Author: Birgit

Memories of India: visual diary entry

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The photos in this post aren’t all my favourites, nor the best from their sets, but what I could easily, without placing too much attachment on perfection, upload to share some of the scenes I lived within, for a brief moment in time. {above : an average street scene in Mysore, India.} {above : a large pebble rock, on top of one of the hills I climbed, unfortunately I am not sure if this was during a temple visit near Mysore or later in Hampi, India.} {above : an average street scene in Mysore, India.} {above : an unusually quiet street scene in Mysore, India.} {above : a typical street vendor in Mysore, selling household goods, India.} {above: photograph from a trip we took to Bylakuppe, Tibetan Settlement, 3-4 hours by bus from Mysore, India} {above: photograph from a trip we took to Bylakuppe, Tibetan Settlement, 3-4 hours by bus from Mysore, India} {street scene from Mysore: Man helping himself to water and struggling turning the tap off again}{street scene from Mysore: Man helping himself to water and struggling turning …

Anticipating the next stop on the life journey

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It is a sunday afternoon, time is closing in and once again feeling limited. Our 6 months in England (for me interspersed with a stay at an Artist Residency Program in Finland) is drawing to it’s close. The time was just long enough to recover from the extremities of Adrenal Fatigue. This is something they don’t tell you in other places: traversing the globe, surviving in far away places can take it’s toll on health; sometimes in a profound way.. But here I am, more or less put back together, the fractals reorganised into a comprehensive shape that somewhat resembles myself as I remember her.. Yes, it feels so long ago that I was last settled in one piece that I am no longer even sure the complete ‘me’ ever existed. But I do recall that in summer 2007 I felt: “I am whole in myself’. Just before a forest fire descended on my life. This is about 9 years ago! Incredible. The time. Can it be this long!? How did I survive this turbulence …

sheep drawings

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Everybody is very keen to hear how this fascination with portrait drawings of sheep began.. Let’s just say: Haruki Murakami was a big inspiration. Have your read his book: “A Wild Sheep Chase”? It somehow formed the literary soundtrack for my second journey to India. Part surreal, part real.

It never rains in Northern California…

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…. at all. It’s day after day sunshine here. It is definitely very tantalising and the flavour of opportunities around the corner is everywhere. In our case without a car we can’t really reach them because it is true, America is a car culture and you better have a car here or be limited but the opportunities are there. There is a distinctly different attitude here to everything. An optimism that I am always trying to understand the origin of. For example in real terms being poor here sucks more than In the UK even (!) thanks to this culture of ‘the individual’ this mentality that creates and progresses SO much “everyone out for themselves: ready, steady, go” but it leaves one a bit by the wayside when in the UK (up until ‘Cameron the Coldhearted Opportunist’ came into power) and Europe there would be some support to helps bridges gaps until one can gain a foothold again. This here really is not a model I would follow if I had a say over government …

Petsitting in Bernal Heights

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After being told that this cat didn’t like being petted and that she is rather moody I was ready for snappy attitudes and a lot of aloof ignoring. Yet within days she was purring on my lap, sleeping in my arm and resting her paws on my right arm as I typed emails and social media posts.. We made best friends! And this just has to be one of the coolest cats that I have every had the pleasure to be friends with! I teasingly called her ‘Zippy’ because I (wrongly) assumed that she would be slow and laid back.. Instead she had so much beans and it was a lot of fun seeing her chase invisible mice from time to time and bounce up and down the bed. I truly fell in love with ‘Zippy’. If we had a San Francisco home of our own, an owned one, I would have pleaded with her family to allow her to come and live with me. What a super, super cat! Daisy the dog was much …

Where can we go from here?

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Our housesitting appointment is drawing to a close at the end of the coming week. We by chance got asked to take on another house-pet-sitting gig from the 1st – 4th of August and I said yes minutes before I found out that we likely have lost the (stationary) RV that we were schedule to move into that weekend. So that was a lucky decision. It leaves a rather big question, especially considering that this is the Bay Area with incredibly high rental costs: where do we go from there? We have a grace period of another 9 days or so before I really have no idea where we will go. I had this wild idea of buying a school bus as an art-workshop venue, I prefer to teach lessons and classes in small settings rather than bigger ones, even if I take a pay-cut as a result. I had come up with a school bus when I couldn’t think of anywhere where I could teach, especially with me being new to the area I just don’t …