Imbolc

Imbolc is the first of the spring festivals, yet it is mid winter. It is celebrated on the 1st or 2nd of februari. From my own experience the month of february can be actually the coldest winter month. But nature is now slowly awakening. In our garden the Tomasini's Crocus or Woodland Crocus is popping up and will soon be flowering. We also have some Snowdrops popping up. Some hardy winter-type weeds are slowly developing too. And our Birch tree is starting to get the stream of sap flowing. This is not visible unless a branch is cut, then the wound is "bleeding", as gardeners say. This sap stream is an unstoppable process, even with frost it keeps on going - as i have experienced in my own ork as a gardener. The changing of the seasons will proceed, even when the weather is bad and nature has to be on hold for a little bit longer. Only the Crocuses and Snowdrops don't seem to care about the weather and go on no matter what. If only they could wait a bit longer for better weather, then they could show their beauty longer. Now in february the wind and rain will make them lie down on the ground as soon as the flowers open. Still, they do announce the coming spring, despite being beaten down by the winter weather.

I'm looking forward to seeing our garden full of growth again, the new seeds coming to life, seeds from the plants from last year's summer, which died in the autumn. In my own garden i can witness the cycle of life happening.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMxeYEhUxYw

Struggle with God.

My wife has said a few times to me that i was 'Israel', struggling with God. Look it up on the internet, Israel does indeed mean 'struggle with God'.
I am not struggling physically with God, but mentally i am. In an earlier blogpost i wrote that i believe in God, an almighty creator of the world and i think i know what God wants from me. But rather then just be content with that, i ask myself 'why' and can think 'yeah but'. There are so many questions that i don't know the answer to. Some questions are just irrelevant, like is God female, male or no gender. That doesn't matter really, it matters that God exists. But why does God exist. Why is this world and solar system created. Is this the only world with lifeforms on it or, as in the Narnia book "The Magician's Nephew", did and is God creating more solar systems and worlds with lifeforms? And why? When did it all start? Was God bored of being in an empty space? And did God suddenly pop up from nowhere? Was God born? I have no doubt that God exists, but if He didn't, where does everything come from? The big bang? A lot of matter that exploded and formed the universe? Where did that matter come from? Looking for an answer on the internet it seems that scientists don't know. Of course this big bang is a theory, not a fact, otherwise it wouldn't be called a theory. And if there's nothing, then nothing can come from it. So there must be something/someone that created things.  

My mind wants to know, asks questions and wants answers. But is it useful for me, or helpful to know the answers? Is it relevant to me to know whether there are other worlds with life, or to know how it all started? Knowing these answers wouldn't help me in my daily life.

Is it important to know everything? No. Even to know whether there is life after death doesn't help me in the here and now, so i don't need to know. I would only want to know that answer if i was afraid of the unknown, of what is there after death. But i reasoned that it is useless to be afraid of the unknown. It is useful to be afraid of known dangers in life. That is what does matters as it keeps me alive and safe. 

Funworld

Last night my wife said to me that it felt like she was living in funworld. "There are so many fun things i do!" And yes, there are always many fun things to do and i'm glad that my wife taught me that it is important to have fun in life. 'Live for the moment' and 'live like there's no tomorrow' are old clichés, i know, but so very true. Why waste your life with doing household chores when there are interesting things to do like playing with Playmobil, reading a good book, solving a griddle puzzle, having some beers and talking. And even with doing responsible things like nourishing oneselves it is possible to have fun with it. Finding a new recipe on the internet and trying it out, or finding some new food in the supermarket and trying it out instead of cooking the same as usual. And my wife is an expert in cooking and improvising and finding new ways of cooking a meal. So much more then i could ever be.

This sounds like we live a free life, but then there's the reality of everyday life. What is most limiting in our life is our pets. The two cats are pretty low maintenance, but our two dogs are not, mainly because of the youngest dog. The youngest dog should have been fully mature by now, but he's very slow in his development. At first it looked like he was mentally disabled, but he seems to be highly intelligent. And dominating. He has to grow out of his immature behaviour before he can become an easier to handle and obedient dog. But for now he is troublesome, and that affects the life of my wife in particular, even more when i'm working. Because of the young dog's behaviour my wife has to keep him on a lead for most of the time he is out of his crate. He can't be held in his crate day and night as this is not fair to the dog. And i'm not as good as my wife in handling the dog, he's just too difficult. Actually we both realise that this dog is very fortunate that we got him, perhaps nobody else could have kept him. And dogs require routine. So we don't live as free as we could and want, but that is the reality of life.

Then why not get rid of that dog? There's two reasons. First, when you get a dog its life depends upon you, the owner. As an owner you keep it safe, well fed and healthy, and yes, also happy. A dog deserves a good life, like every animal or pet. When giving a dog away you never know what a horrible life it could have then.
Second reason is that it seems that God chose my wife to take care of dogs with problems. Many of the dogs she owned, or took care of, had a terminal disease and died long before thair natural lifespan. Three of these dogs had hydrocephalus. One of these dogs was Nachman, i wrote about him earlier. My wife believes it is impossible that someone has had three dogs with hydrocephalus, not to mention so many other dogs with a terminal disease.
Our young dog is troublesome but seems to be healthy at the moment, but still needs a lot of attention from my wife. The other older dog is quite normal. That older dog was chosen by me, Nachman and our current troublesome one were chosen by my wife. Why does God give troublesome dogs to my wife one can ask. The answer is simple, my wife is the only one who can give these dogs a good life.

Dogs have the right to live in funworld too, even when it limits the funworld of their owners. 

New year traditions

Another tradition which i never knew the meaning of (other then starting a new year calendar) or the origins of, is the new year tradition. According to Wikipedia, the origins here in the Netherlands apparently came from the "Joelfeest", the winter solstice celebrations, which lasted 12 days. The noise making at new year seems to originate from the practice of scaring away evil spirits with the chiming of (church) bells and other noises. This i was never told and had to look it up on the internet. So all these years in the past i celebrated new year without knowing anything about it, other then changing the calendar. And i wonder how many people do know. I assume that very few know and that makes it a meaningless tradition. So why do it? Just because of eating and drinking in abundance? You can do that every day of the year. Because of the law the only time that people are allowed to use fireworks is at new year, so that is not possible on other days. But that too is a silly tradition, where people buy a few very expensive fireworks which last for five or ten minutes or which, in most cases, lasts for only a second. That ten or twenty euro sky-rocket goes up in the sky, explodes and gives a second of lights. Not to mention the firecrackers.

For animals it is a horrible time. Here in the Netherlands the banging of firecrackers starts days before new year and on new year's eve gets worse. Our two cats are not happy and sometimes don't know where to hide. One of our dogs is not really bothered by it, but the other is a nervous type and wants to bark at every noise from outside he hears. We try to train that dog to ignore the banging with some success. As he's still young, maybe someday he'll learn to ignore it as the other dog does. As we do not stay up to wait for new year, we go to sleep at an earlier time with the dogs in their crates, which for them is security in their den. Last night at twelve, when the noise began, i was awakened by it, and the nervous dog was making some noises too. He made some soft barks, squeaked a bit and went quiet for the rest of the time it was noisy, which doesn't last more then fifteen minutes here. The other dog didn't make a sound. My wife just slept through it completely! Is it worth it to annoy other people (on the last day of december there had been more then 60.000 complaints about fireworks) and scare animals? Is it worth it for a tradition that is meaningless - just eating and drinking and making a lot of noise? It isn't worth it to me, and certainly not for animals.    

Stigmatising

In a news article here: http://nos.nl/artikel/2077645-leerlingen-kaatsheuvel-begeleid-bij-fietsen-langs-azc.html it shows how easy it is to stigmatise a group of people. In this town there will be an asylum seekers centre which is on a road towards a primary school. Parents have addressed their fears about this to the city council, the parents thought that it would be unsafe for their children to cycle past this asylum seekers centre. Therefore the city council decided to have some volunteers or hired security guards to accompany the children when cycling to that school. The city council declared that they made no effort to convince the parents that it would be safe for their children to cycle past the asylum seekers centre because some parents will not be convinced. So now the parents will be justified with their fears and worse. This asylum seekers centre can become known as the place where "dangerous"people live because look, children can't safely cycle past it without guards! How stigmatising this is. And i know from experience how easy it is to stigmatise.

My father was a young man during world war 2 and has been in danger of being sent to Germany as a forced labourer, as it was proclaimed by the nazi regime that every adult man had to go there to work in the factories. My father refused to go and was therefore always in danger of being arrested. He must have been in fear for that and one day he thought that his fear would be proved to be a real one. My father was standing in the village where he lived talking to some friends of similar age, when suddenly a German officer and two soldiers came towards them. At gunpoint they were then taken to a cheese factory nearby to load a horse cart full of cheeses which would be taken to Germany. My father and his friends were expecting to be taken to Germany too, but to their relief they were sent home again.
This and some other events apparently made my father hate the nazis. Many years later in the seventies of the last century, i was walking with my father in this same village. As it was summer there were several tourists as this village is in the lakes area of Friesland, popular with boating tourists. This area was and is very popular with German tourists. But back then several male German tourists who visited this area were wearing a sort of captain's cap. So while my father and i were walking we passed a man with such a cap, and my father said to me "He was an ss officer, i can see it on his ugly face". As this man didn't say anything the only clue my father had for recognising this man as German was this cap. But my father knew nothing of this man, whether this man came from Germany or Belgium or anywhere else in the world. And if this man was German, he could have been too young to be an officer, let alone in the army during the war. But if he was old enough, he might have been active in the resistance against the nazis. But whoever he was, what my father did was stigmatising and i didn't have any idea of this. Actually i thought that my father was a great guy, hating the nazis. And so i copied my father and started doing the same. Every middle aged person wearing such a captain's cap used to be a nazi in the war. It took me a long time to realise how wrong my father was, stigmatising people just by how they looked. And how wrong I was by doing the same! Had i never realised that i was easily stigmatising people based on ignorance, i would have read that news article mentioned above and probably thought that these people were absolutely right in their fears and that the city council was absolutely right in their decision of having "guards" accompanying these children to school past that "dangerous" asylum seekers centre.

I'm not saying that i'm such a good person for recognising this stigmatising, i'm still a product of my youth and upbringing by my parents. It doesn't take much to stigmatise people. I can still go wrong when for example i read a news article about people demonstrating against the building of a new asylum seekers centre and think NAZIS! And that is stigmatising based on ignorance. I don't like stigmatising, but before pointing fingers at others i also have to look at myself and what i'm doing. Change the world and start with yourself!    

Shop opening times and intolerance.

Here in the Netherlands we have a law about shop opening times. This law states when shops are allowed to be open and when to be shut. But not only that, there's also an (much older) law about the sunday rest, and as you can imagine it's based on the Christian practice to have a rest day on sunday. That both laws are from way before the time of internet makes it possible to have a webshop open and working 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. The only restriction is then that courier companies don't deliver on sundays, but webshop owners can still deliver goods on a sunday themselves, the law never anticipated on that. So why do we still have these restricted laws? Why can't shopowners decide for themselves when to be open and when to be shut. One of the arguments for shop opening times is that it protects employees from abuse from the shopowners, but employees are no slaves and can quit their job or simply refuse to work on certain days when they want to. If a shopowner doesn't respect that they're a bad employer and does one want to work for a bad employer anyway? But besides that, this sunday rest law is discriminating against non Christians. Jewish shopowners, who are following the Tora and have their shop shut on the Shabbat, which is from friday evening before sunset untill saturday evening after sunset. But because of this law they also can't open their shop on a sunday! Note that the early Christians were also obeying the Shabbat untill the Roman emperor Constantine declared the sunday as the holy rest day in the year 321 as the most important day for the heathen religion of worshipping the sun. And as at that time the Christians wanted to remove themselves further away from Judaism, from where Christianity originated from, they embraced this practice.

But for non Christians in general it is restrictive. Why should anyone be restricted by a minority who want to uphold an old practice? It is not only restrictive but also intolerant. The (Christian) governments who made these laws long ago didn't want to consider non Christians and so does the current government of a country where a lot of inhabitants like to pat themselves on the back for being so tolerant. The people here in the Netherlands are in general not tolerant. The hatred towards the people who are questioning the st Nicolas tradition with the zwarte piet, a caricature of a black person, is one of the best examples of intolerance here. I think i could write a list of examples of intolerance that i see here in this country, maybe i will do that some time. To get back to the shop opening times, let the people decide for themselves when they want to open their shop or when to go shopping and when not. And let everyone be tolerant about that. 

Washing up.

I just finished the washing up. It wasn't a daily chore, or that it had to be done because there was nothing to cook in, eat of or eat with, but just because i felt like it. Doesn't happen much. The washing up or that i feel like it. Sometimes, and that is more then that it is at times, the kitchen looks like a battle field. And it feels like it. But that's life. We live, we are made to live. We are not made to wash up. There are better and more important things in life. There's my wife, there are the dogs, there's playmobil, there are books to read. There is so much more and better things to do besides washing up. But this time i just felt like it. At the same time it gave me time to think of what to write for this blog post. And there's a reward afterwards, drinking beer with my wife and enjoy some snacks and have a good conversation. And that's living. I love living.