future and past skies

A sky that was all about the future: sunset at the wedding day of a friend.




A moment from my short trip to Cologne, same time, last year. came across this scribbled note again that made me remember:

Cologne Dome.
Old stones.
Young people.
Future and past, 
on a stairway.




And a sky from last weekend: a touch of autumn in summer: harvested fields.

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more skies: skywatch friday
more moments from august: augustbreak2017

april skies unplugged

Some skies from this week....

...logging into the blog, even though I knew I havn't blogged since a while, it was a surprise to see that the last entry is from a month ago. 

Interesting to see that without really planning to, I actually did a "digital fast" and unplugged from facebook, twitter and the blog, and only posted photos at Instagram every now and then.

Today I am enjoying the skies, and remembered sky friday... more skies from everywhere, over at: Skywatch Friday.

sky alchemy, Antarctica, You-Are-There-Reading, or: I open my arms to the romance of it all

It's grey winter days here - the overcast skies made me go and browse my shelves, looking for a fitting book. That's how I arrived at "Skating to Antarctica" by Jenny Diski - it was one of the books I ordered while I was reading through all continents. In the end, I read another book for Antarctica, and since then, "Skating" is waiting. Now I started it as it felt fitting for this winter. And it was such a good surprise find, both the author, and the book.

I didn’t know about Jenny Diski. Turns out, she had a fascinating life: she had a troubled childhood, followed by stays in a psychiatric hospital in her youth, due to depression. But she had the luck that one of her classmates was the son of Doris Lessing, who recognized her early talent and supported her in an extraordinary way, offering to live in her house when she was a teenager.

The book "Skating to Antarctica" is a memoir with two focus points: her youth, and the difficult relationship with her mother - and a journey to a place that comforts her in its simple whiteness: Antarctica.

Here’s a quote from her, about the longing that inspired the journey:

But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.” ― Jenny Diski

The book itself, despite the topics, has a rather humorous touch and is rather connected to the details of the world. Diski herself looked for fitting reads, too, on her journey. Here's a paragraph I read today, it made me smile:

I was beguiled by the sea and so much of it; snow and ice and white places in abeyance for the time being. An hour or so later, I returned to my bunk, got under the thin duvet and watched the sky outside my porthole for a bit, before opening the copy of Moby Dick I had brought with me on the grounds that now, if ever, was the time to overcome my aversion to nautical literatur. By the third page I was thrumming with pleasure at the energy and freedom of Melville's writing.

These reflections made me a) remember the first line of Moby Dick, ("Call me Ishmael") and consider reading the start of Moby Dick, and b) think of the essay on reading which is about reading book in the very place the book is set: "You-Are-There Reading", Anne Fadiman called this.

And as a side-effect of all this, it seems I am back now to book-blogging, and to taking sky photos and writing smallstones:



Between the dark of night
And the white of snow:
The sky alchemy of winter sunrise

So far, January has been "real winter" here in the South of Germany, with snow on an almost daily basis. And there were some bright nights, with full moon and with Venus showing. Seems January is supposed to bring some interesting sky constellations. Here's a link from National Geographic: "Starstruck – 6 Great Sky Events in January"

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The other Antarctica book
The other Antarctica book I read back then for the continent challenge? That was "Icebound" by Jerri Nielsen, also a memoir, about a winter in the South Pole station. And to continue this book domino: Icebound includes an You-Are-There Reading moment, too:

"The pole station has an own small library, and it includes the books of the first Antarctica expeditions. And so "Ice Bound" transcends from the present to the past of the pole, to the first explorers, and the power of the word, the way it can share experiences and bring comfort. The quote in the video is expressing a lot in just a few sentences: "When I was feeling my worst, Big would sit up next to me at night reading passages from Endurance... The story of Shakletone's struggle in 1915 to survive and keep his crew alive touched me deeply and comforted me. He was the explorer who best understood the wild, seductive lure of Antarctica. "I have ideals," he said," and far away, in my own white South, I open my arms to the romance of it all.""

Here's the link to the blog post about "Icebound".

Moby Dick

And in case you feel like reading into Moby Dick now: there's an online version, here's the start of it: "Call me Ishmael. Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation." - Moby Dick chapter 1

Links
More skies... skywatch friday
More about Jenny Diski at Wiki: Jenny Diski

snow sky poetry moments, or: what I want in my life is..

"On the last day of the year, who better than Mary Oliver to inspire us?" - a friend of mine wrote, and posted a part from her poem "The Ponds"

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled—
to cast aside the weight of facts...

Since then, the reading and sharing of poetry continued - one of my favs from this new year poetry stream is M.S. Merwin's "To the New Year",

so this is the sound of you

here and now whether or not

anyone hears it this is

where we have come with our age

our knowledge such as it is

and our hopes such as they are

invisible before us

untouched and still possible

Beyond those established poems, there also is the memory of the tiny poems / notes of moments, written last year in January. It's a good thing, to take time to note a small moment each day, and note it down - to be more attentive and aware of all those moments that make a day.

It was easy to return to this practice, especially as the first snow started to fall on Monday, giving the world a soft and special touch. And also nice to return to skywatch friday that way: with a light/snow photo.

So somehow, unplanned, this year started on a poetic sky tune.

Here are two of the tiny snow moments:

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and some additional links:

Poetry Foundation - Mary Oliver
Poetry International
poetry in this blog

November rain and happiness

Last weekend was still mild and sunny -
but now November arrived for real, with grey skies and rain.

We tried our luck in a rainbreak, and it was good to get some fresh air...



... at least until the next rainclouds arrived.

Knowing that it would be a rainy weekend, I visited the library and picked some of their new books.

The green one is about happiness - it's written by Maike van den Boom, who is half Dutch, half German, and who travelled around the world and visited the 13 happiest countries - and met with common people and with scientists - to find some of clues to happiness, both on a national and a personal level. Pretty interesting. A bit too generalizing maybe - I guess you find happy and less happy people everywhere, and the country/culture is only one of the many factors for happiness.



The other book is one I almost didn't pick, but the publisher is rather good: campus. Turns out, the book is rather good, too: "Manul for the brain" is an introduction into the ways our brain and memory is functioning, with many recent studies included, and with practical advice for current themes like the use of social media, or the trend to multitask.

And I watched a great film which had an odd title, but was fabulous: "Me and Earl and the Dying Girl" (oddly. the German title is shortened to: "Me and Earl and the Girl"). The film premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Audience Award for U.S. Drama at the festival. It's simply amazing.

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more skies from around the world:
Skywatch friday

local sunrise

An october morning from this week,
seen from the window here

more skies: skywatch friday

in yellow days & your world

it’s this time again:
summer fading and autumn entering in yellow days.
such a color spectacle, the way one tree can color
all the space around it.

and time:
one week ago, it was our final island day.
i walked along the beach in a t-shirt.
watched swallows sail.



The island atmosphere, the more open horizon, the different rhythm of time - it still continues this week. There is a larger art project I am working with right now, and it's beautiful that this week brings the space and time to stay with it. More about that in a while - it's also the reason why I am less active in the blog and in the online hangouts right now.

From island to sky words:

A habit that developed during the island time: reading some poetry in the morning. Poetry Foundation has a playful poetry app that lets you spin a wheel of themes, and then lists poems. That’s how I arrived here this week:

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“Your World”

by Georgia Douglas Johnson

Your world is as big as you make it.

I know, for I used to abide

In the narrowest nest in a corner,

My wings pressing close to my side. 

But I sighted the distant horizon

Where the skyline encircled the sea

And I throbbed with a burning desire

To travel this immensity.

I battered the cordons around me

And cradled my wings on the breeze,

Then soared to the uttermost reaches

With rapture, with power, with ease!

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more skies from everywhere:
skywatch friday

august moon

Inspired by the #awakeaugust invite, August turned into a month of noticing small moments, for me and many others.

As some training experts suggest, habits take about 3 weeks to develop. And that's how it feels - what was a bit of a challenge at first, is now coming with more ease. Or to put it another way: without planning to, I notice more.

Here's a moment from yesterday:

Friday evening walk
Moon and sun and a harvested field
This first touch of autumn in the atmosphere

Altogether, it feels this August is special, and so beautiful right now. Even though the skies were overcast and rainy when the meteor showers arrived. but it's a sunny weekend, so that is a big plus.

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you can still join if you like: ‪#‎awakeaugust‬
and for more skies: skywatch friday 

tall bay view

A room with a bay view - that's what we had for our final two days in Mallorca, after the Finca stay in the North. Such a good contrast. I so enjoyed the view, with the palm tree right in front of our balcony.

Here's a second photo, taken an hour later, at a different angle. The bay lamps, you only notice how huge they are when you see the parasols and people next to them.

Inspired by the photo challenge "tall", and by skwatch friday.

sunday trips: green hills + christo moment

This Sunday, I drove to the Alb plateau again. It's one of my favourite places here in the region, yet it's been a while since I've been there. It's a precious place, both for the open view it offers, and for its history: this once was a vulcano. Now sheep and cows live here. The vulcano history is still present, though: see the perfect cone-shaped hill? That's an old small vulcanoe.

While I went for a walk, the shepherd and his sheep crossed the way. So nice. And all timeless. It feels, the clocks still tick slower up there.



Meanwhile, a friend of mine is in Italy, and sent this photo - this is from the Christo installation "Floating piers" at lake Iseo. Seeing the photos made me go and look how far it is to the lake... well, turns out, I don't have to wonder whether I want to go or not. The installation ended this weekend. But so good to receive the photos from there.



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more skies from everywhere: sky friday

Friday thunder + a sky / moon letter

and a sweet update ...the sun came back and the raindrops started to shine:

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Friday 4 pm and after a morning of clouds and sun, the clouds gather and turn dark - and then rain starts to fall. Some minutes later, it's a full-blown storm, with lightening and thunder. The week of troubled weather news in Germany continues: so much rain. The rivers are high and brown. Hopefully, the weekend will bring a rain pause. 

On the upside, there was:  a sky / moon letter. From the Frankfurt museum. I visited it last month, to see the Miro exhibition (more about that, here: Miro: murals and dreams). Still I was surprised to receive a letter from them. When visiting them, I left my card there, which also includes the link to the comic-website I freelance for. And it seems, they picked up on that: the letter is an invite for their next exhibition, which is about: comics. The moon is the invite, with details on the back. So nice.  Here's more about the exhibition: "Pioneers of the comic strip - a different avant-garde."



After taking some photos, I also tried to catch the atmosphere in a rain video. The gloomy sound you can hear in the second scene is thunder, if i had started to film some seconds earlier, i might have caught the lightening, too.




more skies from everywhere: skywatch friday

5 sky moments: angel cloud, may tree, comic festival erlangen, starsky, and a blackout

The weather is still a rollercoaster, but there were some really nice sky moments happening these days. One was an this interesting cloud that included both an angel-shape and a heart-shape, depending how you look at it.

And another sweet sky moment: the "Maibaum" (may tree) that is put up each year in celebration of spring.

Also, there was: a colorful short trip. This weekend, I visited the "Comic-Salon" Erlangen, a great comic festival. More than 500 artists attended, and the themes of the exhibitions were rather international, with features on India, Africa, Europe and Japan. (I also blogged for a comic-blog there, the photos are online here at mycomics.de).
This is the entry to the festival:

Below is a photo of the main exhibition, with an artificial star sky and handwritten notes by African comic artist Marguerite Abouet (i read her book "Aya" last year, here's the reading note: "Aya" by Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie is a graphic novel - it "tells an unpretentious and gently humorous story of an Africa we rarely see-spirited, hopeful, and resilient, the main character is "Aya", 19 years old with the plan to study. Aya won the 2006 award for Best First Album at the Angoulême International Comics Festival." - and it it’s like the reviews said, such a different image of / story from Africa. The story is set in Ivory-Coast, a bit soap-opera like, but lovely to read with the energy it has.")

Yet the sky also brought bad weather: on Sunday evening, a huge stormfront moved through the South of Germany, with lightening and thunder, and heavy rain. Lightening struck close to here, leading to a blackout that lasted an hour - and just when the light faded and i started to light candles, the power came back. We were still lucky, though: the only damage done was to the flowers, like this white iris. Not far from here, in a town 30 kilometres to the North, it turned really bad, with high water, drowned cars, flooded houses, and 4 people who lost their life. Once again, a reminder how fragile our world is, even though it seems so safe.

More skies from around the world: skywatch friday

rough sky

When I checked the new photo friday theme on friday morning, it was "Rough", and I had no real idea where to start. Six hours later I met up with a friend - and walking there, I saw this "Rough" graffiti. Right there. The red thing, it actually is a river seat. For sunnier days.

Which leads to the title of this post: rough sky. Every now and then, there is this touch of real spring in the air, with sunny moments. Then the clouds take over again. And just to add to it, when the sun shines, then it's often in the middle of the week, in the morning. I miss the sun-terrace-time. The feeling of warmth on my skin. Of walking in less layers. Of waking to bright blue sky... this is a photo from this morning. A sky that feels both soft, and rough in its withholding:



Which connects to 2 poems I once wrote, on a similar morning. It came up when I searched my writing files for "rough" - the word isn't in the poem itself, but in the invite to submit: "Send Rough Poetic Stuff". So here they are:

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rave/n

an overcast morning

but the sun rises just there

in the only stripe of sky

between cherry twigs

greys blend into rays of light

while a stone shadow

stretches into the breathing

of an asana posture

later, on the way to the bakery

a white raven circles

underneath the holes 

in the clouds

like a messenger 

waiting

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359 degrees

walk clockwise

gather the hum melody

of the water neutrons

falling though this metal body

called heating

think outside

this room

think of the birds

migrating into the abroad

while their wings

float through the night

of another past

think clock
wise

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links/about 
more skies: skywatch friday
more rough moments: photo friday
more texts from the past: re/visit
rave + 359 were first published in VoidMagazine, which followed its name and isn't online anymore

running with migrating birds

A sweet sky memory from last week: to get to Leipzig book fair, I first took the s-train to Stuttgart
city. The train follows the Neckar River for this passage, and it takes about half an hour. I tried some photos along the way, and then noticed a flock of birds in the air:



I tried to catch a photo while the train started to move again, and then kept looking at them - and they remained "right there", in the window view. Turned out, they were flying with about the same speed as the train, following the same route along the river.



It was amazing to see them, and to "run" with them for this ride. I tried to identify them, but they were too far away. From direction, they came from the East, moving towards West. but then, that's just the river course in that region.

It also made me think again of time and of migration - how since ages, both people and animals followed this river: the stone age tribes, the Celts, the Romans... That rivers are heartbeat lines of civilization in time.

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more skies from everywhere: skywatch friday

the sky from above

Some moments are just surreal, especially when you revisit them. Like this flight photo - taken an hour after sunrise, at 9.33, above the Atlantic: the clouds from above, with cloud shadows on the water.

Here's a close-up:



more skies: skywatch friday

2 island skylines + 7 days of rain waiting

Yesterday the skies here in Lanzarote island looked like a light installation in mutlitple layers. I went for a longer drive, and it was so amazing both to see the different regions of the island, and this almost magic sky. Here's my favourite photo from the drive, with a curious sky line:



One more day, then the island time is coming to an end.... Back home, grey and rainy skies are waiting. The forecast actually is all-rainy for Germany: 7 days of rain in the next 7 days, and a storm on Monday. So every sun hour here is now double precious.

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More skies from everywhere: skywatch friday

from blue sky to snow - sky in motion

Yesterday, after several rainy and overcast days, the blue sky came back for some hours. I went for a walk at noon to enjoy the sun. Out there, I tried to imagine the way the sky would change according to the forecast: snow coming. And not just a bit, but a whole snow front moving in.

While walking, I noticed some crows in a tree, and next to it the sliver of a moon. I tried a vine video - still playing with the format, and enjoying it. Somehow the moon isn't showing in the video, even though it was right there on the right side of the tree. But something else showed up while I was filming: (click the image to play the video)

 

That was yesterday. The day turned to evening, and still no snow. When I woke in the night: no snow yet. But it was on the way - the first snow flakes started to fall at 7. And now it is winter:

 

And another good surprise: the new photofriday theme is: "motion". So that works well with the vine videos. And the shift of sky of course is a nice tune for skywatch friday.

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2016 skies

Happy New Year!

The image above, I put it together this morning while it was still all foggy outside. It's so nice that the new year starts with a friday, which leads to a weekend and bring a slow and reflective start to the year.

May the new year bring kind skies and open horizons, happiness and health, luck and love.
May we, each day, find some moments of joy, especially when things are difficult.

+ 2 quotes with wishes for the new year:

"May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself." - Neil Gaiman

" Find out who you are and be that person. That's what your soul was put on this Earth to be. Find that truth, live that truth and everything else will come." - Ellen DeGeneres

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(more skies: skywatch friday, more joy: joyful january)

sun through the fog

Today: a forecast that promises sun
Today: fog. and more fog.
Today: phoning with a friend
Today: "it's sunny here, 30 miles from you"
Today: playing catch-up with my to-do-list
Today: the fog, starting to lift two hours before sunset
Today: driving along fields
Today: clouds, sun, fog, wind
Today: breathing in and out, smiling.

...and today:  thursday :)
which makes it just in time for last week's photofriday theme "warm light", and in nice time for the next skywatch friday roundup

waiting for the sun, trees are..., and skies of the past

After several overcast and grey days, the sun returned for some hours on thusday afternoon. I went for a drive, and then drove up to the Alb plateau. So good to be there again. And so lucky that the blue sky zone was moving through in a kind speed and direction - the next cloud area was already visible at the horizon, while I stood in the sun, letting the rays wrap me up.

(The round metal plate is a circular map with the near and far landmarks placed accordingly to the horizon, in the direction of looking)



I went for a walk along the rim of the plateau - the trees are all barren now, stripped down to their essential structure. Walking there, I remember tree lines by Khalil Gibran, copied down in September:

Trees are poems
The earth writes
Upon the sky

Walking there also brought an idea for December: I want to put together a photo calendar with skies from the past. The idea is for each month to find a journey that happened then, and put some photos together.



I guess the impulse for that happened in the morning already, when the skies still were grey, and the promised sunny morning forecast was postponed to the afternoon - that's when I looked at the Mallorca photos, and posted one in the photo blog: "waiting for the sun".

It’s good to go through those memories now the days are so short, and often overcast. The idea, it also relates to two conversations I had last week with friends - that often, the strongest memories that remain of a year are the ones about going to places, especially when the places then also bring encounters with others, and shared experiences.

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more skies from around the world: skywatch friday