Heidi Trautmann

Christmas- and End-of-the-Year-Letter 2019
12/18/2019

Dear family, dear friends,

 

With the evenings getting cooler, I decided to start my usual end-of-the-year-cleaning in my little thought studio where everything is stored what I once wrote down, books, articles, notes, ship logbooks, travel diaries, old desk calendars and…several telephone books and a big box of cards, Christmas and other wishing cards, post cards from friends around the world. I forgot all about cleaning and sat down to go through all those.

 

It was a journey into the past and I realized how much I was connected to it. There is one very old telephone book, it dates back to the 1980s, I kept it for many years as the only one and there I had registered friends we had made on our travels, where all our family members are noted down in alphabetical order with so many new entries added because they have moved to other places. I found entries of artists who were present in the 1980s when I was involved in the art house ‘Werkhof’ in Bavaria where we organized art events…and there were the many sailors listed we encountered when sailing along the coasts of the Mediterranean for many years and also people we met in the most unlikely places whose life stories we listened to in countries where we spent weeks or months travelling through by car, bus, train or camper. However, there are many names crossed out with the date given when they had left the garden of life.

 

After we threw our anchor for good in Cyprus, I filled new telephone books  with my artist friends and such institutions, also non-artistic connections, and also here I found so many listings crossed out. People had moved away for one reason or other…. or nice shops went broke…. or governments had changed and connections became redundant….or again, the one or other had died. I greet them from here and today.

 

My card box gave me extreme pleasure because these cards were greetings from close friends, mostly artists with their own work printed on them, among them many who have moved away or have gone to another level of existence, reminders of good times. One friend, the only one really, had been sending post cards to my lonely and mostly empty POBox  for 20 years from places she had spent her holidays in, a beloved and old-fashioned way of communication.

 

It makes me smile sadly, the world has changed immensely. Who is actually still using a landline, we all have mobile telephones, use Whatsapp or Skype. A telephone book? You save all your numbers in your mobile. Writing postcards? A short message typed in and sent to or from even the opposite side of the globe. Recently I have been strolling through Kyrenia with a lovely 89 years young lady from Luxembourg, she kept looking for postcards as souvenirs for an unforgettable stay in Cyprus. We found postcards on display which looked old and yellow like forgotten objects of the past.

 

There are so many other forgotten objects of the past, and I wonder where we are heading to, can we still stop this mad speed which will one day catapult us into darkness, darkness of crime, destruction and death?  A spark of hope though is making us breathe more freely, our youth around the world has been lighting a torch and is now carrying it around the world, they are waking up as they have realized that their governments are leading us into the wrong direction. The adults have failed. The youth takes over because it is their future, no longer ours.

 

Let us help them to improve moral values again, to protect values like environment, love and respect for each other. Let us become world citizens because the globe Earth is the home of all of us, and when it falls sick in one spot it will have to concern us all. We must stop making the world become sick by exploiting it in the way we have been doing it right now. We must find other and simpler, less egoistic ways to satisfy our thirst and hunger, because we are about to cut the branch on which we are sitting so comfortably. We must not wait for governments to make decisions, we must learn and practice responsibility ourselves.

 

Heidi,

From Eagle’s Nest on 2nd Sunday in Advent 2019

 

 

Inspite of everything...

 

 


Peaceful Christmas and

A Happy New Year 2020

 

 

 

 

 

Heidi Trautmann

P.O.Box 761

Girne - Mersin 10-Turkey

Tel. (0090) (0) 533 876 7470

www.heiditrautmann.com

heiditrautmann@hotmail.com

 





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