Day 638, I am waiting.

Day's pictures

The sun over there

is going to throw me

outside of my rim

that is keeping me hidden

for the day

I am waiting

and hope for

the light

that I still feel inside

as a glow of my dreams

and a hope on the horizon

that is keeping me…

Day 637, Slowly dissolving.

Day's pictures

I like taking pictures of old, weathered buildings. A long time ago someone was lying in bed thinking about the nice barn they had made that day, how he saved all the money needed to buy the materials and the many hours it took to build it. Now it is standing there, abandoned, and maybe thought of for a minute a year by the owners, if there are any. It is kind of sad, an object with out an owner or purpose is all alone, if it could be. It is just standing there, with all the marks of a rich life, slowly dissolving back into the earth while it ones was used and build with a purpose. If I look at this still image I realize that, that lock will never be used again and will sit there till the end, some of the paint will be washed away by heavy rain and loose its last grip in a storm, and the wood is slowly eaten molecule by molecule by time till it is all gone.

Day 636, Snowflakes.

Day's pictures

Millions of snowflakes are formed every year.

They all look unique.

But when you look good.

They are all the same.

When the first morning light hits.

They all melt away.

There only defense is there shape.

Unique as they think.

But only together.

Alone they are.

All the same.

Day 635, I stare outside.

Day's pictures

This old window is the perfect place. It is cold here; the warmth is in the other room. I will sit, and think, look outside. Fog is hanging over the place where there is life, it is all white through this old glass that bends the lines of what is straight. This white from the snow calms me down, it blends in the horizon of my thoughts, I stare outside. It is quiet now.

Day 634, Skeletons.

Day's pictures

I like this picture mainly because of the stillness it shows to me. Alt these thin trees standing there motionless, one slightly more in focus pretending to be you. I imagine walking there, thin air freezing cold. The snow is halfway frozen, and it is the only sound I hear when I go. When everything green that was alive is dead and on the ground, you see the skeletons lying around. The trees stand in silence and morn its loss, I look further and ignore the signs, this animal ones was alive. I slowly walk on forward in time. I wasn’t there when it fell down and died. Last summer it was green here and the sun shined on me. Skeletons are covered by summers day light.

Day 633, Midnight darkness.

Day's pictures, Video

The sun is always low on the horizon when you live close to the polar circle. For a while I lived in a place called Gratangen, 50 km above Narvik. There we lived a couple hundred kilometers above the polar circle and therefore the sun would disappear during a big part of the winter. You would see some light shining over the edge of the world, but you would not feel any sunshine for a couple of months. Gratangen lies in a small fjord with mountains all around, somewhere in January we would see the first sunlight hitting the top of the mountains and slowly working its way down during the next weeks. It is strange if you never have lived in a place like that, the excitement when you see the sun for the first time again. We new when that was about to happen, when the sunlight finely hit the first houses on the sloop of the mountain, that was during work most of the time, but the first weekend we would drive to Narvik and on the way over we would see the sun. I really loved those dark winter days, many people ask about it: is it not depressive, how long are the winters? I never had problems with it, the summers where mush harder for me. In the summer I could still see the sun around midnight from my Living room, no darkness for many months, no waiting for the light to come back.

I made this little video on 30 June 2008 not so far from Narvik, Norway I like the winters but seeing the midnight sun is also special.

Day 632, The need to be alone together.

Day's pictures

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind responds to a stimulus, usually an image or a sound, by perceiving a familiar pattern where none exists. (Seeing faces in objects for instance)

For some reason I see, in this picture, several little people standing on a ridge and one big fellow looking far away in a certain direction. They seem to belong together, wonder what they are looking at, or what that one on the right is thinking about:

The need to be alone together with no one so close to belong somewhere single and go my own way of love for the one outside my reach out to myself at night lying there in my memory with love from the past that was good to hold out with no breath in my neck I can turn around and go to the one that I love and learn to hate this being alone I sometimes cry for no reason I feel great walking proud my own way and I see those eyes floating shooting lightning in my heard burning pain and pleasure all at once in my days single and never alone going up while falling on my knees kissing feet pulling strings in my brain to maintain my own smile alive to get one inside this life I betray my own pride and still go the road that I so much like and also need is what I tell when I lie awake the nights before I sleep alone together with a dream by my side.

Day 631, Looking against the light.

Day's pictures

Looking against the light.

We human beings can easily be overwhelmed. An example: you meet him, the whole date goes so well, as if you knew each other for so long and then… he barks at the waiter. Or you by the new phone you wanted for so long, you install everything, try it out and then after 3 days… the excitement is gone and it’s just an other phone. Our expectation is like the bright sun that puts everything around you in a shadow and you can only see the light. That person or object shines so bright, because you want it so bad, that it makes you temporary stupid, you can not think straight. That realization can come fast, as in the case of the rude date, or it takes a couple of day’s like with the phone. We all know this of course, there are enough sayings that point to this like: “blinded by love”, and it is not a bad thing perse. Looking at any man or woman thinking that he or she is probably an asshole one way or the other, what is of course the truth, is not a recipe for a nice date, a love life or for propagation, the cornerstone of our existence. In a certain way evolution made us les skeptical when it comes to choosing a mate, at least the skepticism is postponed till after the woman is impregnated or in our modern time: you had sex.

Well, that’s all well and good and a little drama makes life more interested for sure, but the side effect of this blindness is: the telephone I just bought and don’t need, or any product for that matter. This irrational potential in us is off course the fuel that our lifestyle, or capitalistic system, is running on. If we all would be responsible buyers our system would crawl to a standstill and that is a problem, if you like this system. I personally wouldn’t mind finding a more responsible one. The main reason for this is that we can destroy the world we live in. Because of all the excess stuff we produce, the energy it cost and the waste we make we probably do more harm than good to the world on the long run. But for now, we are all blinded by the light and cannot see what lurks in the darkness.

Day 630, Sailboat escape.

Day's pictures

This is a spot where I sometimes eat my lunch. In the winter there is not so much change, besides the coming and going of the snow, but in the summer, you can see sailboats from all over the world. I find a small sailboat with a couple of people on board that sail the world endlessly intriguing. It’s like a little capsule where you can go in and literally sail away from the world into your own. It is a long-time dream of mine to do that to, and one day I will. But for now it’s just watching the harbor and eating my sandwiches.

Day 629, about art.

Day's pictures

I have a pipe in my office and I took a picture of it. I like taking pictures of ordinary things. In this case I played around with the original picture till this came to me. I normally don’t know where I go when I manipulate pictures, I follow some routines, go there, ctrl-z and at some point, it’s there. Most of the time I really like what I made but only time will tell if I was deceived.

Rant: I also don’t like to control my appreciation for someone else’s art or pictures. But I draw the line if I don’t know if that fire extinguisher on the wall is part of the exhibition or is there by law. That is the kind of art that needs a lot of words to explain and therefore is no longer art. Visual art for me is something that fits like a puzzle in your mind and its only role is to please and to let you appreciate the craftsmanship. Leave the stories to the story tellers and philosophy to the philosophers. Artist are the biggest liars because they can delve into the deepest well of imagination and ask of us to decipher their brains exhausts. Pretentious art is not for me, showing your deepest fear is like telling me about your pain when all you did was growing up in our comfortable society, we have to invent our pain these days, its fake. And finally watermarking your photography is the ultimate pretense, there is no originality anymore so don’t pretend you are and if money is the reason for life, I’m sorry for you.

Day 628, sometimes you don’t know what you see.

Day's pictures

Day 627, mass graves.

Day's pictures

This picture of some rocks protruding out of the water remind me of some abstract style of painting I have seen before. I see a lot of agony, crawling and screaming, maybe that’s just me.

I read a lot of books, I follow the news and I sometimes wonder why. The house I live in now is old, there is no landline or cable, and in the house, we have no cellphone connection. For that we must go out looking for one, people cannot call us for that reason. Because I wanted internet I had to install a strong directional antenna on top of the hill behind my house for a decent 4G signal. This all works pretty good, but I wonder what it would be like if I didn’t had internet, and therefore no contact with the world. At my job I don’t need to talk about the news, so I would be pretty much out of the loop, well after I also throw away my cellphone…Donald Trump, who is that? How many dead? What nuclear bomb?

But even if I hear the news, most of the it doesn’t affect me…so why does it still torturing me? My fiancé is American, that way I have some family over there, but I still wonder why I reacted so strongly last year when the election results came in. I woke up in the middle of the night to follow those debates and the elections…I don’t know why. And when it got elected I was angry, I uninstalled all my news apps and wanted nothing more to do with the world. That lasted maybe a day, but I still don’t know why something that doesn’t directly impact me made me so angry.

I knew it all along off course but like in that picture, you sometimes get overwhelmed and pulled along with the current screaming and kicking. If you study history enough than you will see thing happening again and again. I don’t think that America is a fascist country yet but having set that, this is the same way the fascist came to power. It is so easy in a democracy to stir people up and let them believe the strangest things. And I am pretty sure that Trump and his supporters would have been on the side of Hitler had they lived there and then. And I’m not angry at Trump, he’s just a dumb rich guy stumbling through his easy life, I’m angry at all the people that voted for them, I’m angry that people have not learned the lessons from history. And I’m extra angry at the people in Holland, where I grew up, where they also have some proto fascist longing for power and getting it.

I wrote in the beginning about what I see in that picture of the rocks…it reminds me of the mass graves that were discovered by the Russians and Americans in and around the concentration camps when ww2 was almost over. In Nazi Germany millions of normal, God obeying people helped killing millions of other people, their neighbors in many cases. Millions of people around the world have that same seed of hate in them as the Nazi’s did.

I can go on and on about this, and, I will. I keep my internet, and to quell the helplessness I feel I write about, and study it so that I at least can say that I tried. I wished that more people did that and learn from history.

Day 626, look closer.

Day's pictures

I like taking pictures of details from ordinary things, when there are only a few parts in focus. It reminds me of real life where our eyes have everything in focus all the time. Where our minds see also a picture as in a cinema, nice in focus, fare away and big. But when you go out of focus, get closer, and only see the little details you might be surprised.

In the summer I like to take closeup pictures of insects. When I walk in the garden I see no insects, maybe a fly or a bee but not much more, so where to go? Normally I will go sit in the grass close to some bushes and just wait. I lean a little bit closer to the ground maybe and then you slowly start to see a whole new world. First you see nothing but take some time, study the surrounding and you see things you would normally never see. This is analogues to real life: you have an idea; an opinion is welling up, you see it in front of you and an emotion takes over, whispers to you the thoughts that come first. But what if you sit down, in the grass there by the bushes. You let your mind settle down and slowly you wait till the details come insight. Maybe you discover the small creatures crawling in your thoughts that unknown to you where guiding your thoughts that you had when you were standing just there before. Life and living keeps so much more hidden for you if you don’t take the time to question yourself.

Here you can see some of the pictures I have taken while sitting in my garden.

Day 625, refuge.

Day's pictures

This is a picture of a rusty pipe. With some adjustments it looks cool, if I may say so. Like colorful lava floating around, breaking away…Yesterday I wrote about America and the innocent lives that got destroyed because of an unnecessary war. I wondered, in that story, how people could live in a country like that. Someone asked me what I would do…Well, I live In Norway, I moved here from the Netherlands about 10 years ago. There are several reasons why I chose for Norway and to move away from Holland, but the reason that I left is complicated. It all started (well most of it) when I came back from Cambodia, where I worked as a Dutch* Marine. Working in a country where the people had nothing besides a bamboo hut and a hole in the ground to cook on, and then coming back to a country where even the poorest have all the basics checked, and hear everybody complain, and complain… And it was not a money thing, poor vs rich or injustice. It was the lack of perspective. The problems we have in a rich country like Holland are not real problems. If everybody in the world has a meal, a school education and something to live for, then we “can sweat the small stuff”. It is difficult to describe what I felt but its like that naked king story and no one says something about it. I didn’t understand how we could live our lives knowing that the world was broken. I didn’t understand why not everybody was talking about that. And I studied it, and started to learn why it is, but knowing reasons for it didn’t take away the unrest I had. I didn’t belong there any more, there was a black hole in front of me where there should be a future. I sometimes jokingly say that I am a political refugee, and if you extend the fear of bodily harm to mental harm that society inflicts on you because of your ideas, then there is some truth in that joke. I moved to Norway because that was something I talked about for years. I restore wooden boats, my nearest neighbor lives 2 kilometers away and the best thing is that I am a guest here, and if you are someone’s guest you don’t complain about their way’s, well not too much, I’m still Dutch.

*I am Dutch, and I live in the Netherlands or Holland, but historically Holland is the name of the two provinces in the western part: Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland. As a Dutch-man we mix those two but officially it is: I live in the Netherlands. As a Dutch-man we can also say: Ik spreek Nederlands (I speak Netherlands), or ik spreek Hollands (I speak Hollands), but a foreigner can only say: I speak Dutch. To make it more complicated: if you speak Dutch you can also say that you speak Belgium, or Flemish, that’s what the people in Belgium do when they get asked what languish they speak, some might even say that they speak Dutch. I don’t know why it is so complicated, if you know an other country that is similar I would like to know.