Long Time No Write

Hi folks!

It’s been a while – mea culpa!

Some of you may have followed me on Instagram and Twitter for shorter updates and random thoughts. (And the Star Wars hair styles I did today and yesterday to entertain a co-worker, go look at them on IG if you need a chuckle!) I really want to get back into writing; I’m just not sure of the format.

There are some topics I want to touch, but I’d like to put more effort into these.

• Getting in touch with your body and your identity through martial arts (and handling blunt weapons, lol)
• Contentment vs. happiness
• Space (I’d love to create something about planets, moons, and asteroids, playing with different ideas right now)
• Navigating life with a mind full of opposites
• Background noise
• …

I’m busy with work most days and want to keep this blog completely separate from my job for different reasons. I’m still a linguist, doing linguist things in a language project for a company, destroying (and fixing) templates, and occasionally dabbling in logic programming and python, while filling my desk with plants, listening to weird music, and drinking a little too much espresso. Sometimes I fold origami manta rays and other creatures when I need a break.

A long due update on my journey in capoeira will follow shortly!

See you soon!

PS: The last few months I didn’t find motivation for photography beyond the low-quality phone snapshots and I still haven’t posted the images from the last wedding I photographed. Life has been crazy, the weather disgusting, and nothing really interesting was going on. I’m waiting for the sky to clear so I can take pictures of the moon with my new tele-zoom lens, then next month I’ll be at the big annual capoeira workshop with my camera.

 

 

It starts with a word or two. (What I wrote while I waited for my pizza.)

It starts with a word or two, a string of thoughts, a random image, and an empty day will be filled with new poetry. It’s raw, it’s wild, it can’t be forced to grow. Some days will remain emtpy, some will bear threefold fruits.

I want to be made from light and song, bring out the stars with my words

I want to know what creation was like, watch the colours pour into life

I want to know what the world was like when it still was what it was meant to be

I want to know, I want to taste the immense nebulae and every deep, dark creek and crease and fold of time and space

I want to write about all the beauty there is, was, was forgotten and reborn

It starts with words and ends with speechlessness, images too bright and pure and folded in themselves, colours the mind can see but our eyes cannot. Colours twisting into shapes taking up more dimensions than paper and brush and ink and reed can hold, more connections to be made than could be soldered on one wooden board with the finest diamond-sharp tips of midnight tongues.

I want to hold strings of words in my hands, pearls of syllables, hard and soft and round, rolling, rolling

I want to remember the faces, lines of laughter telling stories passing me on the street, manifold

I try to write and sing and live all at the same time, fingers tripping over blurry lines

It started with two simple lines, and it became the plea of help of a soul drowning in a torrent of images unleashed on dry ground, barren land not able to soak up all the wonders as fast as they are poured out, the golden song of dust being washed away too quickly before a microscope could be found to examine every speck down to its poetic make-up of crystal genes.

Thoughts born from interstellar clouds, delivered into bare and empty hands.

 

 

 ~~~

Writing this happened between writing the first paragraph and waiting for the pizza in my oven to be done. I had jotted down these first few words and lines as a Facebook status and then the idea decided to take a walk on the meta-level.

 

 

Favourite Friday: things I like to do the old fashioned way

The Favourite Friday series is back!

Modern technology is cool and everything, but some things I still I like to be done in an old fashioned way. Definition of old fashioned used very loosely here.

I don’t put our laundry in a tumble dryer after washing, but hang to dry.

Very few people still write letters or send postcards, which is very sad. I love getting postcards for my birthday, and I’d be happier about a few letters per year than I’d be about a ton of e-mails. Also, if you don’t like paper, a text message is still better than birthday greetings on facebook. I ask people to send me postcards when they go on holidays, and cherish these cards more than your travels blogs (which are totally fine and interesting nevertheless) because they are personal.

We switched to soap bars a while ago and I like them better than liquid soap. Liquid soap is a waste of packaging and full of weird chemicals these days.

In class at university I take notes by hand, despite my bad handwriting (sometimes I can’t read my scrawl myself), and I carry around a small note book (as in paper) and a timer instead of using a smartphone or my computer for putting down important stuff. It’s just easier for me to concentrate on real paper. That’s why I prefer to print out at least the most important papers I have to read, because to truly get to the bottom of a complicated topic I need to sit in a comfortable position and cover the paper in highlighter and side notes.

I buy physical CDs if I want to listen to something more often, and I like using them in my old CD player. Sometimes I sit at my computer, but the music is coming from the CD player or radio next to my table. All-in-one devices are cool, but most of the time I feel more relaxed when there are different devices for different purposes. When just the radio is on while I read a book I don’t feel the urge to check my e-mails all the time, because it would mean having to boot the computer first. And it would be very confusing if music came out of my camera while taking pictures.

I don’t own a smartphone. When I need to go somewhere new I look at a map (okay, I cheat and use googlemaps to draw myself a small sketchy map to take with me), and I ask people for directions. When I need to catch a bus on the way home I either look up the times before or I ask someone who knows them or can look them up. Sometimes a smartphone can be really useful, but in many situations I prefer talking to actual people. On the train I read books most of the time.

Some things I don’t do all the time I but find comforting once in while are making food stuff from scratch – bread, pizza, candy, smoothie, lemonade, iced tea – and growing my own vegetables (though I’m not very successful at this).

In the kitchen I use simple devices most of the time – whisk instead of electronic mixer, simple manual juice squeezer instead of a big machine, mixing bowl with measuring marks instead of a scale. Less complicated to clean, and it just feels more natural.

And just this week I hang up some herbs to dry in the warm summer air.

_ _ _ _ _

The next two weeks I’ll tell you a bit more about random things I like to do in my free time.

potato harvest

Some time ago we planted a sprouting potato into an old popcorn bucket. Today I decided to harvest because the part above the soil had rotten until it wasn’t connected to the new potatoes anymore, so there was no big hope the potatoes would continue to grow (at least I think so, but I don’t know a lot about potatoes). At first I only found some teeny tiny potatoes the size of my thumbnail, but then there were some bigger ones as well! All in all there is no really big result, now we have about the double overall amount of potato as before (the original one was pretty big), maybe nearly triple if you want to be really optimistic. But nevertheless we have small fresh potatoes from our own window sill now! (Technically this isn’t indoor gardening anymore, as we transferred the bucket to the outside window sill after some days.) Autumn wonders.

Favourite Friday: Fair/Market

My favourite fair is the historical medieval market/fair in my old hometown. It takes part every year on one of the the weekends in October, and it is quite a spectacle: heralds, priests, caged and tortured “prisoners”, witches running around screaming, lots of arts and crafts, smoky food stalls, smaller animals like sheep or ponies, musicians, and other performers like fire-breathers or stilt-walkers. It is fun to wander around, look at all the nice things, learn a thing or to from the spice vendors, try exotic dried fruits or “dragon eggs”, or try your luck with your archery skills. For kids there is even a wooden carousel pushed by people, not powered by electricity! Oh, the colourful costumes, the aroma of spices and fire … tomorrow the fair will be opened. I’m pretty excited, because I missed it the last four years. Oh boy, how I missed it. On Monday university will start again, but this weekend we’ll have fun. “Let’s drink a toast to tomorrow, and one to days long ago” (Blackmore’s Night: Toast to tomorrow). Nah, I won’t drink alcohol I guess, but rhytons look really cool.

Favourite Friday: Summertime Activities

Hi everyone, I’m a little late because I haven’t been online yesterday. At the moment I’m out of town and enjoying the countryside for some days, so stay tuned for an update on my photoblog!

Just a short post today –

Favourite summertime activities: going for walks and taking pictures in the countryside (obviously, and today darling was tagging along, which was also fun), reading books, doing a bit of easy crafting (warmth = glue/paint/water dries faster), meeting friends outside – just being lazy and talking for hours, and if ice cream or a barbecue are involved, all the better. Somehow summertime makes me dream about places far away, different (more natural) ways of life, beautiful things of all kinds, and it makes me want to throw out some stuff to get a more airy feeling in the apartment.

Everybody could write poetry

Everybody could write poetry

but few do so

most people don’t trust themselves to pour this bittersweet gold of honey from their lips

afraid the world would hear nothing but the stickiness they feel between their teeth when trying

afraid it could clog their nine to five pens

afraid of being called dreamers.

When did dreaming become undesirable?

When did we forget the ancient art of piecing thoughts together into a flaming mosaic, the art of pouring this honey into patterns on the hard-won bread to make the tired and weary hungry again for life and laughter? When did we become scared of emotion deeper than the cavity of our dry mouths?

We don’t win our bread by touching the soil anymore, we don’t remember the stings accompanying the harvest of the last honey of the year, we don’t know how to wait for the right seasons anymore. We are lost, strangers to our world, merely taking whatever is provided by endless acres of supermarkets, grocery stores, vending machines. Consuming in haste, eating on the way to work to earn another year’s worth of bread, and yet not taking the time to taste the piece we hold in our hand.

Everybody could write poetry

but few take the time to taste life

afraid to waste time

afraid of finding out what we’ve given up.

Everybody could write poetry

and I won’t leave it to the so-called professionals, self-proclaimed experts

to find out what life tastes like

to define what is art and beauty.

I will write poetry again.

——————————————————————————————————–

This (or better the first few lines) came into my head while I was in bed with a spell of migraine-ish headache this evening. I can’t find anything good to write about for weeks, and then it comes to me while my head is throbbing and I don’t want to move or stare at a glowing computer screen … life is weird. Seriously.

You can also find this on my deviantART account:

http://kayanya.deviantart.com/art/Everybody-could-write-poetry-376503587?ga_submit_new=10%253A1370636563