ulla hahn. verbesserte auflage & eurydikes lied. [poems]

if i had found the poem on the left somewhere in the depth of the world wide web and didn't have to go to the library i'd never know about the poem on the right. however, i do know now. complete circle.






Hahn, Ulla. Gesammelte Gedichte. München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2013.

 

 

 

 

pieces of driftwood from a beach somewhere on vancouver island. [good things]

most valuable gifts. [good things]

sometimes children intuitively know what one values most.

this gift will serve me as a reminder to the afternoons i spent with my goddaughter doing somersaults on the grass wearing borrowed jogging pants under my not-so-somersault-appropriate dress, having races to the next bench or tree or fence, improving our skipping skills and collecting leaves, stones and whatever seemed suitable to be picked up as keepsakes. such good memories.

most valuable gifts. [good things]

given to me by my goddaughter.

the lorm alphabet. [memories]

the lorm aphabet

just recently i found this little slip of paper again, with the alphabet on it that was invented by hieronymus lorm. named after him, lorm is a hand-touch alphabet that was developed for deafblind people in the 19th century and is still used today, predominently in german speaking countries. 

when i looked at the alphabet i had to think of my sister. growing up, my siblings and i invented our own secret alphabet that we were soon able to write and read pretty well - although writing with our own alphabet has always been much easier that reading it afterwards. so we wrote each other notes and letters that were not decipherable by our parents. not that we ever wrote something in these notes that truly needed to be kept secret but oh were we proud of being able to do so anyway. 

my very first tattoo

for me our alphabet is inextricably linked to my childhood, the place where i grew up and to my brother and my sister. when i decided on what my first tattoo was going to be i knew it had to be written in these letters that were invented by us. i don't know if my brother would still be able to use them, however, my sister and i sure am. just recently i included a piece of writing in our alphabet as a clue during a scavenger hunt and she had no trouble understanding the note. both of us have always been interested in communication or rather in ways of communication we were not used to such as sign language, braille writing, morse code and so on. she now is a speech therapist while i study linguistics.... 

anyway, i can remember vividly how my sister and i were sitting in the train to zurich a couple years back, trying to write in each others hands - using the lorm alphabet. it was challenging, to say the least. i have always been more of a visual person and taking that sense away and suddenly focusing on another one that we were so not used to is difficult and we soon gave up on trying to communicate this way. however, i feel like it is a worthwhile thing to try to learn and master new things. so let's get started with it yet again! i do hope to be more persistent this time around.

another beach find. [memories]

beach find. [memories]

shape

& structure

driftwood treasure. [travels]

        tower beach find. 

keepsakes that make me happy. [travels]

while i love traveling just for the sake of traveling i also love traveling because it always makes me aware of how much i love coming home and spending time with my family and my friends again. surrounding me with random things from my travels at home somehow helps me during times when i have what i call the "itchy-feet-syndrom" and just want to leave everything behind. i can look at everything and daydream wonderfully and, therefore, include my travel memories into everyday life, intertwining the two. 

maps. planning. counting down days. [travels]

it's not the most ideal situation when your best friend in the world lives in vancouver. not generally speaking of course but if you yourself are living in zurich and the both of you do not have loads of money to throw out of the window for flights this is a bit of a problem. however, i was able to find a flight that i can actually afford and therefore i will be hanging out with my lovely faerie of the forests for three weeks. well, hanging out is not quite accurate. we will be finding out how far away from vancouver we can get on our bikes. the plan is to be near the ocean every single day since the ocean is our favourite thing ever and since the world is quite unfair sometimes, there is no ocean near zurich anywhere. so, we will be spending our days on our bikes, out in nature, camping out on beaches, collecting beach treasures, making bonfires and singing on the top of our voices together because that is another favourite thing of ours. for now, i will just occupy myself with studying maps, in anticipation of this overload of summer happiness. we will also be weird together, have insanely long talks about just virtually anything we can think of and do everything that can only be done with best friends. now, we just have to find a way to teach the bestest dog in the world to run next to a bike. although i have to say, if she is equally stubborn in this regard as she is with her refusal to ever learn how to swim this might prove to be really difficult. anyway, with or without dog, these three weeks will be amazing and i am sure that it won't rain. ever. not a single time during those weeks. ever.

 umarmig. du fehlsch da.    

mamma's jewellery. [memories]

is there quite something that, for a little girl, equals going through her mom's jewellery box and imagine herself all grown up, wearing stuff just like mom's? 

i always liked the color of this necklace so much...

grosmama und -papa. [memories]

when my grandparents moved to the retirement home, we had to clean out their entire apartment, go through everything they owned and decide what was going to happen with every single object. what was worth keeping and what was to be thrown away. this process is a very hard one for every family i am sure. my parents were the ones who had to carry most of the weight of it, since they were always very involved in taking care of my grandparents. my mom basically made it possible for them to stay in their home for well into their nineties by looking after them regularly and my father, even though he was their youngest child, ended up managing everything that needed managing.
for me, the entire process was quite different than for the rest of my family because i decided that i wanted to move into their apartment if no one else in the family showed interest in doing so. their apartment is a very special place to me, there are so many memories attached to those rooms and i just couldn't stand the thought of someone else living there. i have carefully reintegrated so many of their things and belongings into the apartment that now seems so different to what it was before. often my sight stumbles over some keepsake and it makes me happy that my grandparents, who sadly both passed a way last year, still inhabit this place by virtue of the things they loved and valued finding a new home here.
my grandparents were extraordinarily awesome. my granddad was the storyteller and the joker, always entertaining everyone, doing crossword puzzles with the clock nearby in order to see how fast he was able to solve it. he was extremely smart, very knowledgable and loved card games more than anything else, much to the chagrin of my dad, who to that day refuses to ever play cards ever again. grandpa was very excited when i had to learn latin, which gave him the chance to boast with everything he still knew, and when i decided to study english, his first reaction was to look for the two english books that he owned and give it to me as a present: pearl s. buck's the good earth (an edition from 1932) and katherine mansfield's the garden party (an edition from 1937). he liked to tell me stories like the one about how he attempted to drive back home with his car with twenty kilometres per hour after getting drunk when he was young. he was an avid photographer and left us boxes full of old slides of my grandma and his travels.
traveling. my grandma loved nothing more than traveling, she was always beaming with joy when i told her that i was going to travel to some part of the world and she looked through photos of my adventures with me for hours and hours... when she was at my age, she was not able to travel because there was the second world war and when that was over she had four little children and that makes it difficult in a whole other way... she traveled much later on but there is another quality to traveling when you are young and have no obligations or commitments at all and that was something she was well aware of. however, it was not something she was bitter about. she was always insanely excited for me and the possibilities i had. 
she was the person that i admired most. she was the best person she could be: kind, generous, content and caring. if i only manage to be half the person she was i will be proud. she loved yellow roses... and here i am crying over these words because i automatically wrote "loves" instead of "loved"... she hated it when people wore black clothes and she never, to my knowledge, put food on the table without explaining exactly what was not okay with it. no, she did not like cooking.
my favourite thing, however, about my grandparents was that they loved me, unconditionally. i always felt inadequate in comparison to my brother and my sister. i was never extremely smart nor was i very pretty and in a way, i always felt like a failure and like i was being judged from everyone else in the family (even though i now know that was never the case) but never from them. they were always so obviously thrilled when i spent time with them, i just knew they did not care in the least about unimportant stuff like that.
although i am at the moment embarking on a minimalist lifestyle, i will never throw anything away that i got from them. there are boundaries. i will, most certainly, not ever let go of their books. 
i will always love them. always.

the loveliest newfie blog. [travels]

a few years back i bought the most beautiful scarf from a lovely lady at some kind of fair-thingy in corner brook and it was just recently that i found the tag and a little business card belonging to it that i sentimentally stored in a little tin can with lots of other bits and pieces as keepsakes from my travels through newfoundland. this little piece of paper led me to the most wonderful blog. newfoundland has a special place in my heart, there is no place on earth i would rather go to than newfoundland and reading this blog always makes me feel like i am still in a way connected to the island and its people.

http://islandsweet.blogspot.ch/2013/12/on-my-drive-up-to-gros-morne-at-end-of.html

photos from my travels in newfoundland: