new year's eve 2024
2024 was a meaningful year for me. I lived abroad, and I found something that I unequivocally and wholeheartedly want to live for.
Mountains. Freedom and open air. A world in which democracy is unbroken and unbowed. Art. A world in which the values that I hold dear are shared by the culture around me. Landscapes and cottages with wooden shutters and plants spilling out of the flower box. Bread.
I have found the life I want to live and I am making progress towards reaching it. In one semester I will have my bachelor's degree, in one semester I will start work at the job I have been offered after I graduate. I have clear and concrete plans for the future.
More than that, I have a sense of hope. It is easy to despair in this country; it is easy to despair when everything we read about in the news continues getting worse. I have my own plan for what I am going to do about it, which is to escape.
My head is always filled with fantasies of the future life I want to have. Hiking in the Alps, building up the stamina to reach the snow cover myself. Taking the train past beautiful amazing landscapes. Bringing paints along, whether oil or acrylic, and just painting from life, en plein air, because you can do that in Europe, the mosquitoes really aren't bad and it doesn't get too hot very often. Travel. I want to see so many places – especially the Carpathian mountains. Visit a friend of mine who will spend a year in Romania, if the timing happens to align. Learn Ukrainian. Volunteer helping Ukrainian refugees settle in Germany. Get a cat! Make more art. Branch out into illustration, develop the patience for it, gain proficiency with these Staedtler art markers that I bought for myself – surprisingly finicky things, although they let you do shading which is very nice. Make illustrations based on Slavic folk tales. Continue pursuing photography.
Eating the most incredible bread rolls, every day. Waking up early on a Saturday, picking up zwei Käsebrezel at the bakery, and having one for breakfast and another for your lunch on the train, because they're so easy to just store in a backpack. The English translation is "cheese pretzel," but we do not have an equivalent in America. A Brezel is as half big as your face, and is a nutritious meal. You can tear off chunks or simply bite into it. The cheese has been baked onto the bread, so there's no mess whatsoever to clean up.
Regarding this blog, I have a number of posts in draft form that I've been working on. It used to be I had as many drafts as published posts (lol) but I cleaned that up so now there's considerably less. I feel it is too late now to do a "best of the internet – december" but I do want to share a digital collage that I spent the morning making, using images from several articles I read recently.
This collage is a symbol of hope. Hope for the future, and hope for the present.
The text is from a quote by Oscar Wilde, from De Profundis:
"Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole."
