Kategoriarkiv: Weekly Photo Challenge

Weekly Photo Challenge: Celebration

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29

These photos were taken last summer at Midsummer. In Sweden we celebrate midsummer because it’s the longest day of the year. The sun never goes down, we dress a pole with leaves and flowers and dances together around the pole. Silly little songs, like ”Small frogs, small frogs, is comical to see” and we jump up and down in the dance and quacks like little frogs. Children tend to think it’s fun. We eat pickled herring, new potatoes and strawberries and some like to drink schnapps for herring. Midsummer is a magical night for us Swedes, anything can happen then. Picks children seven sorts of flowers and put them under the pillow, they will dream of a person who is going to be their wife or husband in the future. Many have flower wreaths in their hair and people play fiddle and dance.

This summer was celebration finished when we went to look at the pole, but the grass was green and I sensed the supernatural beings that only makes itself known at this year’s longest day. So we went home and prepared the strawberries…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Waiting

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20

Wherever I go I am looking up in the trees …

I do not know what I’m looking for or what I like to find – just that I long for the delicate greenery. I want to feel it in my hands, smell it, see it as if it were the very first time! Forget the seasonal routine, to go around in circles in this middle-aged gray wool sweater. So I play that I am a newborn and trying to see everything with eyes that have never seen the light before. What was it that was so amazing? What was the first human encounter that rang so deeply within me? Can I re-learn to write words that are new?

 

But, before the spring is back here again, I wait for Christmas …♥

Weekly Photo Challenge: Family

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40

This photo was taken in 1965. I sit in my daddy’s knee. He died in 1989, the same year, my daugther was born. The text under the photo, I wrote a couple of years ago. Though I am 50 years today, I miss my father every day…

He lay in his hospital bed and I sat beside him, holding his hand. A tear appeared in his eye and he looked at me. – I’m so scared. I gripped his hand as hard as his words were squeezing my heart. – You should not worry Dad. When I said those words, I saw the little wart he always had on his upper lip. When I was a little girl and sat on his lap, I did often scratch on it and one day it started to bleed and he was crying. I was afraid that I hurt him and I said ”Do not be sad, Daddy, do not cry” and I began to breathe on his lip to make it feel better, just as is done to comfort small children, until he started laughing and he explained that he’s just joking with me. I had not hurt him and everything was alright! It was a joke, a joke and he hugged me and hoisted me up in the air so that I too began to laugh. He had loved to tell that story to others when I scratched at his wart and I comforted him. Today, however, was not wart any problems, it was something much worse. Something called Parkinson had made its appearance in my father’s life.

My brothers and sisters who have come and gone, my cousins ​​and the father who went so far away that I could not reach him long before he disappeared forever, have made me vulnerable of farewells. The difficulty of being separated from a loved one, can be compared with the days harvest work is done, the woodwork is stored for the coming winter. When the cattle were sold and there was no longer small farmers, drying racks for the hay disappeared forever. The future had come up with the village and the move went to town and we who have experienced life in the country, was that people were most. But the remains of the earth is still under our nails. We did not leave the farmers’ common sense in the soil and we are not doing the washing under running water. Neither the credit, market, Dow Jones or tiled bathrooms give us some slight twinge of happiness…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Windows

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13

Mental window. This photo I took last summer in Valldemossa, Mallorca. There is a door, but can also be seen as a window. When I look at the photograph, I think of our great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature this year and the following poem …

Romanesque Arches
Tourists have crowded into the
half-dark of the enormous
Romanesque church.
Vault opening behind
vault and no perspective.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no
face embraced me
and his whisper went all through my body:
”Don’t be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!
Inside you one vault after another
opens endlessly.
You’ll never be complete, and that’s as it should
be.”
Tears blinded me
as we were herded out into the fiercely sunlit
piazza, together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones,
Herr Tanaka and Signora  Sabatini;
within each of them vault after vault opened endlessly

Romanska bågar

Inne i den väldiga romanska kyrkan trängdes turisterna
i halvmörkret.
Valv gapande bakom valv och ingen överblick.
Några ljuslågor fladdrade.
En ängel utan ansikte omfamnade mig
och viskade genom hela kroppen:
“Skäms inte för att du är människa, var stolt!
Inne i dig öppnar sig valv bakom valv oändligt.
Du blir aldrig färdig, och det är som det skall.”
Jag var blind av tårar
och föstes ut på den solsjudande piazzan
tillsammans med Mr och Mrs Jones, Herr Tanaka och
Signora Sabatini
och inne i dem alla öppnade sig valv bakom valv oändligt.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Faces

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8

Prior to the Trevi Fountain. We travel by train from the airport to Rome. I take a photo through the window. An entire week in Rome. Is this Italy? Am I really here? Looks like Sweden, but people say Prego, Si and Ultimo Treno. Here we are at Fontana di Trevi. So many people, so many different cultures. I am, but who are you?