Write me a sign

If only a bird would write it in the sky
That I am to live and not to dye
If only a text would praise my day
Or an email the least to say
My body cramped up in pain
My soul praising the rain
I am waiting for a sign from dear god, dear buddha, dear higher spirits from within
It is you I am praying to be here
It is me I am missing and fearing to be near

Sunday bloody Sunday

Sunday – you used to be my favorite day. Sunday you were my lover and my friend. I anticipated you for six days and now you are here and I don’t know what to do with you. You arrived and I had no use for you, no plan, no lover to stay with long in the morning, no partner to grab for breakfast, no man to hold his hand and stroll to the usual Sunday spots, no friend to share the designer fair with. You showed some sun, you tease, but gladly there was the ice cold wind to remind me that it wasn’t like any good old Sunday, this was a lonely one. The wind kept slapping me across the face to wake up and face reality. You are gone. I missed you today like I miss the smell of German bread, I missed you today like I miss the hug of my mother, so deep, so embedded into my flesh. A sensory memory of you is stored in my skin and will not leave me, the stand by mode has not set in yet or ever will. I had a dream last night I never had before, so sensual, so vivid, so real. I spend a lot of time on your right, beautiful, naked chest. I inhaled your smell, pet you with my face, let my cheek take in your cells. I kissed you all around and it was so real, so real, so real – It was real. It was you. It was not your face, but your smell, your skin, your body, you you you all over me, and me all over you. How come you are so far and so near, how come you are there and not here.

Loosing trust - almost

Dear Judith,

Today is the day I would like you to remember me. I am you and you are me. And not only would I like you to remember this unchangeable fact, I actually want you to tattoo on your hands, arms, breasts and foot soles that I am there - always. I am screaming in your ear, whispering in your thoughts, breathing into your lungs until you will embrace me fully to the point of no return, no double thought, no second-guess. You are me and I am you. In a situation where support does not feel apparent it is near your heart and just needs to be grabbed. It is you and me as you, who will support you always. So go, move, dance, laugh, don’t look back, make mistakes, evolve. There are people in your live who do not know you the way I do and they may never will. Leave them behind, not as in leaving something valuable but as in passing an aisle in a grocery store and only grabbing the beverage you need, passing up the sodas, the coke, the sugary berry stuff and with determination getting a hold of the sparkling water. bottle Take a sip and feel how it nurtures your body not only with hydration but with the knowing that you provided exactly what was needed. Move fast now as time was wasted already, valuable time. Time is your friend in healing and your enemy right now in this time of child wish. Together we will find a balance between both and the outcome will be like eating of a buffet.
Stay strong, contact me, call for me, scream out loud for me and I promise you, I will be there.

Your truly, me as in you as in me.

Blurry pictures

I am inhaling a book right now by a terrific current German writer, Ulla Hahn, by the title Unscharfe Bilder, translated Blurry Pictures. In the book a grown woman visits her father in the retirement home and forces him to share his experience and involvement during the second world war, something he had never spoken about before, something she is out to know. She is ultimately searching for answers if her dad who was forced to fight under Hitler's regime would have had a choice in the matter and what it was like back than and if he directly contributed to someones misfortune in any way. Its funny or just another life coincidence that I got this book for Christmas since I left my house after the holidays with a stack of old old photographs from family members during the time of the war, yet not knowing still what the book was all about at the time when I found the photographs. I had gone through the box of pictures while at my parents house and got lost once again in a re-occurring question in my own head of what exactly the involvement of my relatives was in the war, if they did bad things, did they kill anyone? I had seen the pictures before of my grandfather proud and handsome, so young in his uniform, standing tall and never smiling with deeply secret eyes, but there were also new images or I was looking at them differently now. I never met my grandfather. He died shortly after coming back from the war on lung cancer, never had smoked a single cigarette in his life. I later had thoughts if he had been in contact with any gases in the war that may have caused the cancer but always kept the thoughts to myself. My grandmother, a post war widow also lost her favorite brother in the war. He was her everything growing up. With two people to mourn over she never talked about the war, never said anything but in her eyes there always remained a touch of sadness that I never forget and I always blamed it on the war. With now all my grandparents dead I have missed my opportunity to ask questions, like the woman in the book. and find out the truth and gain a real pictures of the war from my family perspective. All I have now are the pictures and only this time I am seeing some signs of concerns and possible conflict behind the images. My family is not Jewish, but also were not Nazis or so I think or hoped that there could not just be the one or other. With the grief and loss that the war had caused my family I always thought that would be enough of an explanation and justification that the war is not what my family wanted and therefore they were not on the side of Hitler. And I do know that there was a no choice scenario when both of the man from my family were called to war, to follow one leader, to obey, to execute. And I don't doubt that the consequences to rebel against would have been deadly and I am also considering the power of extremism, brainwash and perhaps that both of these man of my family strongly believed in the good behind the war, the cause behind this one mans vision, much like some people still today belief in the meaning of war. Back to the pictures. My grandfather was a musician and a conductor. The band is all in uniform. Young, handsome men with little narrow, above the lips mustache, just like Hitler's. Truthfully, they all look like him in the photo just because of that very distinct mustache. I wonder if it was fashionable at the time or really such a strong symbol for follow ship or both and if it wasn't for Hitler would we see men with such mustaches on the street today? Only with a full on Charlie Chaplin costume in combination is such manly facial hair appearance today possible. There are no pictures of fights, of dead people, of suffering, of growling, bloody scenes, no Holocaust images like we have seen them from National Geographic published much later. The pictures of my family members are portraits of persona in their best of light for the good memory and in style of posture matching the photographic ability then. I was told that for a long time back then the people of Germany did not know what was happening inside the concentration camps, especially not the ones geographically so far removed like my family in the South and neither did the soldiers at the Front know about the killings of all the Jewish people, not until later. What was distributed on the radio was purely war propaganda, nothing more. I knew that my grandfather and his brother in law were both fighting in Russia and neither of them had anything to do with capturing Jewish people, but they fought in Russia and if they actually were ever confronted with killing someone and what they saw and what they felt and what they went through - I can't even imagine. I never asked were my grandmother's brother died and how. I didn't dare. And then there is one more picture that does not leave my mind, on it my grandfather in pose with two other uniformed soldiers somewhere North/East of Berlin inside a bombed building. The building is completely empty, in the back only ruins what eluted to a former factory type unit. Nothing else, no other people, nothing at all, but three men in front of some ruins, the ground clean and white, covered with snow. And then I see it inside the photo album. In faded pencil my grandfather had written one line next to the photo, which says: And here is where we bombed the Jews. I startled reading the line for the first time, reading it over and over again with a cold shower running down my backside. And what that line really really really means, and what the truth is behind, and the event in detail I will never know, I may not want to know, but have to accept that this is part of my family history, part of what I am carrying within my conscience, part of what all German people still carry within their roots, even today. As I said, I never met my grandfather, but what I heard is that he was a loving father and husband, a kind man to all with an open heart. And on the next page there is another pictures of two homeless Russian children, who my grandfather cared for during his time there and fed and often spoke about as he worried and wondered what had ever happened to them after the war. As always there is always two sides to a story, the narrator and the one who is experiencing the tale in his/her own skin. And with that I am trying to find peace and heal some of my never ending country's grief, while also not wanting to close my eyes to how truly unimaginably horrible it was what happened there and then - to all.

The question of choice in love

I was on Facebook yesterday when I got pinged in the chat window. It was Mehnaz, a young girl I met earlier in the year on my India travel. Traveling by myself in the South of India I decided to partake in an all day backwater tour on a boat. I was picked up in a small bus and taken to the river where the rest of the group was waiting for me to board the boat. Turns out the rest of the group consisted of one whole family, a Indian family, mom, dad, auntie, baby, daughter, cousin, grannny, etc. Amongst them two teenage girls. There was much laughter amongst them and although I didn't understand their language I could tell that they were on vacation, having a great time with each other, loving one another. I couldn't help but feeling a touch sad and lonely as I had learned to feel it traveling by myself on one or the other occasion. And so I focused on the surroundings, enjoying the beauty of the boat ride and the joy of being able to watch them all. The curiosity of the teenage girls grew over the day and not long they both came up to me wanting to talk English, asking me questions about music, movies, America, cell phones, Internet, etc. etc. But one of the more pressing questions they had for me was, why am I traveling by myself? It was a question I had been asked often in India and I had learned to understand that the concept of a woman traveling alone was so very foreign to them. Not in the sense of the ability or possibility to do so, but in the sense of why would you ever want to do that? What possible fun could it be to not travel with your family or at least your husband, but all alone? I couldn't explain as I realized quickly that to understand you would have to be raised and grown up in a Western culture and from these girls perspective I had to agree that it made absolutely no sense at all. And in addition of course there was the big question to why I wasn't married or with a partner in life? And then I felt it. Looking at them I felt my longing and loneliness for what they had and they looking at me with curiosity of two young people about to embark into a young woman's life. I spent the rest of the day as their adopted family member and enjoyed every minute of it while also remember very well what restrictions come along with a large family and that I had one of them at home waiting for me. That was how I met Mehnaz and her family back in India. Yesterday when Mehnaz pinged me on chat she had great news for me. She got engaged. And knowing what I knew about that day in India and about her family I couldn't be anything but happy for her. It was instant that I knew it must have been an arranged marriage, but in that moment, feeling her happiness and clarity about her belonging to someone from now on, it didn't matter. Who am I to say that an arranged marriage has not the same chance of happiness as any other two people getting together with a commitment to trying a relationship. After all these years of my Western style free choice in love, I am concluding that with a hundred reasons for a way out and a hundred pre-requisite to fill for the perfect partner and a hundred choices for self fulfillment I myself have never made it thous far. Here I am now 37 years old with all my choices and all my relationship tries behind me, leaving me single and with the same dream - to marry and to have a family. And in this moment I envied Mehnaz only for that one specific reason.

Las Vegas my friend - or where you ever that?

My friend Las Vegas, what happened to you? I know its been a while since my last visit and we have never really been very close from the start (too many differences, I sup pose), but now that I have seen you again I am in awe over how much you have changed. I remember your shine and glamor most of all, your ever too busy live to stand still to talk to me, your VIP status in the rest of the world, your dirty underbelly of which you always have been proud of and I could not otherwise but give you my respect for. My eyes were sore this last weekend seeing what is happening to you and I had no idea how much you were hurting. Where have all your beautiful friends gone? Where has your glitter and glamor gone? What have you done to your staff, your true supporters who now only looked at me stale and lifeless at the bar entrance or on the hotel floor. The smiles are gone the twirls are gone. I even had a thought of doubt over the real human kind in them altogether and that you may have replaced them with automatic robotic dolls instead, wearing faded color costumes. Who knows what you are capable of, when you are the master magician over all things unreal and illusion-airy. I came to enjoy your company and to dip into your magic of endless creation with no boundaries and what I found in the end is that you failed and that you are falling. The hungry villains have now moved in and taken you over. I came and found myself witnessing a feast of all obesity in this country concentrated in one place with drooling mouths at the never ending all you can eat buffet (I never did like the buffet). I came and found myself observing that what we used to call dance has been replaced by endless grinds of body parts in creation of floods of sweat, dripping freely into the grounds, feeding your new thirst for pennies during your economic fast. I am sure you miss the smell of dollars and the taste of gold coins. I know I did in the last three days. And all there was is now no more, leaving you high and dry, lifeless and dusty, stale and cheap, abandoned and poor. I feel for you and yet I feel it is your own destiny to be where you are now, so low, so stale. It is a good bye for me for good or a good bye for a long time at least, until you have recovered. Maybe, just maybe then I can return and hug you again and find some satisfaction for my needs as well. But that would require for you to have learned something new.

Thoughts while in Bali

Three days left in Bali and by now it leaves me with a smile driving through the city streets. I have accustomed well and got myself a scooter. Amazing how being mobil has changed my experience here. I am no longer being hazzeled by the never ending – transport or taxi – call outs when walking on the sidewalk, or what they call sidewalk but actually is more like an obsticale course and made me always nervous to catch my flip flop or worse my whole foot in the concrete cracks. The walk into the town of Ubud in total was never enjoyable and I felt irritable by the time we get anywhere. Not wanting to stay in this energetic at any time while being here I did what worked for me and got myself some wheels. I don’t feel quiet like a local yet driving as there are no traffic rules and I still have to concentrate so much that I am sure I am a funny sight to watch, all serious under my way too big half shelf helmet. I realize there are still parts of town I have not explored and so it is my mission to do so in the remainder time. The people are lovely here – so friendly so peaceful and can I just say what I enjoy so much as well , there is no stealing here. You know how nice it is to just put your helmet on top of the mirror at your bike and not have to worry. I see people leaving there entire groceries behind. Wouldn’t that be nice to go back to these days where one would think that a stinking helmet is not something anyone could desire. I have spent two days on the gilli T island as the white people called it in slang. The proper name is Gili Tranwangan, the largest of the three Gili islands belonging to Lombok. Gili T is said to be the party island and I contest to the truth of that matter. I was not there for the party but rather it is the easiest island to get to and honestly I was dying to get away a bit from all the couples. I knew Bali was honeymoon destination number one and I get why but traveling as a single I found myself annoyed by looking at all the happy couples. (We did see some unhappy ones, too. I’de say I give them at least two more years before their relationship will end in inreconsilable differences.) I did find what I was looking for on the island: Cristal clear water, white sand beach and sun. Once you leave the party scene behind on one street you can actually find beaches all around the island that are deserted, only me, endlessly screening my eyes over the aboundance of shells and coral peaces carpeting the entire stretch of beach. And so I splourged spending two nights in a geourgeos bungalow, all dark wood with the large white bed, dancing white sheer courtains all around for moskito protection. Yes, it, too, was the perfect honeymoon room, but this I didn’t mind, to stretch my legs in all directions, fully enjoying my room, my time, my bed, The place had front beach access and all lawn chairs reserved for little me. One of the owners was German, post or present hippie, usually living in Berlin, when not in Bali. We had a beer and chatted. You can appreciate that even the most hippiest looking person coming from Germany atually has had a most qualified education, including University and therefore the conversations with Martin were interesting, lasting and wordly. We set front row, watching all the white people walking by on their way to the next coctail party and every once in a while a local would greet Martin, saying something in Indonesian, a language which I in the one month did not pick up at all, not even the hello and thank you. I don’t know, but this language does not stick with me at all. Oh well. Gilli T is entrily taken over by tourism, there is no doubt about that. Water shortage and trash mountains are creating a huge problem and for me a personal conflict for being there. I asked Martin all sorts of questions as I was worried about the additional water plastic bottle I just consumed and personally curious where the water came from, provided in the outdoor shower for me. Martin shared all the concerns this island is going to face with the ever increasing tourism on the island and the very little solutions for the problems. I am afraid there weren’t too many concerned visitors and I want to perhaps simply blame that on the age range of all the travelers there. 99% of all people coming to Gilli T are young hipsters, surfers from all over the world, age range 18 – 24, I guessed. And for them I have to say it truly is heaven. If I had a daughter or son that age I would absolutely support them to come here. Its safe haven, beach time, fun as fun happens at that age and also perhaps a fun way to be introduced to your first mushroom experience.