Torn Between Two Worlds....

My life in central Europe...

My home in a suburb of the Dallas Fort Worth area...

My home someday, when I join the rest of my family here - my parents, grandparents, and great grandparents.

Advent greetings to all as the Christmas season 2008 officially and liturgically begins. For me this has become the time of year I dislike the most. I am no Scrooge. December is jam-packed with too many Christmas parties, too many people who want to get together "one last time this year", and too many crowds in the Leipzig Christmas Market, which is supposed to be one of the best in Germany. And to these reasons comes another: this will be my first Christmas without any parents; they are all buried in the cemetary you see in the photo above. There is simply too much going on in 28 days, and I am always relieved when January 2nd arrives, signalling the return of normal life.

This year I am again in Texas over Christmas, but this visit will be very difficult - my first visit to the home I grew up in, when I will experience it without parents. As my life continues to be successful over here in the "old world", I am torn more and more between the two continents.

I have one brother left in my immediate family, and one cousin with whom I have a close relationship. But putting the facts on the table produces the following scenario: I have very little contact to anyone in the states anymore. There are about five people in Texas who keep in contact with my by email, and some of them read this blog. No-one ever calls me on the phone, never ever. My mother was faithful - she was the consummate model of faithful unconditional love - and she always called me if more than a week elapsed with no contact. Yet when I visit Texas for only three weeks, at least two friends from Germany call me just to see how I am doing. And I know they are waiting for postcards from Texas.

So is this simply no more than the "out-of-sight-out-of-mind" phenomenon? Or does this speak to the different nature of relationships on the two continents? In the German culture, you traverse a huge psychological distance when you move from stranger to acquaintance to friend, for you use a different pronoun to address a friend (du instead of Sie) and you use their first name and not their last name. And friends often greet each other very affectionately here - two grown males will hug each other with their cheeks pressing against each other, and female friends kiss each other on both cheeks - reminding us of French customs. Americans, in contrast, are the world champions in smiling and laughing, but close body contact is something many of us shy away from. I remember a comment from former President Clinton how he did not like to hug men.

It seems that Americans are much more self-made individuals, where Europeans more typically find their self-definition in the web of family and friends as a type of psychological safety net giving them a context for life. Think of the cartoon figures in the states: Batman, Robin, the Lone Ranger, Spider Man, they all are lones who don't really seem to have any close friends, and if they do find close friends, as Spider Man fell in love, it can spell problems for their identity as a hero.

With all of these thoughts in my mind, I will be glad when normal life returns, so that I will have more time to think about these things.

I hope Christmas can give you moments of reflection and peace.

Winter Wonderland in November....?

It's too early for this!! My geraniums are still blooming! Don't cover them up, Mr. Snowman...

Here we are in Frostyland and not even December yet.... This is the way our week is starting. I have just taken this photo a few minutes ago for your.... uh...pleasure. This weekend was busy, since I celebrated American Thanksgiving a few days early (Thanksgiving is on Thursday, but it is no holiday in Germany). We were seven people sitting at my table for a traditional Thanksgiving meal. The highlight of the evening for me was my pumpkin pie I made "from scratch" as we say - I even made the pie crust myself! And it tasted great. Everyone liked it. But when you go to the market and select a fresh pumpkin for the pie, you first have to bake it for an hour, then scrape the meat out and purée it in a blender. Then you do the rest of the recipe. It was a lot of work, but it was well worth it.

At Thanksgiving we give thanks, of course :-) What did I give thanks for? 2008 is a very bad year for me, overshadowed by the theft of my car in mid March and above all the death of my dear Mother on March 31. But I am always thankful for my loyal dears friends, and I reminded them of this at this meal. Of course, I have more friends here than only these at the table, but these at the table belong to the inner-circle of those who are helping me make it through this time of finding life after the death of the last parent. I want to share their (first) names with you: Stephan, Tobias and Claudia, Sebastian, Matthias and Gesine.

I'll go to work in a little and battle the snow, as I remember and give thanks for my dear friends here. Who are your friends you give thanks for?

Who's in charge? People or Technology?

The old post office in Hearne, Texas, where my grandmother was the Postmaster back in the days when people wrote real letters to communicate.

The good old-days, nostalgia, talking about hours spent washing clothes, doing the dishes at the sink, hanging up the wash to dry on the clothes line - those were the days when we had time.
Now we have all these convienience appliances and technology: washing machines and dryers, dishwashers, microwave ovens, kitchen machines, coffee makers, etc. But we have much less time than our grandparents had, even though machines do all the work they used to spend all day doing.
Worse than that, we don't communicate very well. But wait, we have flat-rate calling plans for our mobile phones, land lines, and we have DSL internet, chatrooms, discussion forums in the internet, email (yawn), youtube, skype, text messaging, and probably some more I am leaving out. We are reachable 24 hours a day at every moment. I can experience something breathe-taking here in Germany, grab it on my digital cam, and within one hour friends and family in Texas can experience it with me and comment back. That is possible, at least.

But alas, that never happens.

Technology and convienience have duped us into thinking we have to stay "busy" all the time. Mobile phones are constantly flashing, ringing, buzzing, with someone texting or calling, so what does everyone do? They never answer the phone - let the voice mail pick it up, and "sometime" they will return the call. The time advantage technology gives you is thus down the drain.

And, in my opinion, the classic human weakness eliminates the advantages technology gives us. We become accustomed to the instant effortless communication and assume it, so it is no longer important. Who cares if I sit on an email or a voice mail for two weeks? Everyone is texting and emailing all day anyway, so it means nothing. Or "someday" I will find them on chat and we can catch up "then"....
It seems a predisposition of the more individualistic western mentalities - the USA at the forefront of these - to be preoccupied, "excited", about that which is in front of my nose at this moment. All else pales into oblivion while I am raptured with the object jumping up and down in from of my nose right now. The problem is, technology gives up so many things jumping up and down in front of our nose right now. We have no brain or emotional space for things stored in our memory bank.

There was a time when writing or getting a letter was something special. You got out your fountain pen, cleaned it, filled it with fresh ink, selected a piece of stationery, and began composing your thoughts to someone as you also produced a work of art - penmanship. And when you opened your mailbox and found such a letter, you sat down to open and read it. We still have a letter my great-grandmother wrote over 100 years ago, and her tears are on that letter - what a priceless treasure. When you read that letter, you entered another world as the world jumping up and down in front of your nose paled into oblivion.

Who recongizes anything personal in a times new roman font on a computer screen? We dash off emails with etrocious spelling and grammar, and if we are responding to a previous email, we often don't even answer half of the concerns our writer mentioned in the previous communication. Text messages have become like short hand - something that needs unraveling and fleshing out. And so we sit in restaurants with real live breathing people and ignore them while we stare at our mobile phones and punch letters into the screen for a text message - what a bass ackwards world!

I wonder if we have lost touch with the uniqueness of life and our relationships. Technology makes communication into a ware to be traded and sold on the market, to be quantified and packaged for the masses. We may have email, chatrooms, mobile phones, etc. available 24 hours a day, but the right opportunity for sending or responding to a message is not available 24 hours a day - there are only certain windows for such times. And those who purposefully ignore the distractions jumping up and down in front of their noses so that they can use those windows of communication, those people will help us save humanity from technology. Are you part of the problem or part of the solution?

A Post-mortem on Halloween and All Saints Day

I was reading in a book on culture analysis - the chapter on final things in the Middle Ages. I paused to reflect on the comment that in the Middle Ages death was a part of daily life and thinking. It was a part of life. Today it apparantly is not a part of life.

In earlier generations people died at home (as they were born at home), you had wakes at home, and the cemetary was around the corner. You saw the undertaker go down the street, and you knew someone close by had died. So much of medieval literature and art directly speaks to the moments just before death - in those days anasthetics were not known, so dying was very painful. And then a sketch depicts an angel pulling the soul out of a dead person via the mouth.

Today we die in hospitals, often with no family or friends at the bedside at the hour of death. We embalm the dead, so that they look like they are asleeep dreaming pleasantly, and we cart them to massive cemetaries far from our daily lives. And the last hours before death are experienced - if at all - as a doped stupor, since morphine and other narcotics supress all pain. Birth has the epidural for the mother, so why not more drugs at the other end of life?

What has happened? I think we have shoved death out of life. We run from it, ignore, pretty it up, as if it were another event that can happen to some people who aren't careful.
We can't be certain about a lot of things in life - about money, marriage, children, our health, the weather. But we can all be certain that we will all die, the only question is when. This one experience we will all share together. And how will we look back on it when we are on the other side?

All Saints Day - or Day of the Dead - can help us remember some of these things. Commerical Halloween sweetens it all up, which can be good in some aspects. But where's the sweetness in death? Well, that's another topic.