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