I’ve been raised in the Netherlands, and you might know that it is a flat country. I can’t speak for all Dutch people, but I think that most of us get excited when we see hills and mountains. I still do after living between them for 15 years now here in Norway. Don’t get me wrong; we have a beautiful landscape in Holland too, but for me, hills and mountains are always associated with vacation. So, I still like this flowing landscape end I did it to this morning. At one point, somewhere halfway, I noticed a tiny snail slowly going somewhere. I took out my phone to take some pictures, the one you see at the top is one of them. After I saw this first one, I started to notice more that tried to crawl somewhere; I also saw many that were flattened by the wheels of an occasional car that drives by.
Later I took a picture with two signs telling the speed limit is 60. I wondered how fast you could drive if you didn’t want to hit these tiny snails.
Yesterday I wrote about philosophers and how seriously they can take their task. You can widen this, of course, to all kinds of professions. Today I listened to a podcast where some biologists talked about the history of the crocodile. One thing they have done the last ten years is scanning fossils with all sorts of equipment to see how many different kinds of crocodiles there were 200 million years ago. It’s fascinating and cool to spend your day doing that, and it probably has some purpose down the line. I myself restore old wooden buildings and boats, and I can tell you precisely why it is important but, as I do now, I can tell you also why it is not that important. This finding meaning in what we do is something we all do. That’s why I called it “playtime” for grownups yesterday, and that sounds all jolly, but there is also a downside. We are so rich that we can do all of these fun but unnecessary jobs and produce so much stuff that we don’t need, and this pollutes the world and maybe even cynical.
Yesterday I wrote that I don’t necessarily look for proof when writing something in one of these blog posts. I want to elaborate on that a little bit; I don’t look for proof when it comes to my ideas, the ideas that come to me when I start writing. As I wrote yesterday, I want to see what kind of thoughts are in me, and those thoughts need no proof. Only when they hit the real world can they be judged, but not by me the moment I write them down. I do, of course, check arbitrary things like quotes, dates, specific historical facts, and so on.
That I don’t judge my thoughts so harshly is something I started to do not so long ago. Doubt about what we can know (Epistemology) has been strong with me. Part of my character has very little doubt; I have no problem saying yes to tasks I know little about. This more practical fearlessness has been in me as long as I know, but it got stronger over the years. Getting face to face with death and hitting rock bottom a few times has put a lot of things in perspective. In the world outside my head, I downplay my bravado and be the stubborn, nice guy I am, but in my head, I have a “fear” to say what I think out loud.
I don’t like to write about politics though I did it a lot when Trump was president, he was a special case, to put it mildly. But now politics in the world is back to “normal” I had some hope that I could forget about it again, at least on this blog. But last week I got really disappointed in president Biden, not that I had high hopes on many issues but maybe he would be less of a…I don’t know. He more or less ended one war and immediately starts provoking China out of some idea that China is dangerous and banging on your chest is the only solution to stop them. I know that international politics is complicated with thousands of moving parts but once again a group of privileged, (middle)-aged man decide the direction the world goes. I understand that a captain of a ship can not steer the boat democratically but a nation is not a ship and should not be treated like one.
I don’t know if you have that feeling, that feeling that it is all going well. It its going well for a while now but something should happen, things always happened in the past and its overdue. Where is that unexpected bill or that fight with a friend.
I thought about this because I got a strange association when I saw the picture from today, why is all that important stuff concentrated on the top, on the top of a really thin stem. Seems like an odd choice of nature. It looks like it all happens in one place and nothing below.
Why is our brain concentrated in one place, where one hit can end it for you? Why don’t’ we have redundant organs spread out trough the body, these organs lay dormant and kick in when the other kicks out, nice and fresh. Why one heart end not four smaller ones. Why are the most important things in our life concentrated in one place or happen at once and not spread out?
Heraclitus said 2500 years ago that things are always changing and opposites are…well, not really opposites from each other. Philosophers through the ages have always been good in coming up with the phrases that encapsulate there philosophy, they think they are really clever but the layman will not understand the full depth and others philosophers think they do.
That things are always changing sound pretty obvious and even if you never philosophies about life, it would not be hard to understand this idea. One of his own examples that he seems2 to give is that of a river that is never the same river. It is not only the water that flows through the river that changes constantly but even the simple act of you standing in the river and leaving footprints when you leave is a change. But why would you care about this simply example, your life will not become any better when you know this you might think and you might be right. Maybe you only need to know the things that you think you know, and dismiss the rest.
Today I helped my landlord harvest the last potatoes, she used a 50- or 60-year-old machine for this and that was a big help but it is still all hands on deck. Ever since we started living on a farm, I get more and more appreciation for the work of a farmer. This is off course a small farm, she runs it besides another job but she still feeds many people that appreciate food from local ground and not produced on large industrial farms. She also has a few cows and chickens; it is all kind of idealistic and certainly not a solution to feed cities but what is.
I should know some of the answers because I come from the Netherlands where efficient farming is something “we” do for hundreds of years and we export more than far larger countries, only the USA exports more but is also 237 times larger. We invented all kinds of machines and robots in the Netherlands that take away a lot of manual labor and we make excellent use of the fertile ground. There are also downsides and many people think we should produce less to lessen the effects this all has on the environment.
For me food is something you get in a grocery store but doing part of the work myself now makes me think more about the whole process, I want to know more.
Today is day 2000 of my…well, me posting pictures and later also text on this blog. I started doing this in march 2016 to not only say that I like photography but also actually do it regularly. Well it is regularly because I haven’t skipped a day besides some pictures that got posted after midnight. What started as a motivation is now turned into something I do besides eating and sleeping, even when I am traveling I will find a bit of time to make a picture with my phone, play with it and make a little poem and post it. It is even as important as sleeping and eating for me because life can become a drag when you think of it to much and you’re in an endless loop of going to work and coming home to sleep. I honestly have no illusions that what I do means something to another and that it might bring me something, but just being creative and thinking about life every day for half an hour or an hour gives a lot of meaning to me. I’ve been in poor countries and we all know that a lot of bad things happen in the world and I admire the people that are hands on and actually do something about it but I don’t have the internal drive to do that. I also don’t know where to start. The last two day’s I have written about Palestine and there are a lot of people that use all their time and energy to change the situation there but I just have questions and grind to a stand still wondering what is the best approach. So, I feel guilty that I live here in Norway in comfort complaining behind my computer that the world sucks (and off course that it is beautiful to). But I believe that education and promoting critical thinking is important and when I write these blog posts every day, I feel that I grow and this, on a very small scale, helps the whole world to grow a little bit.
The pictures you see here are from Day 1. Back then I posted several pictures a day and these are taken outside the house where I lived before. The people that follow me know that I almost never take pictures of people but most of the time of dead objects or nature in closeup. I do this for the simple reason that I don’t like to intrude in someone’s privacy and a lot of photographers take pictures of people, it’s pretty obvious. I like to find the details that most people never see, like we do in our real lives where we glance over the details of the day. When I see these wires, I see the twist that are made by someone…who? I like the way that things are attached and wonder how they produced those little clamps that keep the wires together. And why are some parts rusted and others not? You see that there is more in ordinary things, they have a history and character, and I hope that people appreciate this and use this thought to look at life in a similar fashion.
After more than a year I also started writing on my blog. I have written in the past on other blogs and I like doing it but I have dyslexia and I make a lot of mistakes, but I saw that my pictures where slowly getting better so why not my writing skills if I just keep on doing it day in day out. Because writing takes a long time I started experimenting with poetry. The problem is that I don’t like reading poetry and most of the time I don’t understand what the poet tries to say. But that didn’t stop me and I found out that I like juggling with words and I using the pictures as inspiration and my knowledge of philosophy and life experiences as fertilizer. I play with a lot of complex concepts in my head and I try to learn how to put them into words and understand them at the same time. The nice thing about the short poems I write is that I have to condense these elaborate thoughts into a few words, it helps me to explain to myself my own thoughts.
Some people look strange at me when I tell them that I do this every day, and I can understand that, it is kind of obsessive and compulsive. That maybe plays a part in it but after a couple of hundred days I just wanted to see how long I could last and now I just don’t want to break the spell, it also keeps me going in a world where I don’t belong.
The “poem” underneath is one of the first and you can probably tell that I summarize the different way’s we look at life and what we want. I wouldn’t do it like this anymore but I guess that is progress…
This week I watched a documentary called “5 broken cameras” from 2012 in a local theater. Before I talk about this, I have to say that now the Corona restrictions are loosened it is nice to meet people again. I know that a lot of people have problems with these restrictions or don’t even believe that Corona is real but please respect the people that take it seriously. I am happy to live in a country where mask mandates are lifted but people still wear them because it is recommended. Another reason I mention this is because of the subject matter of the documentary I want to talk about, it goes about the conflict between the Israeli state and the Palestinians. People that have a problem with Corona restrictions should realize that living in fear in Gaza is a problem, not doing what you want to do to protect vulnerable fellow citizens is NOT a real problem.
The documentary 5 broken cameras is a film about a small town, where people live their lives as good as possible and then they get confronted with Israeli settlers that slowly eat away the farm land they have used for generations. Emad Burnat was one of these farmers that had a chance to film the birth of his latest son and he discovered that he couldn’t let go of the camera. He took it with him wherever he went, also when the villagers started demonstrating against the barriers that were put In front of them. The protest looked no different then any protest you might see in your own country, and were more or less tolerated in the beginning by the occupying forces (I use occupation as a statement, it is heavily debated and in theory you can go both ways but in practice it is clear who is in charge). The reaction of the Israeli forces, they don’t look like police in riot gear, become more extreme the longer these protests go on. That it becomes more extreme you can tell by exceedingly violent methods his 5 consecutive cameras are being destroyed, at the end you see him filming a sniper in the distance aiming at his camera (or him?) before the camera goes black again.
Nochrisis 