light

i am not my house.

my car.

my job.

my kitchen.

i breathe in golden evening light.

and a calm comes over me.

the very air itself shimmers golden.

liquid gold.

and realize that light is all there really is.

no light without darkness

it’s that dark time of year and with each passing year, i feel increasingly the oppressiveness of the winter darkness. of course, winter was darker than summer where i grew up, but i live a lot farther north now. for example, chicago is on parallel with rome. where i live now, in denmark, the hudson bay. so the winter darkness is significant here.

but with the darkness, come thoughts of light. and memories of light. and somehow, along with the candlelight so prevalent in december, it carries me through...

...a cold, clear march night. a taste of moonshine. and the greenish, eerie glow of lights dancing on the northern horizon.

...a summer night on the prairie. lying on an old wooden bridge in the middle of a pasture, creek flowing below, the song of frogs, crickets and cicada filling the warm night air. strangely undiscovered by mosquitoes, watching the night sky darken and fill with a million stars. the sounds of my own laughter and our low voices, carrying through the night air. filled with the carefree joy of youth and of youthful infatuation and being full of oneself and the feeling of being alive. the light of the stars coursing through our very veins in the warm night air.

...fast forward to another summer, the waters of the volga flowing timelessly past, the winds of time and history washing over me. the summer nights stretching on and on, filled with laughter and song. and the scent of white linen breeze in the waning endless golden hours of sunset.

...warm breezes blowing in off the adriatic, ancient walls trace their trails down a hill. a plate of cool, green melon. a bottle of red wine. a heated discussion of postmodernism in the long twilight hours as night slowly settles in.

and with these, from the darkness, i can recognize that there is an unbearable lightness of being..

scenes from frilandsmuseet: take 2 or it's the light, silly

i found myself being especially observant of the light in all of the old farmhouses at frilandsmuseet. we're pondering quite a lot about how to redo the bits of our farmhouse that won't be torn down and windows are a big issue. we've collected a lot of old, traditional metal-framed windows, thinking we wanted to use them, but they are actually quite small and we're worried it will be quite dark inside. and in these northern latitudes, light is everything. so i looked for how the light fell at frilandsmuseet...

the right windows mean everything

this little geranium is clearly getting enough light.

a rather dark hearth in a house from småland in sweden.

if only my old kitchen were THIS old - that i could live with.

i love, love, love the idea of a step-up pantry

an axe by the door - looks like they're ready for blog camp! ;-)

there were many cobblestone floors. we might experiment with that in one of the rooms of the part of our house that was once a barn. i love how some leaves had found their way in on the autumn winds.

one of the things we're generally really rubbish at is lighting, so it's really important that our coming remodel enables us to take as much advantage of natural light as possible. there's so much inspiration to be had by visiting museums, don't you think?

shadows of thoughts

reading murakami (again again) and feeling thankful that my chairs and lamp still have shadows.

many thoughts are swirling in my head, but they have yet to coalesce and form shadows...so please stand by....

three times trees

the troll hill (troldebakken) across from our house on thursday, december 17, 2009
straight out of the camera (SOOC)

8:29 a.m.

10:42 a.m.

4:04 p.m.

proving once again that light makes all the difference in the world.

5 words: darkness

awhile back, i asked rxbambi for five words - you know, way back when she was doing it on her blog. and she sent them to me and i've pissed away waited a couple more weeks before getting started on them. but today, i thought i'd get a start on them. because one of the words was darkness.

darkness is a fact of life around here these days. today's stats: sunrise 8:34 a.m. sunset: 3:34 p.m. this makes it difficult to get up in the morning, as it feels impossibly early and generally wrong to get out of the warm covers when it's still so dark. and in the afternoon, the sun may be setting at 3:34 p.m., but you can already feel the sunset light at about 2 p.m. i'm happy that we're only a few days from the solstice and heading in the other direction, towards lighter days, because i'll admit i find it rather depressing.

but i'm making an effort this year, to appreciate it, rather than complaining so much and i've realized there are some good things about this dark time:

~ using loads of candles. when it's dark already mid-afternoon, you can fill all of the windowsills with candles. it looks warm and inviting both inside and out.

~ real candles on the christmas tree

~ a fire crackling in the fireplace

~ warm apple cider and æbleskiver (yummy danish pancake balls) with powdered sugar and strawberry jam

~ walking in the winter wonderland of tivoli (which we're doing this evening)

~ sparklers in the house

stay tuned for the other four words in the near future...

* * *

drumroll please...we have picked a winner!

you all had a lot of good food for thought on my what did i mean by this picture? post last week. i had a really hard time deciding which person should win the random handmade item and i even enlisted my sister and husband to help me choose a winner (i said it would be entirely subjective). my sister complained loudly about the assignment, saying it was an awful lot of reading to try to do while simultaneously being on the air (she works at a radio station), knitting a nose warmer, counting bricks of sculpey clay and chatting with me on gmail chat. husband sighed deeply when i handed him the six printed pages at 11:30 p.m. and said, help me!! but read them he did and we even stayed up another hour discussing the whys and wherefores of blogging (it was his question i posed on twitter - is blogging a religion?).

husband liked this one best - it suited his enigmatic bent:

discounderworld said...

I think it says you missed a spot.

my sister liked this comment best - particularly the bit about covering up stagnancy:

One Womans Thoughts said...

Your post was as if you had peeked into my mind about the whole blogging experience, and your words said it so much better than I could have. As for your photo, I see the house with solid walls, solid wooden door and small window, a place where the mind has grown closed and the emotions inside are not being nurtured, not given air to breathe and exposure to all of life. The plant life alongside is growing fast and tall, trying to cover up the ugliness of stagnancy. And as the sun shines on all of this, it's also a call for a new beginning offered us each and everyday. I'm probably not anywhere even close, and I'm eager to read the other comments as I have not read them before posting. I'm sure you've been entertained by the possiblities of the minds.

and i was thinking about sending someone to switzerland in january to rough up gwen over this comment:

Gwen said...

I am totally going to start using the word "rad" in all my blog posts. Also, squee!!

Squee!! It's going to be so rad!!

then came this comment and it became clear to me which one i liked most - because of recently spending a lot of time thinking about opening new doors:

The Fragrant Muse said...

I'm just reading this post today and can't imagine that, being the 29th commenter, I'll have one original thought about the post or the photo. Nevertheless, here's what I have to say on the subject(s):

The blogosphere reminds me of high school. You show up feeling incredibly insecure and seeing every other blogger as cool, marvelous, sophisticated and so much better than you. With time you find your own little group where you feel safe. With time you become more self-assured and begin to show more of yourself. You experiment, branch out, make new friends and leave some of the old friends behind. You develop BFFs and you avoid the crowds that scare you. You tell secrets, give advice, listen to the advice of others. Sometimes you argue, take sides or just listen. You soothe the wounds of those you care about who are hurting. You stand up for yourself when criticized or decide you don't give a hoot about the opinion of others. And through it all you grow.

As for the photograph, I see a metaphor for blogging: When one side gets old, just look around the corner and there's a new door to discover!

and since i enlisted the help of others, i'll send something fun to discounderworld, one woman's thoughts and fragrant muse (yup, skipping gwen for that mean rad thing. :-p). i won't promise to get something sent before christmas, as that's looking pretty unlikely, but i do promise to send you something handmade early in january if you send me your snail mail address! and a big thanks to all of you for your thoughts. i studied it again myself and i think that what i liked about the photo was something about the play between light and shadow and the way that underlines how we reveal or don't reveal ourselves through our voices here in the blogosphere.

the special light of spring

this time of year the light is so special in these northern climes. i shouldn't actually try to describe it, because it's indescribable, but since when did i back down from a challenge? maybe it's so striking because if you've lived through the darkest part of the winter, you appreciate the return of the light that much more. as the sun comes up on a february morning, it loses the harshness that it has in october, where it cuts into your eyes from the horizon--that harsh sharpness that almost makes you happy that it's cloudy and overcast all of november. the spring light gives you a sense of hope with its almost pink, goldeny glow. if the temperatures are mild to go with it, you see the leaves of crocuses and snowdrops begin to peek out of the ground, eager to greet the light. the light brings with the promise of spring and even when you otherwise cannot sense spring in the air, you know it's on its way.

we have had the spring light here in denmark for a couple of weeks now. i noticed last week in oslo that it hadn't really reached that far north yet. i remember reading about this spring light in the vilhelm moberg series of novels--the emigrants. kirsten longed for that spring light which she remembered from sweden. now that i have seen it myself, i understand why.