A Boxing Day Walk...

... at noon, and it was a clear enough sky to see the sun for a bit. These photos were shot at 11:54. However, as everyone keep pointing out, it´s getting lighter and lighter, day by day!

Have an Excellent Christmas

The other day I came across a reference (I think it was in the Guardian) to art critic, etc John Berger´s BBC series "Ways of seeing" from 1972. All the episodes are on youtube and it was two well spent hours, though I confess I did skip most of the episode two feminist discussion about the male gaze. I understand the text that this series is based on is still used for educational purposes. What Berger pointed out, among other things, and that I hadn´t really thought of like that, is how the history of the photograph and the culture of photography is very much linked to advertising, which is about depicting what is desirable. Or, as Berger puts it, glamorous.

I remember a kid I know, who a few years back, when I asked him to pose for my camera, immediately started behaving like a fashion or glamour model. It was a bit eerie, he would have been six or seven, but telling, I think, of the photographic culture that he had grown up in. And don´t we all, really, attempt to make ourselves, our home, and our lives look just a little bit extra charming, enviable, and desirable for photos? Most of us probably don´t even feel particularly weird about the idea that we are selling ourselves to the world, even to those we call friends and family.

Yesterday we visited five supermarkets in our search for everything we need to make a perfect Christmas for our closest family. We try to make it simple and traditional, but it seems we have rather particular demands on certain things, like the brand, type, and weight of the ham. As we stood in one check-out line after another, I saw many women´s faces marked by stress and anxiety, whimpering kids, and grumpy grandpas. And it occured to me that Christmas has also become glamourized. Even if we don´t buy magazines, most of the supermarket chains send their own versions to all registered bonus point-collecting customers, and the newspapers all have lifestyle supplements. There is no getting away from it. 

The only way I can think of to resist, is to be aware. I am reading Brooks Jensen again, and in my notebook I have written "What is my definition of excellence?". He is writing about photographic projects of course, but it´s a good question to ask oneself concerning most endeavours, I think. What is my definition of an excellent Christmas? What is yours?

Four Days Until Christmas

It´s been raining all over my Christmas spirit. This photo is taken at 2 am yesterday but it might as well have been at 3 pm. Also, someone at the post office has "mis-sorted" a parcel of mine, and they can´t find it. Nor do they seem very interested in looking for it. It contains a 50´s watch I bought on Ebay, a kind that I have been wanting for a long time, so I am pretty distressed about it.

At least my traditional vörtbröd (a traditional rye bread made with brewer´s wort) came out smashing this year, and in triumph I carried part of the loaf to mum-in-law. She had, in spite of near blindness, made a second attempt in as many days to bake hallongrottor (literally: raspberry caves).
She showed me a tin full:
"I think this batch looks much better than the first one."
Well, I could see the raspberry, but no cave; there was a sorry pat of jam on top of a slightly burned, thin layer of flour in the paper baking cups she had used.
"I think you may not have used enough flour", I said.
"But I followed the recipe exactly!"

There was a lot more Christmas spirit at my friend Oscar´s tenth birthday bash, as his mother is a champion decorator and a black-belt shopper. She was particularly happy about the tree this year, and rightly so, I thought.

I am trying to learn how to use my camera better, and this low-light season is very challenging. As you know, the road to proficiency goes uphill and is paved with failure, and I came home with around eighty very, very bad photos. Sometimes, however, a bad photo goes so bad, it turns around and comes back kind of good in an unexpected way. This is, of course, not a sign of improved skill, but rather blind luck.

Today, I have the big pre-Christmas cleaning to do, Sunday is the big Christmas shopping day, and Monday is meatballs and ham frying day. Tuesday, it´s Christmas Eve, which is the Big Day for us in Sweden, when we eat ourselves sick and watch the eternal and obligatory re-run of "Kalle Anka och hans vänner önskar God Jul" (= Donald Duck and his friends wish a Merry Christmas). And drink liters of glögg.

From My Photoalbum

Lucerne, November 30th, 2013.

A New Perspective on Storytelling

Now notice who is reading this book. Again see if you can connect with a sense of looking out at the world from behind your eyes. Notice that you are here in this moment reading, and notice too that the person behind these reading eyes was there when you ate breakfast this morning and was there when you were a child. You’ve been you your whole life, though there have been many changes in your thoughts, your feelings, your roles, and your body. At the very moment that you gaze at these lines of ink on paper, notice who is gazing. Hello. You have been you ever since you showed up in early childhood as a conscious human being, and your infantile amnesia fell away (about the same time that these deictic frames of I/you; here/there; and now/then made their appearance). This “I” is what some call the observing self (Deikman 1982). It is a sense that transcends both time and space, not literally but experientially since this sense is everywhere you go. Whatever happens to you, it is this “I” that will be part of your verbal knowledge of that experience.

That is a quote from one of the most useful and interesting books I have read this year: "Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" by Steven C. Hayes and Spencer Smith. I read one of those agony aunt-columns in a newspaper, and became curious about this so called ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy. I decided to investigate and picked this book out from a selection available on amazon.

Bottom-line, this is about the practice of mindfulness, which I have learned a bit about from Eckhart Tolle. The root to suffering, says Hayes and Smith, is that we (or as Tolle calls it, our egos) tell stories about ourselves, other people, our lives, and our world, that define what we are and what we are able to do. This can be empowering, but often also causes distress and in some cases hinder us from doing what we want or need to do.

This is our point: humans suffer, in part, because they are verbal creatures. If this is so, then here is the problem: the verbal skills that create misery are too useful and central to human functioning to ever stop operating. That means suffering is an unavoidable part of the human condition, at least until we know how to better manage the skills language itself has given us. 

The therapy part of this book is about learning to defuse from the stories, and go beyond these self-imposed limitations. It is not easy though, to defuse from labels put on oneself by parents, friends, teachers and others.

There is an alternative: you can learn to look at your thoughts rather than from them. These cognitive defusion techniques are a core component of ACT. They help you to make the distinction between the world as structured by your thoughts, and thinking as an ongoing process. When your thoughts are about you yourself, defusion can help you to distinguish between the person doing the thinking and the verbal categories you apply to yourself through thinking. Defusion leads to peace of mind, not because the mental war necessarily stops but because you are not living inside the war zone anymore.

This is so interesting, and I have learned some useful techniques for my hangups, although I must say that considering some of the examples of problems patients struggle with, I can only say (and with a great sense of gratitude) that I really have no problems. Perhaps the most useful thing about reading this book, for me, is a greater understanding of the suffering of some of my friends, which has at times been incomprehensible to me.

...the conceptualized self fits into a story that provides reasons for your actions and a self that provides coherence for your experiences. It is a kind of comfortable but suffocating coherence that leads relentlessly toward “more of the same.” Have you ever noticed that if someone thinks he is unimportant, most events in his life appear to confirm that view? Or have you ever observed that if someone sees herself as a victim, somehow she keeps ending up (in her mind or in actuality) being victimized?

If you are interested in how the mind really works, how our thoughts govern our lives, and want to try some interesting new ways (at least they were new to me) to deal with whatever levels of discomfort or behavioural limitation that you experience, this could be a good read for you.

Christmas Meditation

Sunday the 15th we went to church and listened to Erik Westbergs Vokalensemble celebrating their 20th anniversary with a Christmas concert. Among other things we got to listen to the first performance of composer Jan Sandström´s "Veni, Emmanuel", which was a real treat.

But now, a few days later, as I think back, my favourite piece was Morten Lauridsen´s "O Magnum Mysterium". I found a version of it on youtube (put there by GP Eleria) by the Nordic Chamber Choir, and here it is.

Here Be Dragons

It´s been a crap kind of winter so far, with temperatures bouncing up and down every other day between plus five and minus ten. This morning we had kramsnö, which is a wet, heavy kind of snow that is excellent to make snowmen from. This didn´t just lure out the kids, but a pair of artistically inclined, grown-up neighbours, and this is what they made:

It only lasted a couple of hours, though. I took this photo at half past one (the sun was setting, as you can tell), and by the time I got home, at six, it had fallen to pieces. Great initiative, I think.