There is a heatwave. This week temperature will go above 40 degrees Celsius here too. Together with information about huge fires in the arctic and many millions of people who have to leave their homes because of flooding or lack of water. It all starts to look and feel very apocalyptic. 

I have always felt related to the many different stories in the mythology or sacred texts of different cultures about the big flood. The flood where the Gods of God destroyed all living beings to punish them for their sins. As a child  I used to have nightmares about a huge wall of water coming over the land and destroying everything.

Whithout supernatural powers doing anything special we seem to be punished for our sins, punished for the burning of fossile fuels, punished for greed and lack of moral development, punished for lack of solidarity.  The word puishment is not correct it is more a logical consequence of this behaviour. It makes that we have to face the extinction of many species, of animals and plants and of our fellow human beings. We might even have to face our death as a consequence. 

It can make me feel very angry, and very depressed. It can make me feel to hate it all and not wanting to be part of it. It can be quite difficult to find a place where life is simply good and happy and where that shadow is not hanging over you. I call home that place where people are naturally friendly and loving and caring about one another and about all living beings around them and where all can thrive, where Life is pure and simple. People may say that I belief in fairy tales and that I should get real, but I refuse to believe that human Life in it's essence is anything different than that. 

Meanwhile also the anger and desperation needs a heart willing to feel it. Like a caring mother when her child falls asks where does it hurt? Wit her loving attention the pain dissolves and the healing follows. Whatever emotion the heat might rise let it be accepted as it is, let it have its space with respect whithout overreacting on it. 

I wish I would be better in doing what I think that should be done.

Waves of emotion seem to be like the emotions shudering a huge human body.  The earth and all the living creatures on it are like that body. Every living being is like a single cell in this body. Every cell is a world on it's own and has it's own specific appearance and specific functions though it has the DNA of the whole and is connected with the whole body. Very much like a hologram. Very much like all human beings being different but also very much the same. What I feel is what "we"feel and we only have to let it be to let it continue in a flow ever changing ever the same. The emotion is like a wave trough the body fluid affecting all cells. We all know the same kind of emotions altough we subscribe them to different circumstances. 

In order to understand the world around me and make some sense out of my experiences and perceptions I have to write.

Back to painting. Stop moving, travelling, time to process all that is done. I paint paint paint. I notice that forms come and dissolve again, colours too. The works stay in a formless flux. Like most of my works actually. I do feel good in that formless, slow, continuously transforming  movement. It is only when it moves too fast that I start to feel uncomfortable and start to think too much. 
Some people really don't like the absence of clear forms in my work.

I was thinking about my letters, home, my homesickness and homelessness and the line it marks in my history. I would love to bring that story to an end.

The feeling of being home and being totally relaxed and at ease often goes together with images of endless spaces, like the universe, the ocean, wide empty landscapes with views as far as the eyes can see... The space makes me feel free and very joyful, an ecstatic joy, a giggle, the enjoyment of adventure making me run or even fly. It is so much fun to move in that freedom. I am myself again but it is not me. I am stone and earth, I am wind and sky, I am stars and sand, I am water and light. I have many faces and am many creatures.  I am home.
Solid matter start to drip and mould in my hands, like the dripping watches in the painting of Salvador Dali. While mixing the elements new Life appears. Yellow and blue, as light and water creating the greens of plants. Red sparks as boosts of energy from which forms start to grow, rippling outwards. 

We just returned from a ten day trip to the heart of Russia. It was refreshing to be confronted with that otherness of a different culture, a different way of experiencing life. 

I give some impressions of places which attracted me:

These wooden houses awakend memories, visions and dreams I have captured a couple of years ago, lying on the edge of my awareness. It was as if whispering voices told me what has happened there in times past by. Like when you wake up in the morning after a dream and part of it you remmber and part of it quickly slips away.

This looks like an embodiement of an imaginary reality. It was a great place to observe the meeting of cultures and the "in between place" of east and west.

This shows the clash of the dreamworld and everyday reality, which sometimes looks a bit threatening.
As I feel it, it is as if there is something hanging in the air which might quickly transform this holographic illussion into a new image, maybe better, maybe not better but definitely different. 

Often I felt like being in different realities at the same time.

And often I was remembered of the great Russian literature, the vastness of everyhting, the landscape, the depth of emotions, the complexity of human relations, the multigenerational family dramas taking place in very different parts of the world, and all of it observed and experienced with so much telling details. It touched my heart.

That great capacity to be very precise in observations was remarkable in paintings in musea as well.

There is no need for reforestation in Russia, plenty of wildness and forests and no private ownership of nature. It did place some questionmarks by my recent projects and concerns. Tough climate change is there also clearly observable. 

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