Find what you Love and let it kill you

My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you.
Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.
Let it kill you and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Charles Bukowski

Just wanted to say hi but produced a rather lengthy blog post about life, death, starting things up and writing things down… Read or skip it, but know I’ll be back soon with more creative content, link update and a postcard swap for sure.

My beloved pink boots, a thin icicle melting, the cold and always unexpected snow of March,
and an indoor summer bouquet.

I always have things to write about. My brain is full of wonderful topics in the color of the rainbow. They disturb everyday life and needs to be written down. Blogging, this awesome creative outlet, is always on my mind, and has been for the past decade! So when I take a break from blogging you must think something is terribly wrong… It was/is, and it isn’t. I’m fine. And I am sorry if some of you, my dear readers, have been worried about me. Thanks for asking about my health, leaving kind comments, and sending me e-mail reminders that I need to get back to my blog. You’re so right. I need to get back to sharing, not because some of you are waiting for a sign of life, but because this is such big, bold and beautiful part of wee life. It has always been a part of my life that makes me happy, and it continues to thrill me.

I am not sure I will continue for ever, but for now I am not quiting. This is not the time to end this blog, even though I haven’t posted for too many days. I do not like endings anyway, so let’s not think about that day… For now I need your company, I need to share my photography and artwork with you guys. Thanks for sticking with the blog and checking back for updates…

It simply did not feel good to leave March with that one blog post, so as we’re nearing the end of the month I am trying to pull myself together. I am not sick anymore, but I have fallen into a writer’s illness that is, maybe not a block but similar. It’s called “too much to share”. Where do you start when your brain is jam packed with the past three months ups and downs? Oh, no need to answer that, I know the answer already. You just start anywhere and continue from there. Where you start does not matter, the most important thing is always always always that you start!

Poor yourself a drink, sit down and start something. Weather it is a painting, a blog post or writing morning pages every day, you’ve got to take one step at a time and then continue from there. It is the only way you will ever get anything accomplished. It is the easiest strategy ever, yet so hard to realize at times. Especially when you “get away from it” for a few weeks, like I have. It is way too easy to loose your good habits, sometimes it happens in a matter of days. Sometimes you loose sight of what’s important too, and it is just as bad.

I have been caught up inside my head this month. Procrastinating, thinking, resting, and thinking some more. I have several reasons, or maybe I should just call them excuses. The reason why it was hard to write in January and February was that my paternal grandmother died, at the age of 96. She is (was?) one of my favorite persons in the whole world, so it feels like my family shrunk a tremendously when she went to “the other side”.

Vintage photos of my grandmother, her collection of May Flowers, the hospital corridor
and the sky of her last day in life.

But death can be a good thing. My grandmother was ready to die, and had been for quite some time. It was her time to go. She died calmly in her sleep just a few hours after we visited her for the last time (16th of January), though she did not wake up on our last visit. But it is still so darn hard to understand death (or life), if at all possible. It is so final, and I don’t like endings. Ever. Death is also so overwhelmingly foreign and strange when it enters our lives. It is such a normal thing, the way it has to be and should be – but because it happens so rarely it falls upon us like an abomination. We accept that it is a fact of life, but in fact it is very hard to be at peace with its interference of life.

I think I needed to share her death here, so that I can move on to other things. This blog needed it. I have a creative idea for a project involving all the things I have brought to my home from hers, as we’ve been going through everything these past weeks. Throwing away stuff, sorting, saving, reading through old papers, laughing at letters she wrote, finding treasures (like the school drawings of my grandmother’s sister), giving boxes of stuff away, and keeping some of the important stuff. Dividing the memories so that we all can have a piece of her belongings.

Well, I really want to document, through photography and maybe writing as well, all the things I inherited, especially the collection of bric-a-brac and trinkets I couldn’t let go of (including my grandfather’s tiny collection of owls). And writing about my idea for a project here feels like a start. Thanks for reading on, and letting me think about this project here with you guys. Would you mind if it became a series of blog posts, perhaps? Among other blog posts of course, I have lots to share.

The start of something new (using old yarn from my grandmother’s stash), eating waffles with blueberries,
finding ice on the ground, and adding snow to my art journal.

As I get back to blogging I will start the postcard swap sign up soon, but first I want to get back to my Spotted Photo Theme idea. January was supposed to be Darkness and Light (think lightplay, winter photography, and such) and then February Vehicles (pick your favorite way of transportation or the kind of vehicles that mostly show up in your photo folders). But since I’m the boss I am moving Darkness and Light to next winter, and will post some photos of vehicles the 5th of April. If you want to join me, prepare a post on that theme. I’d love to see your collection of photos then.

And as I have already said in this post and numerous times before, the act of starting is what gets you going. I started writing, and found I had things to say. I always find writing cathartic and wonderful. It is important to me, so important that I choose WRITING as my one little word of the year… And then I almost instantly stopped writing anything. That has to change. This is a start, though we’re now at the end of the blog post. I would like this blog to have at least one blog post every second day next month, or more…

I won’t make promises, but I will try my hardest. And in the end, isn’t that the only thing we can ever do?