july: harvest & swimming time.

the garden of my parents is definitely one of my number one retreats. i never appreciated it so much when i was younger, but as time goes by, everytime i am visiting my parents this garden fascinates me again and again with its beauty and lush greenery. even in autumn and winter it provides beautiful sceneries. my father loves natural gardens, with lots of flowers, weeds & herbs growing seemingly everywhere. and that's what i love about it, too.

an abundance of fruits and berries grow in summertime and it's always so much that a lot of the harvest can't be eaten immediately. so my mother prepares a lot of jams. sometimes my father presses wines as well. sometimes i wish i could be there all the time just to help with all the work in the garden.

butterflies are loving my parents' garden, obviously! they find lots of nectar every year.

a red admiral.

a fresh bowl of raspberries with a lot of cream is the best little afternoon snack, don't you think?

we also went swimming in a nearby gravel pit now used as a bathing lake. because the gravels are pretty mean to your feet my mother had the glorious idea to buy these swimming shoes. quite something that you have to get uses to, but it's easy on sensitive feet :)

the lake is pretty nice.

clouds came up and we decided to drive back to pick more raspberries before the rain got too strong.

in the end i picked them in the rain, but it was really a meditative chore.

and eating them right away is also another very joyful chore :)

Comments

november: kickelhahn, himmelblau & weimar cemetery.

i had a week off in november and visited my parents ( as i often do on my vacations ). on a sunday morning we headed to the thuringian forest to climb onto the peak of the kickelhahn mountain. the kickelhahn mountain is the landmark mountain of the city of ilmenau . johann wolfgang von goethe , the famous writer & philosopher, often visited ilmenau and also climbed the kickelhahn. oftentimes he stopped at a little hut in the woods to relax for a while and on one of these stops he wrote one of his most known poems. our little adventure didn't last the whole day, though, as we had a little date with the weimar cemetery to look after the grave of my grandparents and then to visit my cousin and his family. tiny peek onto the kickelhahn tower. thuringian woods - deep dark green. at the goethe hut. this plate shows the german version of the poem goethe wrote here. inside the hut. and here's the english translation. i love this poem so much, as ...

in the forests.

it's that time of the year again.

july '20: lake petersdorf discoveries and a plea against genocide.

the green wild meadows of malchow's sandfeld. in the west of malchow there is a big chunk of forest that spans towards plauer see, a widely 'uncultivated' area these days, but it hasn't always been this way. in my last post i mentioned the nazi munition factory that had been built in these woods, away from prying eyes of their enemies and where they also built an external subcamp for the concentration camp ravensbrück. exactly these woods we explored on a pretty sunny day, betraying the darkness that happened around these parts. isn't it weird that there are places in this world that were built or used by dark forces and horrible regimes and you vist them 80 years later and they are the most peaceful places you can imagine? sometimes my brain can't cope with the contrast of knowing what was in the past and what the present looks and feels like. it definitely leaves me with a strange impression often, kind of like a little sting in my heart and brain that is not ...

ghost of nature.

Search This Blog