Britt-Arnhild's House in the Woods

Why today…….

@brittarnhild

May I tell you a secret?
Ok, but promise not to tell anybody......

I am a master "why do today what I can put off till tomorrow"-person. I have a long line of gold medal won in the championship of delay!

You don´t believe me?
But, of course it is true. I am hopeless, and I have absolutely no idea how I can improve myself.

Take the helleborus and columbine seeds my garden friend and blog reader Jorunn/Granny gave me months ago. I planned to sow them right away, and actually, it was so easy. Just put them down in the soil in the Blue Garden somewhere. To remind myself I left the small plastic bags on the kitchen table, where I easily could see them when I walked out into the garden. For my daily garden walk.

Week after week passed, and still the seeds lay on the table.
Week after week passed, and every time I wrote Jorunn an email, I wrote - I still haven´t sown your seeds.....

Then, the other day, Jorunn wrote me back - take your seeds with you out in the garden today and just throw them out, at random.

I did! And hocus pocus, like magic the seeds are now deep in the soil........ and if magic continues, they will sprout next spring.

 

Memories and wandering thoughts

@brittarnhild

On my way to Svartlamon, the area which I presented in yesterday´s post, I walked through Lademoen. In the 80ies I worked here as a deacon, my job was to visit old, lonely people.

I was young then. Married for a few years only, the mother of two wonderful small boys. This was my first job. A fumbling start, but soon I loved it. I loved the life in the huge old church, I loved my colleagues, but most of all I loved the visits. The people I met. The lives I was shown. The tales I was told.

I remember one sweet, old lady. Every time she wanted me to visit her she called the church office; "Hi, can you send the girl up to me?"

The Girl! I was 27! I felt so mature........
......and it must have been around that time the church secretary found my first grey hair.....

So many lives became alive to me as I walked around. All these people are dead now, and I wonder - are they still remembered, where are their lives now, how do we bring history forward, how do we bring the people we meet with us?

Some of the houses at Lademoen have small signs, telling about one of the persons who has lived in the house.

But what about all the others?

And my thoughts wander......

.....what about my own life.
Where will I be in 10 years? In 25?
After my death?

 

 

Appropriate thoughts on the day before Halloween, or what?

Well, one thing I know for sure though.
I am living today, I am living here and now,
and I also know that I am living the life God has given me to live

 

.......though from time to time it is hard to know which direction to chose in a multitude of crossroads........not to talk about roundabouts.

 

 

…….how can I have missed this charm

@brittarnhild

 

Saturday morning I drove downtown for my almost weekly photo walk. I parked my car where I used to, but then I let my feet wander in a new direction, to a part of the city where I have never been before. I have known of the area always, I have passed by, by car, many times, but never actually walked there.

Svartlamon, Trondheim´s answer to Copenhaven´s Christiania. I am sure most cities have a Svartlamon, a place where the inhabitants like to follow their own rules, live their own free lives.

I could never live in a place like Svartlamon, I guess I am too bourgeois, but never did I know how the area charmed me. 

How much it made my heart smile.

How can it be that I have never walked these tiny streets before? How can I have missed this charm?

 

Now I know that I will be back, with my camera, to feel this special atmosphere through the seasons, through the year.

Do you want to come with me?

 

In my journal

@brittarnhild

 

I am a journal writer. Have been so all my life, ever since I learned to write at the age of five.

 

This week I have been given some time to step aside, in solitude. With me I have my black moleskin, a set of felt pens, a few pencils, a paintbox. I am reading old entries. I am writing new ones.

 

A blue background, a chessboard, a rose growing.......... or fading........ letters are gathered into words, words into sentences, into tales......... Tales? No, to me they look more like life lived and loved.

 

Am I a real African girl now?

@brittarnhild

 I have been back home for almost a week now. It is Sunday morning in The House in the Woods. I am just out of the shower. My hair is dripping wet, even though I used two towels to dry myself, one for the hair, one for the body. Terje is making breakfast. We will have tea, juice, pastries, eggs, cheese, jam, honey, yoghurt. We will, as always on Sundays, set the table with a beautiful china. I have been back home a week. A week of daily showers, a week of comfortable nights under my eiderdown duvet, a week of family meals

I love comfort. I love clean water, I love to be able to change towel every time I shower, I love my eiderdown duvet. I love to be back home.

And I miss Africa.

 Yes, I miss Africa.
I am not sure if I could live there for a long time though. I am too spoiled with the Norwegian comforts of everyday life.

Though, who knows. May be I could adapt. 

 I remember when I was in India a year ago, there were some problems with the water, and one morning Sheri, my Indian mother´s daughter, who lives in Rome, came down to breakfast. Freshly showered.

"I am a real Indian girl" she smiled, "I can shower under a bucket of cold water"

 May be I can say that I am a real African girl now. Yes, I can shower under a bucket of cold water. Though I did wait to wash my hair until I was able to add some hot water in the bucket. Sure, I think I can say that I am a real African girl. I could even use an old cotton scarf for towel when I showered under my bucket of cold water.

 I did miss my eiderdown duvet though. My eiderdown duvet with absolutely no fleas.

 

I had planned to let yesterday´s post be the last one from Ethiopia. But it seeems like the tales won´t stop. May be I should continue to Agrica-blog over in Caffe Avec, which is actually meant to be my travel blog.......

And there might always be more Africa post over in Books on the Menu if you are interested in books.....

And who knows, there might even be one or two in Blåklokkeveien :-)

 

Another kind of a Saturday morning photo walk

@brittarnhild

I am back home after my Saturday morning photo walk. Today I have been walking in parts of Trondheim where I have never been before, and the photos and the tales will be posted tomorrow, or another day.........

I can´t remember last time I had a Saturday morning photo walks. The weekends have been filled with so many other things.......but when I look back, I realise that the photo walks have been there, all the same, though not in Trondheim.

 

Like a week ago. It was my last day in Ethiopia. We were in Lalibela. I packed my suitcase, my backpack and my camera bag, not knowing until a few days later that a bunch of fleas decided to come with me up north. After breakfast we were picked up by a prebooked car with a driver and our guide from the previous day. The drive from Lalibela to the tiny little domestic airport takes about half an hour.

Last Saturday it took longer. It was market day in Lalibela, like all Saturdays, and the road was filled with people walking in from the nearby villages and the remote mountains.

"Everybody comes to town on the market days" our guide told us. And he continued; "For many years I used to work up in the mountains, for Plan International. It took us five hours to walk from where I lived to Lalibela. On market days we always walked there, the five hours in the morning, then another five hours back in the afternood. As I worked as a teacher, I had nothing to sell. I walked there to meet people. And to have coffee!"

Most people carried with them what they were going to sell at the market. Some had heavy loads. Others had a hen, a few potatoes, a twig of herbs. If they could sell their goods they got money, or may be they could trade, tef (the grass they use to make injera, the typical sourdough pancake eaten everywhere) in exchange for a few coffee beans, a few papayas for some meat, cotton for a little sugar.......

My thoughts wander. I put away my camera and shot images with my heart instead. I reflect upon the life I am living. Where I can walk over to our local gvrocery store and buy whatever I want. Where my main concern is - there is so much to choose from, I have no idea what to make for dinner tonight.......

In Ethiopia people are lucky if they get one dinner a month with meat. In the news I read that in Norway an average consumer eat 77 kilo meat per year!

 The school of life has something to teach us. Every day.

The churches of Lalibela, the world´s 8th wonder

@brittarnhild

Already when we walked around, I told myself: this is going to be fantastic to blog about. Every time I sit down to write a new blog, I am thinking: Lalibela. But then my mind goes blank. No, that´s not correct. My mind doesn´t go blank at all, it goes rainbow!

Lalibela was so impressing. So different from everything I have seen elsewhere.

I had read a lot about the eleven churches of Lalibela before I came. I had seen pictures. Still I was completely unprepared. And walked around asking myself - is this real?

After my visit I have read Philip Marsden´s book The Chains of Heaven, and as I lack words myself to describe this place, I borrow some from Marsden:

 Lalibela is a town to die in. The tunnels that once linked the complex of churches are clogged with centuries of corpses. To make a pilgrimage to Lalibela eases your later passage to heaven - but to die here is much better. The soil itself is sacred, and those who take the journey are buried in shallow graves.

......It is not known precisely when the churches were carved, whether they were started during the thirteenth-century reign og King Lalibela or much earlier. Nor is it known where all the excavated rock was deposited, nor if any outside expertise was responsible. 

I have read somewhere that it must have been 40.000 men working on the churches. Or rather, they must have been built by angels. The legend tells that king Lalibela fell into a trance and was transported up to the heavens, and there he saw the eleven churches he was to build.

Philip Marsden again: So Lalibela became a Biblical Land in miniature. Here is Golgatha, Cana and Nazareth. Beneath Calvary is the Tomb of Adam. I had skirted the slopes of Mount Tabor. Mount Sinai, crossed the River Jordan and climbed the Moint of Olives. In the compound of Beta Maryam, I had bent to smell the single rosebush from the Garden of Eden. Beside the church of Beta Giorgis is a slope f un-dug rock which is Mount Ararat.

Often I say to myself: the world is filled with so many thing, places, people you have absolutely no idea about, how will I ever know it all, how will I ever experience it all, how will I ever learn it all.......

But then I know - it is not up to me to know it all, to experience it all, to learn it all. What is up to me is to know, to experience, to learn...... to LIVE!

 

Thank for walking the way of LIFE with me.

 

Maria, Mary, Miriam…….

@brittarnhild

Maria, Mary, Miriam. Her name is a little different around the world, but she herself is the same. The Holy Mother, who gave birth to Jesus. I am working on a book about her, a novel, where I follow her from childhood till old age. I read what I can find. The Bible. The Apocrypha. Legends. Novels. And wherever I go, she is with me.

Not only in my heart and mind. Not only in the written words. But also on a tiny road somewhere in Ethiopia. On her way to the market, together with her beloved Joseph, with the gem of her heart Jesus and with her dear old donkey.

Sturdy Joseph, always to be trusted. Jesus with his mind elsewhere, the faithful donkey who never complains. Maria´s heart is light as she walks towards the market with her husband, her son and her dear animal friend. At the same time it is heavy. A deep sorrow she know is waiting for her, today, tomorrow, next year or in twenty hears. She can already feel tears pricking behind her eyes.

 

While walking, her thoughts wander to the night when the angel came. With the impossible message,

 

to the strength from Elisabeth´s embrace when they shared their secrets,

 

to the long, difficult flight to Egypt,
when the baby, the man and the donkey were her only weapons to fight insanity.

Maria had known all her life that joy and sorrow were to be her companions.
Joy and sorrow.

A refugee. A queen.
A mother. A wife. A woman. 

 

She looked up and let her eyes rest on Joseph´s strong shoulders.
Love filled her, and with a smile she turned and met the eyes of her son.

 

 

 Photos:
two first one from a town somewhere in western Ethiopia
third from Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa
two last ones from St.Mary´s church in Lalibela 

 

The only way I know……..

@brittarnhild

Sharon commented on yesterday´s post about the rool-up book: Is there any way we can purchase one that you know of?

Sure there is a way. Not only a way, but the best way......

We asked the people we met: how can we help you, what is the best help we can give?

Again and again we got the same answer....

Come and visit us. Come to Ethiopia. Come as tourists. Leave your money. Stay in hotels. Eat our food. Buy our souvenirs.

Ethiopia is a beautiful country. Ethiopians are beautiful people.

Sharon, and all you others. Go to Ethiopia. There you can buy your own roll-up books. There you can take part in the coffee seremones in the birthplace of coffee. There you can count the million shades of green. There you can mirror yourself in the eyes of a smiling child. There you can eat well and leave rich tips. There you can........

.......there you can.......well, tell me, what would you like to do in Ethiopia?

I know of a lot of things I will do when I go back :-)

Behind the Blue Door. A Prayer.

@brittarnhild

A blue door caught my interest. Then I saw the paintings hanging from the fence.

It was dark inside the hut with the blue door, but when I came closer I saw a young man painting roll-up books.

Even closer I saw that he painted Mary, and Jesus, and the archangel Gabriel.

 

Now one of the roll-up books is mine. Part of my nativity collection. I will hang it all year round though. Behind a blue door. The door which opens in to my studio.

I will hang the painting today. And it will be a prayer. A prayer for my dear cousin who is fighting for her life. Against the ugly, devastating enemy cancer.

Please pray with me for Berit Olga and her family.

 

The photos are from Lalibela, in Ethiopia