The “Kalima” is blowing, a very strong wind coming from the Sahara with a lot of dust and burning everything, extracting the water out of everything it can find. De wind blows trough our little house, blows away the chairs in the garden, makes the electric wires sing and sweeps the branches and you can see the leaves becoming brown and curling up.
Apparently there has been a lot of wind this summer and no rain that is why everything looks so dead and brown.
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     Nonetheless I feel happy inside, a special kind of quiet joy. There is no need to move around anymore. Last year I did photograph every detail on the island, did explore all it’s corners. Now I can just be here and have time to feel what is happening inside. Knowing and feeling that the nature around me is so extremely strong and rough gives me a very happy, spacious and free feeling. Also the very basic and simple life we have here is just fine.

     Yesterday someone told me some interesting information about traditional forms of healing here with prayer and giving energy with the hands. About dealing with demons and the evil eye. It is interesting that demons are understood as repetitious clusters of negative thoughts which start to live al life on it’s own because the person gives them his or here emotional energy. And then the demon makes him or her suffer or even makes him or her physically ill. Then the demon has to be chased away with prayers, new intentions, energy healing and healing herbs.
As a psychologist I think that the description of demons is very accurate.
      These forms of healing can integrate religious elements, like the form of prayers used, but are older than religion. For me this all sounds very familiar. I have heard the same principles explained from different cultural contexts. It is actually simple that person from the island told me, and just very practical. People don’t spend too much thought on it.
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      I like it that some things seem to be universal. I wish I would master those healing skills a bit better and wish I had a more simple and calm mind.
Also the importance of being very careful with what you say was stressed, words have power. Words makes your thoughts become true. 

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For already six days I am back on the island of El Hierro. There is a very different energy here. The dream world of Lemuria seems to be hidden in a mist of clouds from here. But there are other images popping up when I meditate. All familiar from a distant past, 35 years ago they were also there. Their meaning seems to get another dimension and becomes richer. I keep writing them down. No idea if there will ever develop something out of it, but it is inspiring me.

No space to paint big pieces of canvas here but also no need. Instead I make small drawings in ink, just little exercises to further develop a language of images, even some humanoid figures.

The island is more dry and brown than I have ever seen it before. Luckily some rain has come, which makes the earth and plants smell. Altough there is a lot of wind there also is a kind of peace, which seems to breathe out of the island. Others may experience it as emptiness.
I do feel deeply happy, satisfied, fullfilled, grateful with less and less concerns about the future. Life is just wonderful as it is and where I am doesn't matter as much any more as it used to do. 

It is a time of often quite intense emotios flowing trough me like waves, coming going and coming back again. They push themselves trough my system like babies wanting to be born. Once they are out I feel free again.
It makes me sometimes feel confused and uncertain. Then people show up willing to tell me what is wrong with me and I tend to believe them for a little while. But later I find out that in fact it wasn't correct or only very partially true.
I have to trust myself even when I feel uncomfortable and awkward. Letting go of the urge to get things under control and arrange and fix it, do something about it, get organised. The fixing makes it fixed and it becomes an obstacle.
​All my decisions and actions have to grow organically in tune with the earth, the rain and the sun. When I trust that I can act and move at the right moment.
And also when I ask a question and really listen with an open quiet mind answers do come very simple and clear.

It is pleasant to look from a distance at my work from the last weeks. And pleasant to take that memory with me while travelling. Another way of looking from a distance... I need that as my eyes have more and more difficulty to see things clearly focussed and with sharp edges. I need some distance from myself and reflections to be able to see, physically and psychologically.

Foto's made during a city walk in  Leuven, Belgium. Again the red and the green catches my eye and the water which contains and connects everything, everywhere. 

I have had two weeks to digest my Swedish experience, and get my work organised here in my current studio space. Tomorrow I will travel back to the little island of El Hierro to continu my work there. Again the need for silence and just pure nature was so strong that I can't hold myself back from travelling. I hope to continue writing and make some smaller sized visual work to develop new directions.  

Working in Leuven, Belgium.

"Lemuria" is the name of my latest paininting serie which you already can find in my portfolio on my website. 

    Lemuria is the name of a continent which disappeared like Atlantis but it is assumed that it was located in the Pacific Ocean. The legend is that it at a highly developped culture which lasted for a long time long before other nowadays known cultures on our planet.
The stories and mythology I am currently working on are mostly about the moving in between our time and that in time and space far away culture. Of coarse there is nothing objective about this. It is just that images and stories came more and more frequently and more and more clearly visiting my mind and I thought it might be interesting to document them.

     Modern physics explains how parallel realities or even universes can exist and that time travelling is possible, in fact that the past is existing now and is even mutable. For some time I have been studying that because my mind likes to really understand things correctly, but I must admit it is difficult to really understand. I don't understand it. Nonetheless I can work with the concepts and explore the one of many parallel realities which is bringing me those vivid images and information. 

     I am not ready to share all I have written. But I would like to share a bit of the characteristics of this world. 
     
     In Lemuria a lot of things are very different from our reality. People don't have solid physical bodies for instance. They are more like energy fields, which can change in form but have an individual essence. For instance you can imagine a person as a kind of cloud with a certain colour and a specific individual intensity of that colour. That cloud is continuously moving like water. It can take a more distinct shape which then looks as if it is physical but that is actually a holographich projection of the person. The same person can show him or herself with different physical characteristics and a lot of people do that. So one day you can meet them with black long smooth hair and tall and skinny in appearance and the next day they have blond short curly hair and are round, rather fat and short. It is the same person and for them there is never a confusion about who they are. It is like wearing different clothes.
     When they meet each others something happens like when you throw two stones in a pool of water. the waves of each (stone) /person meet and goes trough the other's energy. The experience is like deeply feeling, tasting, moving with the energy of the other and experience being that other person from the inside. 
     That is also how they communicate. Language doesn't exist as such, they don't speak, because their thoughts generate wave patterns which are clearly perceived and understood by others. It is a  telepathic communication. 
      They do use their voices and use sound to create things they like. They can build houses with that and move stones with it. They also have a kind of writing but that is not based on symbolizing words or sounds it is used to record stories and more complex thoughts. It is a visual representation of  the thought patterns in their wave characteristics. Seeing the writing is feeling and knowing the story instantly.

      We can see them as if they are carrying a round ball of light. Those round lights are their focus of attention. They use it to move. They focus their attention on where they want to be and then that light goes there and takes them there. 

      There are a lot of hybrid beings among them, half human half animal in appearance or a mixture of different animals. They can also have both male and female sexual characteristics. This happens when they have had their focus of attention for a longer time on that other being. For example a young human woman is fascinated by a fish and her attention is for some time absorbed by how beautiful that fish moves and behaves, in a way she falls in love with that fish and absorbs his characteristics and after that she appears as a mermaid. 

     In their culture there is no need for machines or artefacts. They use their focus of attention, their mindpower, visualisation, their breath and sound to create whatever they need. Sometimes they intensify it by using stones. If needed they can also collaborate with other species, animals or even plants to create what they like using the capacities of those other species. But because they only play with the possibilities of appearing physical they don't really need to have objects, houses, or protection from cold or heat. Eating is not necessary either but they do need energy exchange, they do need to move and meet other beings experience the differences. They do have very individual preferences in what kind of energies they like to hang around with. 

It is a bit like the Garden of Eden where Adam had a good time giving names to all the animals God has created. That is like enjoying and exploring all those different ways of being and identifying the different kinds of energy and information that they are. That was what the Lemurians did as well and all that existed around them on Earth and in the Universe was so richly diversified that their culture did last very long whithout them getting bored.
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Some impressions from my last walk on my last day of this stay in Sweden. 

This is an overview of the Paintings  I  made during the residency in Sweden. Most of them have passed along individually on this blog. All are painted in acrylic and on canvas. And most of them are rather large in size.

Today it is storming and raining and I stay inside, looking at the swinging trees. Realising that there are a lot of branches and may be trees falling. My company is a little mot on the window.

And I burn the fire to chase the cold wind out of the wooden cabin. And take a day to read and write.