third time, i decided to look for jobs elsewhere, including copenhagen and on august 28, i applied for the job that i would get back in the shipping world.

september 2015

the visit from xxsjc prompted me to think i needed some vintage lego fabuland characters, so i went to ebay and found some. they are fun to photograph. the new minifig series came out and i bought a whole box. that was very popular when we went to our yearly family crayfish party in sweden. a neighbor called and said she had a whole bucket of extra porcinis she'd picked that afternoon. i oven-dried them to flavor winter's sauces. the plum tomatoes were going gangbusters in our greenhouse and i oven-dried a bunch of those well. most of my time was spent at our new library, painting a mural in the children's section and making coffee for everyone. i also painted a table for the teen/tween section with that magical annie sloan chalk paint. i definitely want to work with that again. a couple of job interviews and, one month after i applied, i landed that job in shipping.

october 2015

the magical amanitas came out, telling us it was really autumn. we celebrated my new job contract with champagne. and after being pulled back and forth through the ringer with lego and their horrendously slow and unprofessional hr practices, it was so nice to encounter a professional organization that could get the job done. our new library/"culture house" opened with a big party. more than 500 people came. i had arranged a quilt and handiwork exhibition as part of it and talked to so many wonderful people with wonderful stories that evening. my new job, even before i started, sent me and husband and sabin on a minicruise to oslo to "experience the product." it was pretty great! charlie had four kittens! her cutest batch yet. i started my new job, but only ten days in, i was knocked flat by a disc prolapse and experienced some of the worst pain of my life.

november 2015

most of my november was spent lying in bed (at least i had kittens). i couldn't stand upright for more than 5 minutes and walking, even just out to the kitchen to make a cup of a tea was a pretty overwhelming challenge. i spent a couple of hours in an mri machine and countless more consulting doctors and physical therapists. after getting somewhat the right cocktail of pain meds, i went back to my new job (which was thankfully very understanding) for as many hours as i could take. i even slipped up to the kusama exhibition at louisiana one evening, when i was in need of soul-soothing after an awful bullying letter that came out of the blue. some good friends came to my house and cooking a thanksgiving feast. i unexpectedly lost my precious frieda.

december 2015

december brought a new camera - a fuji x-t1 mirrorless camera. it's for work, but i took a load of pictures around home to get acquainted with it. i miss the multiple focus points of my beloved D300, but overall, it's a good one. i had back surgery december 4 and spent ten days recovering. i did go back to work and it went well, but it required a lot of energy. i even flew to amsterdam and back and sailed from there to newcastle and back and did pretty well. the worst i ended up with was a christmas cold. the kittens all found new homes and things have gone back to normal around here on the cat front, aside from the gaping hole left by frieda's absense. there's one ginger ninja sleeping at my feet as i write this and charlie, our little white mama kitty is resting at my side in relief that her mothering duties are over for now.

another year winding down. and while it felt like it was mostly lows, looking back through these photos, i can see that it wasn't. the tide of sorrow has turned, i'm quite literally on the mend (both my back and my wounded-by-lego sense of self) and looking forward to what 2016 has to offer.

how will you ring in the new year? with friends? with a party? with champagne? oysters? in a crowd? with fireworks? or just relaxed around the table with candlelight, cocktails, some good food and friends? we're definitely choosing that last option.

rising from the ashes

i'm not a fan of brené brown (pretentious git, i could not stand this ted talk by her), but this post about her work on brain pickings did speak to me.  it makes me realize that it's time to release the notion of idealized perfection and acknowledge that it's been really hard for the past year. my dream job being taken away for reasons that feel false and disingenuous has left me wounded in ways from which it feels like i might never recover. to have found something that felt so perfect and so much like home and have it taken away hurts so much. i wonder if i'll find a job that feels so right ever again? will all other jobs pale in comparison? and the thought that i might not ever be as happy in my work again is truly frightening and leaves me paralyzed. at times, it just seems like too much and i want to crawl into bed and pull the covers over my head and just sleep until the world is different. or at least until my view on it changes.

but brown's work is about rising from the ashes of defeat, not about sleeping it off. it's about the guts and resilience it takes. she says, "the process of regaining our emotional footing in the midst of struggle is where our courage is tested and our values are forged." the grit it takes to do this is often lauded in today's world, as we rush headlong towards happy endings, but brown says that discounts the pain and the hard work of rising again after a defeat. "embracing failure without acknowledging the real hurt and fear that it can cause, or the complex journey that underlies rising strong, is gold-plating grit. to strip failure of its real emotional consequences is to scrub the concepts of grit and resilience of the very qualities that make them both so important — toughness, doggedness, and perseverance."

the truth is, i feel that some part of my identity was stripped from me along with my dream job and it feels like purposeful cruelty. and while i have been fighting the notion that i am my work for a good many years now, the truth is that it's inescapable in our culture. so i am left wondering who i am and what's next. and i'm feeling like any grit i once had that would help me through such an experience is gone for good.

but perhaps each time i acknowledge the hurt and pick a bit more at the wound, it will get a little bit better and i will find a way to rise once again from a failure not really my own. and perhaps that's the problem. this happened to me due to the cold, unfeeling reality of corporate decision-making and despite how very personal it feels, it actually wasn't when it comes down to it. and that makes it hard to know what to learn from it - should i become less trusting? be a cold, unfeeling spectre? do i give less of myself the next time? should i not fall in love with a job i love? do i stop being my real self in order to protect that self the next time around? it's all still very bewildering. i wonder when it will get any easier...

the view from here

the last of our long spring holiday weekends is winding down. we got our fair share of most welcome sunshine. after a nice dinner (another of those south dakota beef roasts that have strangely been available in our local grocery store), husband and i took a walk down to the lake. the wind, which had been blowing quite intensely all day had all but died down and we had a quiet moment on what's left of the fallen tree (husband has been hard at work turning it into firewood). birdsong and the smell of verdant summer were all around us as we gazed at the peaceful lake. it was a good way to end the day and the weekend. 

i've had need for peaceful moments of late...needless strife and conflict with my sister has zapped my energy. why are we hardest on those we love the most? i have been reminded that words are sharper weapons than actual physical blows and healing from unwisely chosen words takes longer than a recovering from a physical injury. i wonder at times if you ever really get over the most hurtful accusations? especially if they are bewildering and incomprehensible. i've also realized that losing a parent makes you feel and behave in strange ways that make you unrecognizable, perhaps even to yourself. grief is a journey.

but working outdoors in the garden, or indoors on the new kitchen, or even cleaning, tidying and doing laundry - things where you see the tangible results of what you do - really does help. it eases the mind and soothes the wounded spirit. and so does a moment by the lake, breathing the quiet, letting it penetrate your very pores. 

it will eventually be ok in the end. and if it's not ok, it's not the end. 

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this made me laugh.

"i went paleo and now i hate everything."

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check out the amazing 1917 chalkboards they found under some other chalkboards in oklahoma city.

finding solace in poetry

i've been looking for solace in the face of the political climate. it hasn't been easy to find. but there are bright spots here and there. and one of them is the poetry of mary oliver. i've often said i'm not a poetry person, but these times call for beauty that's complex and deep and which speaks directly to a parched and wounded soul. and nothing does that like poetry. funny, i'm also not a morning person, but these two poems lauding the morning both spoke to me and soothed my soul. i even worked them into my art journal today. soul soothed. at least for the moment.

Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who make the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety -
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light -
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

- Mary Oliver

Morning

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.

Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.

The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.

The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.

Then laps the bowl clean.

Then wants to go out into the world

where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,

then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.

I watch her a little while, thinking:

what more could I do with wild words?

I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.

I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

- Mary Oliver

eat, pray, love

reading elizabeth gilbert's "eat, pray, love." or should i say re-reading. just finished it and am reading it again. i read too fast and don' t remember so well. so re-reading is in order. it warrants an immediate re-read. it's good stuff. and soooo exactly what i need right now. although i do NOT want to go to india to get past this one....truth be told, i'm not fond of india. but i could do italy and indonesia. no problem. it's an excellent book to read if you're feeling run down and your soul is wounded and has been for a long time and for some strange reason (the volume of emails in your life?) you didn't really notice....

the view from a safe distance

i am really at a loss for words about the events in connecticut. i feel a little bit about it like i did about 9/11 - i didn't know anyone involved, so it didn't really affect me directly, but yet, i feel somehow personally wounded by it anyway. so senseless. so violent. so incomprehensible. and i suppose we'll never know what possessed that young man to do it. and writing it off to madness somehow negates it, so i hesitate to even think that.

but i think the most disappointing thing has been the idiocy of the gun-happy people - some of whom are sadly, close to my own family. an inflammatory conversation on facebook has me fuming. how on earth can someone who is a teacher herself defend guns and make the most absurd arguments (aren't teachers taught basic rhetoric) in the hours immediately following the events? the timing of the ridiculous arguments, while the details were still fuzzy, chilled me to the bone. interesting that the person in question never dares in person to broach such subjects, but chooses the passive aggressive forum that is facebook to do so. but that's no doubt the stuff of a different post.

the fact is that this introverted, socially-awkward kid did what he did because legally-obtained guns were at hand in his home (why on earth an elementary school teacher had need for multiple semi-automatic weapons is another mystery). if he'd had to go out and try to obtain them illegally, he wouldn't have known where to begin. this happened because he had access to guns.

i feel for all those families, devastated right before christmas. but if anything good can come of it (and it seems an awful lot like there's nothing good in it at all), we can hope that something will be done with the gun laws in the US. there are entirely too many stories like this one, whether on a campus, in a school or in a movie theatre. apparently americans are not to be trusted with guns. and this is surely not what they meant with the second amendment.

tune in and tune out

funny that i read frank bruni's column on how our devices help isolate us from the world on the same day when a facebook friend posted a shockingly racist and downright nasty post about president obama. it was supposedly written by a black journalist, which supposedly made it all better. it didn't. and i hid it from my feed, not wanting my world and my mind poisoned with such absolute vitriol and frankly, utter bullshit (the tea party crap about michelle not loving her country and obama being a communist). it crossed my mind to unfriend that particular friend.

i hide other posts on my feed - graphic pictures of kitties in need of eye medicine and scarred, wounded pitbulls in shelters. i don't want to see those things. i want cute pictures of healthy kitties and cake and scrubbed children on the first day of school and hilarious videos of clever bulldogs that can go get the milk out of the refrigerator. it's this curation (tho' i hate that word) of the content of the world around us that bruni is talking about. we narrow all of the information coming at us down to just what we want to see, rejecting anything that's of a differing opinion or world view than the one we already have.

i think this selecting is something we do instinctively to survive the onslaught of information coming our way. we don't go to facebook or twitter to hear good arguments or have our minds changed about anything, we go to relax, have a chat, check in on what's going on among our friends. it's today's telephone call. my friends or the pages i follow sometimes share something that opens my eyes or causes me to learn or think in a different way (the links below came to me via facebook pages i follow), but mostly, i laugh at wrongly attributed quotes, pithy aphorisms and photos of that poor grumpy cat. it's facebook, after all, not a paris salon in 1913.

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check out these amazing photos of the burning man festival in the nevada desert.

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if libraries are over, why do we keep building spectacular new ones?

maybe they're not so over.

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milk vodka?