Dinochives!!

The day off!
After I did yoga and went swimming in the baltic, Rose and I spread the wonderful blue picnic blanket on the lawn outside our house and decided to soak up some spring sunlight! With the view on our herb patch the thoughts began wrapping around gardening topics although we did make an effort before to study some Swedish or read a book. But the green around us took over. There is many things to find out about the little wonderful plants that we eat everyday. And especially the ones we drink every day!

Yes, we do. Nettles, dandylion, and many others go into the green smoothies Rose makes every day, now that she has finally got her most desired birthday gift: The Vitamix! The Vitamix will be a topic of many blogs herafter, but so much is to be said now: It is the strongest kitchenaid I have ever seen and it produces wonderful bubbly green tastey frozen banana and orange green smoothies with all our fresh herbs from the garden...

Now to the educational part of our morning: did you know that chives are the only ones of their family that were present in the Old World and are still in New World? We didn't before. They have hereby become the dinosaurs of our garden. We also learned that our chivosaurs become stiff before they grow their flower, which might lead us to feeling them up every now and again.

Back from the chives to the blue picnic blanket where we will be visited by a dear friend in a minute (who will add a very good fresh potatoe recipe to our chive knowledge in a minute, mentioning some butter and salt and a lot of chives...mmmhh).

The topic turns to nettles. Stinging nettles. The horror of every child is our pleasure now. No, don't think that we are into masochistic technics of nettling, not at all. We are inspired by the content of the nettle and we have some ways of getting around the sting. If you happen to have some freshly grown stinging nettles in your garden or anywhere you go for walks, that is, not too close to roads or where dogs go regularly too, then try picking some, the fresh part at the top, and here is how you treat them: either soak them in warm water, boil them like you could with spinach or, and this is what we do: blend the hell out of them!!
Of course we have our super strong kitchen device, the Vitamix, but even on your normal blender the nettles will successfully use their sting.

Both, chives and nettles, contain Vitamin A and C, potassium and calcium. The chives add some sulfur to your diet and the nettles have additional goodies such as Vitamin K, iron en masse and also some maganese. Really, we should all be eating one dose of raw nettles and some chives every day! But sure, there is the winter, which we are glad to be done with up here...but even in the Winter you can eat chives and nettles. The trick is to collect as many of the nettles as you want and can now until they blossom and seed and to dry them somewhere well ventilated. They store nicely in ground up form or as a leafy tea.
Chives apparently grow well in flowerpots on your windowsill in the winter too. We shall try that. Our Chives aka Chivosaurs shall be somewhat of a pet next winter, reminding us of the lovely sunny mornings in spring when we found out how to feel when the chive wants to blossom.

Spring...life...

running thoughts, no sense, just expression...

visitors in and out, coffee, fika with leftovers from work, garden beds dug, fires on rainy days, nettle soup of nettles that I just found around the rock opposite the trees where the pastures for cows begin and where in about a month I will be harvesting wild strawberries...Spring...Easter is over, so is April, I have had my first swim. Canoeing and drinking wine in the late evening sun, yoga in the early morning, picking up gifts that life lays on my path and enjoying them!

My life is unfolding and making decisions: I am going to stay in Sweden longer than one Summer. I will take on some interesting tasks in project here, I will learn about this landscape, the local culture I accounter while meeting more and more interesting people...

feeling grateful...for having met you! All!

Snail shell home by night...

A stormy night. Walking home from the Seminar, the home of the Yippies, I crossed two fields and passed a forest edge, walked up a driveway and all this way was windswept by the cold but not icey storm of a spring night that is currently still blowing around the house and making noises wherever it touches things, trees, houses, rocks or just itself in other gusts of wind.

I always felt that Spring storms are good. They bring new air, they lick away the leftovers of the winter's snow, they let it rain and blow it dry again. They sweep the skye clean of all clouds so that I can see the stars. And how many there are tonight.
It strikes me, that this season, when nights are still dark and days are newly warmed by the time gaining sun, is made for stargazing. The skye is perfect. Dark black with a shade of blue (besides the edges of lightpollution along parts of the horizon...). And the moon in a clear crescent, tonight even with a sharp contour around the dark round so that it is visible in its wholeness somehow. And while I find my way in the dark without hesitation, as the moon lights my path and does so efficiently, the expression "moonshadow" comes to mind. I have one in the very same moment. It is following me alongside my rubberboots on the ground where the moon is reflected in old puddles and other faint shadows appear, of trees and fence poles.



The storm brings beauty and interesting moments, such as today, when the sky was brilliantly blue and yet it was raining from somewhere faraway, carried for miles to rain on me. Or the storm can fell trees, as I saw one falling on the way in the car with a friend to the station, where for a while no trains were going. Maybe also due to the storm? I would not like to trade this day for a day without wind, for had the trains been going the conversation would have never been as good as it was while the car got stuck in a traffic jam. Wonderful winds! Windful wonders.

Now a moment of stillness. The wind decided to take a breake, I can hear myself breathing. The cat moves to cuddle up the other way 'round and I know that my flatmade and friend Rose is already cosily sleeping in the other room. The fire died down in the fireplace, my time is up for today, my bed is calling for a good night. I imagine this home to be like a snailshell, I can withdraw all the way to the very inside and if you put your ear to the shell and listen carefully, I am almost certain you will hear the wind.

Ytter Eneby goes Mitte, Basel!

Today I walked into the front of the Cafe Mitte in Basel, the Nonfumare, and at a table in the morning sun sat sparkling and lovely my good friend and housemate from Ytter Eneby, Rose! Oh how good to see her! And next to her sat Che, a friend who always turns up in the unexpected but just fitting moments.

Rose is here to be here and to see friends to be here with. I am here to be here, to work here, to finish off my life here and to feel my way out here, into the new period that is lying ahead of me, Sweden, Järna, Ytter Eneby.

Seeing Rose makes me feel so close to Ytter Eneby, where I will be going back to in 3 weeks.
Sometimes I would love to beam back and forth, make my double life possible in one place, reduce the homefeeling I have in many places to only one place, in order to stay there. Put the security (inner and outer) that Switzerland gives me, into a pretty little bag and take it with me wherever I go. Pack up the conversations and inspiration I experience when I see my friends from Basel and from Berlin and plant them else where, make them grow wherever I end up going. And most of all: where I end up staying!

But no, this world works otherwise. I have to keep saying yes to some and having to say no to other things, I have to chose and chose wisely. I have to say goodbye here in order to say hello somewhere else. And most of all I have to get used to only doing one thing at a time. Then life is beautiful. And whatever I have to say goodbye to today I could possibly say hello to another time. In the meantime I am in the right here and right now and I will enjoy it! And will take time for each thing I do. A lot of time. Even more time. Because life is beautiful and rich when I take the time to discover it!

Ser fram emot...looking forward...Vorfreude.

Three white weeks...

Three weeks. I have been here for three weeks and 2 days now.
Outside there is snow, melting snow, frozen snow, fresh snow, powdery snow, white snow, grey snow, dripping snow, sticky snow blue snow, brown snow, green snow. Shades of colours I never expected to see in the snow. Bu then - where I come from there has never been much snow, so the colourful development of the snow proceeded a lot faster and un-noticeable. Here in the South of the North, where I am now, you have a lot more time to notice things! I do understand now how the people of the North (the South of the North and the North of the North) can have so many different words for snow. Respect!

So, three weeks of snow.
In the meantime, I have visited some places around, the city of 14 Islands - Stockholm, a course at YIP given by Rembert Biemond about Money, Economics, the meaning of work and the values in our life, my favourite cafe Åsgatan 2 in Järna, the Astrid Lindgren childrens hospital, the Tuesday Nights Choir, and the public lecture tonight by Valentin Vollmer about "The School of Everybody", where everybody is a teacher!

And after each outing, this home has brought me back my calm and energy. When I arrived I was welcomed by the letters V.Ä.L.K.O.M.N.A. on my wall. Welcome! I will keep them there, as this little cottage in the middle of the white fields surrounding Ytter Eneby has always been welcoming to me and has to others. The walls call it out loudly, and now the letters give it literary form. Welcome! Be welcome here, you friends out there! Come by and visit! Sit by the fire with us, enjoy the warmth while it is cold outside. And dream with us of the Spring and the sun and the leaves on trees and warm air!

Do we ever really understand the gift that the people in our life are to us?

Do we ever really consider where we would be without them?

I have been thinking about this a lot lately and it seems the answer is, nowhere.

Or at least very far from here.

In the last year especially, I have observed the essential role of those closely around me, sheepherding me as I find my way into myself and the world at large. I have been shaped by these people, protected, loved and tested. So much of who I am is because of you.

Thank you.

I love you.

Look at the person next you, the one making toast, or humming a tune while they facebook, or cook you dinner, or a cup of tea, or.... and ask yourself, what do these people allow in you/for you?

Do they play a part in your life that no one else can fill? How well do we understand the wisdom of their company, care and chaos?

This is an ode to those people in our lives who make us who we are.

This is a dedication to those people in our lives who without them, time would be empty.

I feel the presence of the souls who have made this place a home.

Pink is the colour!!

Rose and I drink one freshly made vegetable juice every day. Living in Sweden this limits us to the winter veggies we find available, which are mostly roots. One can love roots when one is creative with them! So the juices we make are often of the colour PINK, since beetroots are high in season here (they store well!). Our juices also contain carrots and apples, cabbage and ginger, pear and orange sometimes. I swear, I have never lived as healthily as here. (And I was an eco freak per se before I moved to Sweden!!). But here I learn to live in a truly different way, not a eco freaky but eco friendly, fun and stylish lifestyle. Not necessarily the typical Swedish lifestyle, but a way of living that I feel is timeless and placeless, it should be in any household at all times, that's what I mean!
Rose has one of the best juicers there are, and a blender for smoothies will be bought as soon as she can afford to. Did you know you can make banana ice cream in a juicer? Well, I didn't before I saw Rose do it last night. The frozen bananas go into the blender rock hard and come out as sweet and creamy, icy delight without anything added to them but pressure and some sharp teeth of the juicer. Wow!
You bet, we are looking forward to the Spring!! With fresh leaves, herbs, celery, and so on... But I can do with more pink juices for a while still. Spring comes late in Sweden, but when it does, it really does, that's what I've been told. The colour will be green then, for sure!