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came home from Berlin to this package from Sia.

Today I like being just where I am. Today is about rainy day things: work, emails, tea, crafting. Listening to slow things like maps and diagrams. I want to have time to decorate, a workspace with an inspiration wire, now that I have room. (I can hang out all my treasures and postcards!) I want to bake cupcakes. I want candles. See, the little things are starting to feel good again, slowly.

Sia and I were talking about that laser quote (pale … glow) again. I think you need reminders like that around. I am sick of being so afraid of everything. I am sick of constantly worrying about what other people might think of me and the things that I do. I am sick of my blog-writing being so constrained, not to appear too boring or flakey… to appear cool (what an absurd thing to want to be at 26, surely I am over that). Perhaps I am shedding skin.

this I jotted down at the jewish museum:
If we don’t use our physical and mental capabilities, we lose them. I notice in conversations that I have to look for words that I often used in the past but can’t remember now because I no longer use them…
-from Jean Heinemann’s notebook

I feel like this a lot. In totally different context, of course. Growing up seems to be about missing some parts of yourself… has something better taken place?

——-
Over the weekend I worked on this:

These are (were) my favourite shoes of all time, but so “well worn” they were starting to hurt my feet. I thought they deserved a proper funeral… It was so much fun to craft! I need to do more this type of projects. Some t-shirts, maybe.

A week is too little time in Berlin, You’d need a year, at least. We only got started… Now I am in throws of travel sickness (=homesick in reverse), there is always that when you come back.

Berlin is a giant. Travel twenty minutes with U-bahn and there is another main street, another Mitte, more beautiful old houses, vast parks… Too big to explore by foot, the city feels unmanageable. (And why would you need to manage a city?). You are just a grain of sand. That is freeing, and scary.

Our Berlin was:
The Jewish Museum, that comes in definite first. Daft Punk at Velodrom, one of the best gigs of my life. The U-bahn in general. Friedrichshain nightlife. A quiet Sunday night dinner in a restaurant where they played music from Amelie. Lots of good wine. Hellen van Meene at c/o Berlin. The whole Prenzlauer Berg. The stylish berliners in their black/gray attire… and so much more.

It’s a cliche but travel is a bit like meditation. A stuck in a motion kind of thing. You impatiently start to wait to get home, to do things, life, differently. To drink more espresso, to make more likeminded friends, to stay up all night talking, to make art… to hang onto yourself in every little way.

Even though I know the language, I didn’t get that ‘at home’ feeling in Berlin. I have no idea why I have that in Holland. And why Finland is a constant low level depression for me, however immature thing that is to say. All this I thought about a lot while away.

Scared and inspired, that’s what I feel like these days. It’s not a bad thing.

P.S. Most of the pics up now.

And oh! We seek to be pale, while we could glow.

Home again – full of post-travel-emptiness. What now? Really, what is there?

I didn’t fall in love with Berlin straight away. I even hated it, at times. But then I got thinking maybe cities are kind of like people. You forget about this, all wrapped in easy comfort. And then you meet someone who makes you terrified, and that’s the only way it is supposed to be.

(at home, this was in my emails)

some Berlin pics up, I have 250 in total, so be patient..