I used to have a favorite tree. It was a centuries-old beech tree, standing free on a small meadow, separated from the groves to its sides.
It was a glorious tree, with a mighty crown and heavy branches, strong and thin enough to allow children to hoist themselves up. Higher still, four trunks reached into the sky but not without offering the climber a place to rest like the palm of a wooden hand. "The Old Beech" as we called it, "Die Alte Buche" was not one but four trees, siblings sharing not only water, ground, and parasites, but even a common gown of bark.
A few years ago, a developer bought the area around it. It's close to my parent's house and there was much curiosity and some concern about what would happen to the woods and lines of sight. The beech stood under nature protection though, so it would stay and the developers had to make place for it with a small "park" around.
There won't be a park anymore. In February 2022, the old beech faced its last storm that took one of the four siblings. Briefly thereafter, chainsaws came for the other three. It saddens me still. But I am grateful I was visiting during that time, that I was able to say goodbye on my terms.
A ferry. A small part of your journey back. After sand, and sun, and beach, and adventure, it's two hours to get through. Can this thing even swim? It looks and smells and screams like a pile of scrap metal after all. Its corridors are narrow, the steel cooks under the sun. Please let this be rubber burning and not your new shoes! A last good-bye to the island? You did that already. This is not the beginning of the end. It's a random paragraph in the last chapter, between the concrete of the harbor and the concrete of the motorway. Tomorrow you'll be home again, a shower, your bed.
A ferry. It's the last vehicle between you and The Island. There were cars, and planes, and taxis, and buses; hotel beds and airplane seats; hotel staff, security personal, and the lady showing you the way to the shuttle bus for whom you seemed to be just an item to be moved from A to B. But now you are here! You can feel the sun on your skin. (The same sun that you will feel later lying on the beach!) You can smell the water. (The same foreign sea you will soon plunge into!) You can listen to the other strangers whispering and shouting in foreign languages. (Isn't that dark-haired guy over there cute? Will you meet him again?)
What difference a few minutes make, a change in direction for a vessel to ride this way or that way.
The Hong Kong-Zhuhua-Macau bridge, photographed last November. 55km in total lengths, it's the longest sea crossing in the world, liking the three cities that give it its name. The name is misleading, as it actually consists of three bridges, an undersea tunnel, and four artificial islands, one of which you can see in the picture.
From above, it seems even more unreal than from the data alone or pictures taken from the bridge itself. A long concrete line suddenly stopping in the vast sea, where suddenly a bridge becomes a tunnel. Somehow, my whole understanding of what it means to be a "bridge" or a "tunnel" rebel against this idea.
Reaching back into history, we feel a mixture of awe and wonder if we hear about "the seven wonders of the ancient world." On the other side, many of the wonders of the late modern world seem mundane. Dams, bridges, sky scrapers, tunnels - after passing by hundreds of times, seeing images a thousand times, we might hardly notice them any more. And yet, how truly, utterly magical they must be for the average city dweller among us, who would probably struggle to build a wooden goose barn strong enough to survive the next storm.
I love it to go out on the balcony by night or look out of the window, to watch the lights in other buildings go on and off, to watch people living their private-evening-selves.
I wrote about life journey and life stories in the last days, using words and images to reflect. With all this, it's easy for the ominous Self or Ego to become bigger and bigger, until all that remains of the rest of the world has crumbled to a formless something in the corner of the mind. In these moments, looking out reveals how ridiculous this it. When there is more information and life in the few images of one of the many high rises, in the few branches of a tree or the feathers of a bird than in all the what-ifs we came up with.
I often find it utterly fascinating how low the "resolution" of our dreams is. "I want to be a doctor" he says and thinks of little than his title and a bit of money. "I want to be an astronaut" she says and thinks of little but a shiny circle in the sky and maybe iron being thrusted into heights with a feeling of a shaking merry-go-round. Yet do they really think of how minutes flow into hours into days into weeks into months of doing what doctors and astronauts do?
All this becomes even more true with the internet, where after scrolling for an hour or two we struggle to remember a handful of images or stories, where reading news articles leaves us with little more than that others too don't like politician A or business person B. How humbling it is then to watch out of the window and see how many many people (or birds and trees) there are just a few minutes of walking away from us of whose lives we know so little. Lives taking place in what looks like just an aquarium from our balcony.
"Reflection" is an interesting action, to let your mind more or less run wild and hope something useful will stand at the end. (How wonderful that's often the case!) German philosopher Andreas Reckwitz argued that self-reflection is not necessarily something "natural," but a social practice like many others that was developed during the Renaissance and in its aftermath as people started to write and read and to construct stories and narratives about their lives. I think it's an interesting idea, but I'm a sucker for slightly-too-big social theories. At least the way ("Bullet") journals and Note-taking apps and diaries are marketed speaks to the theory that reflection indeed is a rather personal (solitary) practice based on writing.
This need not be so, though! First there is of course a conversational approach to reflection - a long walk with a friend along the shore during winter or around an autumn lake, for example, a mild summer evening on the balcony with one too much bottle of wine - pick your poison. (Even dinner at a meditation retreat or a therapy session might work if you prefer your friends not to know... whatever.)
And then there's photography! It's actually one of the things about photography I like most, the silent dialogue it allows with myself. While in normal times it is quickly directed outwards, towards people in the streets, birds in the air or the water in the sea, it took an inward-turn while I spent the two weeks in quarantine. "Reflection" here obtained a literal meaning, as I looked at my image on the screen of my camera or fixed my reflection in the window.
What role do images and photos play in your reflective practice? Are they the starting point of a habit of contemplation? Have you built rituals around them?
Play is the last source of joy for this week. There can be an innocence in it that is hard to find elsewhere - not because hiking, cycling, music, etc. are not also innocent, but because real play allows us to forget time and any greater goal that lies beyond the moment.
Competition takes part of this away, at least for me - but maybe this is different for different people. Did you find time to play this weekend?
People often seem distant when they sit there with their phones, disconnected, maybe even ignorant.
What we usually don't see is what they are looking at. It's easy to forget that who seems to be under the spell of their glowing screen is sometimes just connecting to someone else, sending a short wish, showing someone they care - maybe even to make sure that they have their peace of mind to be fully there for us after they put it down.
(The man in this picture is an old Taiwanese gentleman who now works as a driver and guide to show visitors the beauty of the island. In the moment I took the picture, he texted his wife that he'll be home soon - before sharing more stories from his life with us. Only few edits, the backlight of the car, the cigarette and the phone did enough of their magic.)
Being online is a big part of our life. The average person is spending hours on social media each day, even more actively online, even more staring at screens.
While there are all kinds of smart think-pieces, essays, and books about the societal consequences of this, I think that when it comes to our own life, art is the more powerful way to engage with these issues. Like this installation at Pier 2 in Kaohsiung (高雄市) - a wonderful area to stroll around!
It's a nice piece to remind us of our smartphone use (as if that was necessary!), but its strength lies in allowing us to address it ironically, in a fun way, "performative" if you want so. There is a clear invitation to sit down next to the lady on the left, to interact with her (and be it by ignoring her), to take a picture of doing that. And thus, on another level, the art piece about using smartphones creates a reason to stop using them, to think while using them (of course to use them to capture all that!), and again to talk about it.
An art installation at Taipei101 for Lunar New Year.
(I loved and pushed the red in the sculpture itself, reduced colors in the background. I withhold from doing too much coloring apart from this, so it's not really a "cinematic" edit I would say...)