Wall clouds over the Oslo fjord

Oslo has experienced a fair amount of unstable weather for the past month or so. We have had days that start out sunny and warm, then the clouds roll in and darken the sky. Sometimes it rains, other times it doesn't. Sometimes we experience a brief rain shower, other times the rainfall is torrential. When we were sailing back to the harbor on Saturday after a pleasant boat trip on the Oslo fjord, I captured some of the really weird cloud formations that appeared around 6 pm local time. I say weird, because I've never seen anything like these formations before in Oslo. Perhaps they have occurred before and I just haven't seen them. I commented to my husband that one of the formations looked like the clouds you see in the Midwest (USA) when tornadoes form. And then I googled these types of cloud formations (square clouds) and found out that these types of clouds are called 'wall clouds', and sure enough, can be associated with the formation of tornadoes. I often wonder why we don't get more tornadoes in our part of the world. But we have experienced waterspouts; the Oslo fjord experienced a waterspout some years ago (https://norwaytoday.info/news/waterspout-oslo-saturday/) and in 2014 southern Norway experienced the same (https://www.thelocal.no/20140624/mini-tornadoes-stun-southern-norway).

Here are some photos of these weird cloud formations: 

never seen anything like this before

almost looks like a tornado is forming

To regret or not to regret--the choice is yours

“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
― Mary Oliver


I have in previous years written many posts about choice and that we choose our own lives to a greater or lesser degree. The pressure to conform to the modern life around us and to choose against our inner desires to live life more on our own terms is enormous. The pressure to be a workaholic, to prioritize work at all costs, to want all the material things money can buy, to always choose what is better than what we have now (to never be satisfied with what one has), to be constantly busy and active--all these things are driving forces that society supports and even adulates. If you do not want to be a workaholic, if you want to slow your life down, if you don't want a bigger house or a bigger car, if you want time to reflect on life, you risk being labeled as unmotivated or unambitious. And that may be the case, at least in the context of wanting those particular things. But there are some of us who do not want bigger, better, and more all of the time; some of us are content with the material blessings that we have attained/been given and want more time to reflect on life, especially now as we get older. Some of us want, and have wanted all our lives, as Mary Oliver so aptly writes, to follow the 'call to creative work', for no other reason than to follow that call. Not because it will make us rich or give us more material things, but because it gives us the chance to express ourselves in the unique way that only each of us can do. Yes, we need money to live and to function in society. But we don't need to drive ourselves to an early grave in a futile attempt to 'have bigger, better, more', because once we reach one material goal, there is always more to want, in other words, a new goal.

Each of us is unique and gifted with talents that others do not have, and others have talents that we do not have. And that is what makes the world a wondrous place to live in. We each share what is uniquely ours with others. It doesn't matter if the world judges one harshly or if one is unsuccessful at what one creates. The definition of success in our society is a bit boring, because it is always equated to how much money one can make. Georgia O'Keefe wrote “Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant, there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing--and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” She understood the call to creative work and the importance of ridding our minds of terminology that keeps us prisoners of conformity--successful/unsuccessful; ambitious/lazy; efficient/ineffective. Rigid 'either/or' thinking does not help us to find a middle ground, and that is what most creative people need. It may not be possible to quit our jobs and pursue our creative leanings full-time; but a middle ground might be working at a less stressful job in order to have the time to pursue creative hobbies in our free time. Many writers and artists worked full-time at other jobs and pursued their crafts alongside their jobs. However, very few of us will reach the point where our creativity (e.g. our writing, painting, photography) can support us and/or families financially. But the middle ground allows for both. Still, we can live with the nagging feeling that we should have conformed to society's definition of success--that we should have made more money, had a fancy job title, had a bigger house, or a newer car. Some people will never be happy until they have attained (their view of) material success, but once they earn what they think is enough money, they will set themselves a new financial goal. The amount of money that equates to success will always be a moving target. It seems obvious to me that personal happiness is not based on having a specific amount of money, but this is not obvious to some people.

To choose our own path in life is to move out against an ocean that pushes us back to shore, no matter how often we try to head out onto the water, to brave the waves. You might think that the pressure to conform is greatest when one is a teenager or young adult. It probably is if you look at the statistical data, but the pressure to conform doesn't lessen when one is older. If you want to retire earlier than age sixty-seven, for example, there are people who will try to talk you out of it by telling you that you will be bored, that you will miss the workplace, or that you need the social interactions that the workplace provides. Many societal and political leaders are now pushing for people to work longer, into their seventies. That's fine for those who want to do that, but it should never become the norm. These types of people have little idea of how to live their lives without a company to define their lives for them, to give them their identities. They don't understand that the reason you might want to retire early is to have the time to pursue your creative activities after a lifetime of dedicating your time and energy to realizing the goals and visions of others. So the pressure to conform to the 'new norm' is strong; striking out against the new norm is guaranteed to get people talking about you and to you about how you will regret retiring early. Interesting that they talk about regret when it comes to retiring early, but not when it comes to not fulfilling your personal goals and dreams. I applaud one of my colleagues who retired last year to devote his free time to painting. He was honest about his desire to paint and had no desire to continue to work as a consultant for his workplace, to which he had devoted many years. He was retired from the work world and had plans to do other things that he had put on hold for many years.

Very few people are willing to talk about the regrets they may have for choosing against their creativity throughout their lives. Choosing against your creativity is as simple as having an idea that one doesn't write down or reflect upon; it is as simple as saying to oneself that this idea or vision is not worth exploring further. Or as simple as saying that I don't have the time to pursue this. But what one is really saying is that one doesn't have the will to pursue it. That is the biggest problem for most of us--the will to choose for our creativity. Because what if that idea or vision that you toss away is the only one of its kind, the one unique idea or vision that never sees the light of day because you tossed it into the waste bin? I know that I get irritated with myself when I don't write down an idea or thought that I know would make a good blog post or an interesting poem or short story. The ideas get lost forever; it's hard to remember them a day or a week later. I tell people that if you have a creative thought, write it down somewhere, and come back to develop it at a later time. It's worth it.

There are many ways to be creative and creativity is not limited to writing, painting or the arts. We are called each day to be creative where we are--at home, in the kitchen, in our sewing and hobby rooms, in our gardens, among other places. We should give ourselves a pat on the back every time we choose for creativity and against conformity. Maybe as simple as preparing a new recipe from scratch rather than buying frozen prepared food. If there are creative pursuits you wish to follow, the time is now. As I have written in many posts on this blog over the years; "If not now, when?"

Embracing all of life, sadness and all

Dan Rather posted this quote from writer Louise Erdrich on his Facebook page today, and I wanted to share it with you.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

I am adding a few more quotes today, written by Mary Oliver, one of my favorite writers.

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

She also wrote this:

to live in this world

"you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go”

And last but not least, she offers her take on the gift of darkness in a life:

The Uses Of Sorrow

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

"Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

Cluttering up life with apps

If I get one more message telling me that in order to do something, I have to download this or that app, I think I will explode. I wish to inform most companies with this blog post that I just don't care about their new apps, at all. I don't care. I don't want them clogging up my phone and cluttering up my life. I don't want to download apps to my phone for each supermarket I shop at (I'm not loyal to any particular supermarket), I don't need an app to pay for street parking, I'll use an automat, thank you very much. I don't want an app that allows me to use charging stations to charge my electric car, or that allows me to convert HEIC photo files to .jpg file format. Why can't I just transfer photos from my new iPhone to my PC with no problems like I could with my iPhone 6? Why can't I use paper coupons (still possible, but for how much longer?) rather than having to download a supermarket app to use coupons? If you want to use electric scooters here in Oslo (I don't want to at all since I think they're the latest piece of garbage to litter city streets), you have to download an app for each company that provides the scooters. I mean really, you can't make this crap up. At least there is only one app for using Oslo City Bikes, and they are well-controlled, have specific parking areas, and don't litter the city streets and sidewalks the way electric scooters do. The latter make it impossible for handicapped and blind people to navigate the sidewalks.

Apps are the future. I know it, but I don't plan on using many apps. I don't need an app from my electric company telling me how much current we used last month and how much we are using this month compared to last month. I don't care. I pay the electric company and that's all the contact I want with them. I don't need an app for every little thing that daily life consists of, since most of what daily life consists of is unimportant and forgettable. All these apps are just new ways of tracking us, our movements, preferences, purchases, likes, dislikes, etc. and making us focus on unimportant things. I hate the idea that everything I do in life is being controlled and measured, all for marketing purposes. But the reality is that we will be forced to download apps in order to use most things in the future. My husband and I were recently on vacation for a few days in a city in south Norway, and when we parked our car in one of the city parking lots, it was nearly impossible to pay when it was time to leave. We asked some people about how to pay, and they told us to download an app that would make payment possible. Why? If we are visitors to a city, why would we need that city's app? Why would we care? We're not planning on returning there anytime soon. The whole app and phone thing is out of control--a mania, an obsession. Anything to keep us glued to our phones. Instead of making life simpler, all of this pressure to conform is making life more complicated. I suppose the next thing is that we will need to download an app to our phones in order to use the toilets at bus and train stations and airports. I mean, why not? Or an app to activate lights, faucets, soap dispensers, coffee machines, and vending machines in public places. What about apps to start our cars (perhaps they exist already)? Remembering which app should be used when will continually occupy our brains, so that we don't have to reflect on what is really going on. Because if we understood that this is about controlling our every move, we'd be much more circumspect about what we downloaded to our phones, and much more careful about the amount of time we spent on our phones.

Cheating on someone and real love

A smart piece of advice and a good perspective for couples of any age to have and live by, but especially those starting out. Wish I had read and incorporated such advice when I was younger; it would have made a world of sense and might have made me look at some people quite differently. In other words, I would have wasted less time and expended less energy on the wrong people. Because if people cheat on you, they're the wrong people for you. They don't deserve your time, your love, or your loyalty.

Monday morning reflections

The feeling that things will never be the same is a feeling that is occurring more frequently with each passing day. The pandemic is the cause, yes, but the sense that the 'known' is becoming the unknown is prevalent within me, and I cannot say that I like the feeling. We are moving toward a new epoch in mankind's history, in the planet's history. I dread reading or hearing the news, I am aware of the anarchy around me, in every country on this earth. Some countries give the appearance of having more control than others, but scratch the surface and you will find unrest and dissatisfaction present. You will find people who only care about themselves, and who will do what they want to do, will not listen to medical and scientific authorities, will not listen to reason, will not abide by the rules. What matters to them is their freedom and their 'rights'. One thing has become very clear to me, and that is that it doesn't matter how rich you are or how much power you have--you are nothing in the face of a virus, a pandemic, an apocalypse. Money doesn't matter. Money won't save you when the institutions that use your money no longer exist. I fear the future at times. It doesn't look like anything I picture as a happy place. I look at major cities around the world, but especially in the USA, and see the discordance, the unrest, the violent behavior--all arising really out of a pandemic that laid bare the inequities and unrest in my country. It breaks my heart because I fear that it will only get worse before it gets better. Defunding the police is a terrible idea; it will only lead to more chaos. The country is led by a nihilist, someone who 'believes that life is meaningless and rejects all religious and moral principles'. He doesn't know he is one, but he is. He believes in nothing and stands for nothing, except for himself and enriching himself. 'Make America Great Again' is just a slogan to him, he has no idea what it means or what he really wants for the country, because he has no idea what it means to truly serve his country. The word 'service' is not in his vocabulary and never has been. You can watch the documentaries about him from the 1980s; he's the same nasty person he always was. Make America Great Again are empty words, uttered by an empty person, who fills his heart with rage and hatred against what, I am not sure. But he plays on the emotions of a particular type of person, and those people will follow him off a cliff if need be. Perhaps he is unhappy about being old, because he is old, and one day he will die, like everyone else. I have no idea about his soul or personal relationship with God, but at present, there is nothing that indicates to me that he is interested in preserving the Christian values on which our country was founded. The USA is an imperfect country, yes, but one that offered hope to so many people who wanted to start a new life and strive for something better. Hope seems to have died, at least from where I stand.

And if you take hope away from people, you destroy them and a country from within. You contribute to the rise in depression and suicide, to the increase in bad behavior and lawlessness. Because when there is nothing to hope for, there is no point in living or for striving for a better life. And that is nihilism. If that's what people want, that's what people will get. Nihilism will kill more people than a virus ever will. 

The creepy and engrossing stories of H.P. Lovecraft

It’s been well over twenty years since I purchased The Best of H.P. Lovecraft (Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre). At that time, I read perhaps one of the short stories in this collection, The Rats in the Walls, but that is the only one I can recall reading. I recently picked up the book again following the recent release of the movie Color Out of Space, which is based on Lovecraft’s short story The Colour Out of Space. I have not seen the movie, but decided to read the short story instead, and am now reading the entire collection of short stories and enjoying them.

Lovecraft is a master horror writer. Born in 1890, he wrote prodigiously until his death in 1937; he didn’t live a long life, but he left behind a literary legacy that endures to this day. It’s hard to describe what it is that captures and draws you into his stories, but it only takes a page or two and I’m hooked into yet another short story. I don’t know if I would describe his tales as bloodcurdling; I would rather describe them as creeping terror, or as a gradual build-up to what you know are going to be fear- and anxiety-inducing events. Stephen King has stated that “H.P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale”. High praise coming from a master horror writer himself. King grew up reading Lovecraft’s tales, and Lovecraft himself was inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849). We read a fair amount of Poe in school as children/young teenagers, but not Lovecraft.

I know from my reading and searching online that readers either like Lovecraft’s classic prose and phrasings, or they don’t. I happen to be one of the readers who do like his style. He is wordy, but he chooses his words carefully (some would say he is old-fashioned and that’s fine with me), and there aren’t many wasted sentences. He doesn’t write or present details like a journalist, and is excellent at crafting his tales. Each tale deals with a different kind of horror, and the protagonists, educated and logical men, are sceptical at first to what they find themselves dealing with, only to understand (in the nick of time) that what they were sceptical of is in fact real (or surreal) and life-threatening. My favorite stories are not necessarily the ones that his diehard fans would hold up as their favorites. In the collection that I am almost finished reading, I would say my favorite stories are the following:

·        The Picture in the House  (the build-up to the suggestion of a grim end for the protagonist is nerve-wracking)

·        In the Vault  (just plain creepy, something you might find in Tales from the Crypt)

·        The Whisperer in Darkness  (cosmic horror = fear of the unknown, of the cosmos, of all things alien)

·        The Colour Out of Space  (cosmic horror about a meteor that crashes to earth and the after-effects)

·        The Haunter of the Dark  (the unwitting unleashing of a satanic-like monster)

·        The Thing on the Doorstep  (wizardry, mental telepathy, mind transfer—plain creepy)

·        The Shadow Over Innsmouth  (part of the Cthulhu mythos)

The Call of Cthulhu is also part of this collection of short stories. After digging into Lovecraft’s background, I found out that there is an entire cult mythos built up around the monster Cthulhu, and that the book The Necronomicon that is mentioned in several of his stories, while fictional, is thought to be real by some people. The Shadow Over Innsmouth is part of this mythos, and I found it to be much more terrifying than The Call of Cthulhu because of the pursuit of the protagonist by the townspeople (monsters) and how the realization of his strange ancestry slowly dawns on the protagonist. Lovecraft writes in an exceptionally visual way; his descriptions of the fictional town Innsmouth (in Massachusetts) allowed me to imagine it, such that when I saw it depicted in artists’ pictures online, I thought, yes, that’s how I would have seen it too. He is not big on dialog between his characters, but for some reason that is not a problem for me. He explains the motives and thoughts of his characters in great detail, and that suffices. 

Lovecraft has inspired many writers and filmmakers to this day—among them the writer Stephen King and director Guillermo Del Toro. HR Giger’s monster in the Alien movies was inspired by Lovecraft’s writings, likewise John Carpenter’s creation The Thing, according to online searches. I would add that some of the X-Files episodes bear a Lovecraftian influence, especially those episodes that deal with insular townspeople, xenophobia, and strange goings-on. Those are the episodes where Mulder and Scully visit such towns and out-of-the-way places, and all the while you sit and watch and are anxious for them, wanting them to leave as soon as possible. The X-Files remains one of my favorite shows, precisely because the show took the same kinds of bold risks in its storytelling as Lovecraft did with his.

I am nearing the end of this collection of short stories/novellas, and I really don’t want them to end. Lovecraft has created a universe that you are very glad you don’t live in, but that fascinates you nonetheless. You can ‘visit’ it safely via his tales. He is an excellent writer; I’m surprised that it took me over twenty years to appreciate him, but thankfully, I can do so now.