the art of slow living,
(I’ve done more than you)
the art of poverty.
(I’ve gone to a hundred different countries to write poetry)
Tag Archives: thoughts
Pink x3
3 Photos from the past week.
Pink food
(If you fry literally anything at the same time as beets, it turns pink. You can make pink scrambled eggs, it’s great. They used beets to dye fabric back in the day, didn’t they? I keep wondering if it would work on my hair.)
Pink baby
(It’s my friends baby, we didn’t steal it. It’s the cutest baby though, 10/10 would steal.)
Pink painting
(I’m trying to paint some hands and flowers and stuff, but only one hand turned out good, so now I’m trying to restructure everything to focus on that one.)
💗
August but it Feels like Autumn
The weather is getting cooler and I was walking this evening. I’ve started to walk when I want to listen to new music, so I can hear an album through from beginning to end. On my way back, right as I was walking the last few metres before houses and trees start to close around you, the sun came out from under the clouds. Resting just above the top of the trees while the rest of the sky was still a dark grey. It made stripes of field glow in yellow as the rain kept falling. Weather makes me feel things.
Here’s a completely unrelated picture of a sketch I’m working on right now.
Attempt to Abbreviate
The more you think about something (after you’ve let the ideas bloom and bloom and bloom in your mind), the more you’ll start finding the ways of making it simple again. Here are the thoughts of this summer.
(The Nature of a Lifespan)
Death – When our fear of death is bigger than our fear of God, we worry about our time running out.
Questions – Questions are not made to have eloquent answers, but for us to keep wondering around something, they’re structure for construction, suggest that the theme of life is “ongoing”.
Buildings – The clear and well executed visions are nice buildings, but concepts that contain questions build (keep building) skyscrapers.
Doors – You put a door in a wall, not for the sake of the door being pretty, but to be able to move somewhere else. Doors exist not for themselves, but just lead you to a new place.
Death – Not for itself, it just leads you to a new place.
Sunday Thoughts
A few weeks ago I had the vision that waves were rising all around this garden, tall and mighty. Like the ocean, like the red sea. And I felt it tonight, standing out there. (And I wondered why it is not falling, why it is not crashing down on doubts and enemies, what are the waters waiting for?) I felt God saying that He’s separating me from it. I am learning to not be all the things I’m not. And first then the water can fall on my enemies without falling on me. How can God kill the army if we’re on the ocean floor at the same time? There’s a height and width and depth to the importance of faith in forgiveness and the death of sin and it being killed off in your own body.
Smultronställen
The word “smultronställe” in Swedish means a little hidden away place where you can find wild strawberries growing. It’s also used as an expression for something good, maybe like a corner of a dvd store with movies that are good but possible underrated, or a specific destination that you’ve found for yourself and enjoy going to. I think of it like a place in the sun, like a place of unexpected sweetness that is a bit separated from the rest of your life.
There are so many smultronställen in life. I found a literal one next to the road while I was out walking today. And they remind me of C S Lewis saying:
“Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”
But that is not less of an incentive to enjoy it. It’s like saying you shouldn’t enjoy your vacation just because you’ll only be there temporarily. Isn’t it rather the opposite? We have to learn to enjoy our fleeting moments and the frailty of things we love. Not because that’s what makes it beautiful – even though that might be true – but because that is what we have.
The Surprise of Creativity
(Excerpt from a notebook) On the topic of writing, Bukowski says: If it doesn’t come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don’t do it. There’s no other way, and there never was. I think what he means is that your writing has to be a surprise, even to yourself. Too many people see writing as a form of thinking, when in reality it’s the complete opposite, a mirrored version or maybe a distant relative to it. When you write, when you really write, you do not need to fear the blank page, because it’s not you who are going to fill it, but your words. Sometimes I’m all up in my head, and I only write such things I’ve already thought about. But what then is the point of writing at all? Is it only documentation? I believe, and believe strongly, that the power lies in not knowing how your sentence will end. I believe, and believe strongly, that we have labyrinths in us just waiting to be discovered, but if you always know and see everything, you just walk along a winding path. You miss all the ways you could have gone. True writing is about something like that.
To the writer who won’t start writing (so, me)
Stop looking for the perfect story and choose a real one. (Your heroine doesn’t need freckles or a specific hair colour and your love interest doesn’t need his eyes described in detail. It would be more interesting hearing your story from the point of a view of a baby. It would be more interesting if everyone wasn’t so morally good. It would be more interesting if you didn’t care so much that you ruined it.)
4th of July
Or: The inevitability of time
Wow, deep right?
See, we didn’t quite have time to finish our ice cream. I was eating my cookie dough extra chocolate chip caramel chocolate sauce deliciousness while stressing out about not stressing, and then suddenly the sky was dark and we were biking along the road as rain started to fall, fireworks going off in the distance. Violent in comparison to soft lights from the restaurants we passed. It was not bad. It was one of my favourite moments of the whole evening. But as we hopped off and stood next to our bikes the sentence ‘The inevitability of time‘ popped into my head.
We just bike alongside that time. Sing with it. Get rained on, messed up, as it flows by like the wind and grabs our hair and hands with the unforgiveness of a ringing bell. The sound of it is breaking my bones from the inside out. I was just supposed to be here for a short time. Last year was the fourth of july I was supposed to experience. Now it’s no longer just a small window or good perspective into a culture that is not mine, but it’s tradition for me too. There will be another fourth of July, and the sun will sink as a countdown until the fireworks start again, if I die, if I live, if I stop caring. It continually exists. Apart from me. Maybe that’s what I’m saying.
Anyway. It was one of those moments when finding a specific set of words and using them to define the moment, the experience, the lesson, made me feel better, calmer, satisfied with existence because it means I am here, I am growing, I am seeing this moment as being something.
(And is it ever something. My heart sings with it, beats with it, and I am just lost enough)
Hiking
You know what I thought was a good idea? To just leave everything behind and go hiking in the mountains for five days.
It’s now 15 days until I’m leaving for Florida. There’s a certain role I’m stepping into, and I like who I am with the people there, but it’s gonna be intense. And here, everything is happening. Summer is beginning and everything else is ending and needs to be celebrated, there’s so much I need to be here too.
So I just wanted to spend some time being no one. Not seeing anyone. I didn’t want to paint, or write, or even pray about anything very specific. Just be.
It was more difficult than I thought. It’s that thing I forget and relearn every time I go somewhere new, that you’re still gonna be yourself there. The mountains are unchanging and quiet, but I am not. I was walking and walking and walking, and my mind was spinning.
It was a good different though, more of a challenge. It’s stupid to go hiking in May, because all of the snow hasn’t melted yet, and there’s too much water everywhere. I’d literally follow the path and there would be a lake in the middle of the way all of a sudden. At least I got my solitude.
You don’t necessarily worry less in these situations. At least I didn’t. Just about other things, about having brought enough food, being able to chop the wood, get the fire started and find water. At one point I burned my entire face in the sun, and rubbed ashes all over it the next day to protect it (I don’t really know if it worked, but it made me feel cool even if it probably looked really stupid).
Anyway. I walked a lot, read a lot on my e-reader, and wrote a thing or two even if I wasn’t supposed to. The whole thing made me feel accomplished, I think. Happy. I wasn’t there to find something or learn something, but it feels like I still did, though I don’t quite know what.
But next time I’ll bring company and watercolours.
eirians 