Below is the finished watercolor painting, I started a few days ago in Marsberg, Germany and finished here in Playa del Rey, California.
Photo of “Bloomen für Unsere Mutter,” © Frau Kolb, 2013, Watercolor on paper 7.9″x7.9″
Walking OFF Emotional Pain, On Losing OUR Dear Mother, Christine M. Esch Kolb, in Marsberg, Germany
Los Angeles California,
Playa del Rey.
6th August 2013
(8:57 am)
Today, I am back in Los Angeles after an emotionally intense trip to Germany. We buried our mother. We are torn inside and feel like crying buckets of tears just to prove that our pain is BIG, BAD, WORSE than any other…
Yesterday, was my first real day in Germany. Of course, I’ve visited my husband’s homeland many times before. At least ten times…. I think. But never have I had a day to myself here, since family obligations, and domestic duties, a myriad of un-worded demands commanded my every moment spent in this richly attractive and powerful, relatively small, nation.
I had a healing, IF, pensive hike. After an intense week of social formality, all conducted 100% in German, defined by deep, potentially life altering, conversations with closest family and cherished older-generation, family friends, including the family’s 88 year old brilliant Protestant pastor, a married man who spent part of his youth preaching for the German speaking community in Manhattan, my beloved hometown, New York.
It was TIME for ACTION, movement, exercise… at least. It was urgent to get inside myself, hear my own voice, and YES, remember how I’d arrived at this crucial junction in my personal history. Every step was toward understanding, meditation. Every moment was draped in the dappled sunlight of heavenly grace, which is a flawless summer day in a place with harsh winters. Yes.
After the death and burial of our beautiful mother, the beloved, Frau Christine Kolb, I had a lot to think about. What is LIFE for? Why are we here? Where are we going? What do we really want? What is worth fighting, or better yet… what is worth surrendering for?
These and many other questions burst forth in noisy mind chatter. On the onset of my walk, I was feeling a flood of emotions. I reflected gently on some intense talks I’d had with my family members, ancient and dazzling family friends, my dashing husband and his two tall intense brothers… Can you imagine… The boys, now men, adored their MOTHER! The pain radiating, at times, was thick ass rotten cheese. I had to find my silence, my stillness, my joy in a hike toward my silent center.
After about an hour invested in silence, together, at Mommy’s, Grave with my, very European, tall and slim brother and sister-in-law, they left and I took another chunk of time and used it to really LOOK at, listen to the buzz of bees fluttering around, and thereby draw the once triumphant, now fading flower arrangement, that marked the, waiting to settle, burial mound. Then I walked, down the hill and into the small town, where my sweet and loving husband grew up.
Marsberg is a place ripe with natural beauty. Traditionally, this fruitful, furtile, land is what we think of when reflecting on representations of rural Germany: hills, farms, and triumphant summer green define the place. The people of the town vary from the sophisticated, highly educated town’s people to recent immigrants without the advantages of German education, destitute depressed burn-outs addicted to social services, prostitutes and their clients, and every other kind of person a little city, including, Germany might breed. There is also a population of drooling/stumbling yet NOT drunken but “geistes Krank und körper behinderte leute,” being that Marsberg is home to at least three mental institutions. Walking in the town past all these and other types of people I felt a curious solidarity with the folk around me. It was an intense, full of feeling.
Before the visited the grave, we had hiked a steep and winding path, up to the tower of Marsberg, which over looks the city, the walk is punctuated by scenes from the fourteen scenes, known as the Passion of Christ.
It hurt when Hans told me of his pain. I felt every word like a lance, piercing my milk chocolate heart. Empathy is not recommended as a sport or hobby, IF you don’t want Swiss cheese to be made of your main organ, its four thumping arteries torn asunder, a series of holes where wholesome obliviousness once lingered. I could taste the grief, the hard baked solid HATE which years of battle, war, envy, rivalry, and LOVE have transformed into a multi-layer CAKE of bitter-hard sufferings molded into a sculptural mass of fetid misunderstandings and continuous strife which is a slice of life, he’s cut for himself.
Thank you, god or goodness that despite our issues personal issues we managed to bury our mother with the appropriate dignity, well deserved, honest earned, deep LOVE and undying admiration, our the gifts we lay before Christine’s Grave. Yet, we can not allow grief over DEATH, which is essential to LIFE, to derail us. We must stay focused on living progress. Life continues.
Today, for example, despite the cloud of grief, which threatened to break into torrents of negativity, there was a happy mood just outside, our potentially gloomy home. A wedding took place the day before and the voices of a cheerful circle tempered our ability to wallow in a tepid pool of predictable and necessary grief; the clensing routine, post-sorrow.
A guitar melody tickled my ears as I made my way up the small hill to our family driveway. The light-hearted sound of backyard jazz, in rural Germany, no less, as I arrived HOME, from my glorious—thoughtful—revitalizing walk, through town, and up the hill where houses curl around in an affluent maze of residential structures, welcomed me. Tired, sweaty, I felt as though I’d taken an meander through time and space, from place to place I had ambled, from the graveyard, where we visited Mother’s freshly flower bedecked “final resting place,” to a re-invigorating stop for Mother’s favorite ice-cream treat: a “Spagetti Eis,” at one of the only two places open Sunday on the town’s short center street.
Ah! I felt privileged to have let into me, via the music and ice-cream, the drawing and the walking, the blessed beauty of a Sunday in a (traditionally) Christian nation. Just as I’m sure it is a pleasure to enjoy a Sabbath in a Jewish state… I find it marvelous and truly helpful to be in a place where the weekly calendar includes time for stepping outside of routine and thinking about the steps taken and the future course of one’s tracks.
Ass you may know, shops are mostly closed on Sunday in Germany and I had to go to a Tankhalterstella to buy wine. I bought a bottle of tröcken oder “dry,” “Reisling undeine flasche Rot wien, bitte,” from a blond girl with the name, “Johanna,” tattooed on her inner arm in Gothic Script.
(I wonder who Johanna is. Is she living? Is she dead? Is she a girlfriend, a forbidden love? I know that some people get tattoos to commemorate the dead. I learned that recently, at Sprouts, a grocery store near my home in Southern California, from a young man, with luminous eyes, that works there. He explained to me, that he had tattoos because his best friend of childhood committed suicide via heroine overdose. The young man’s eyes were so shiny, brimming with life and intelligence. His arms were covered in tattoos which, tightly packed, intricate stories of his life, his values, which he’d decided to have woven in ink into the fabric of his young beautiful skin.)
(© Frau Kolb, 2013, Work in progress… Underdrawing for a small 7.9″x7.watercolor painting of the burial bouquet.)
So…Today, I invite you to create your own Sabbath or holy Sunday, take healing time OUT for yourself and go out for a thoughtful walk. Make a drawing, perhaps… so that you really LOOK and see the buzz and squirm which is real life, miracle, all around you, let yourself feel, allow yourself to think. Allow yourself to take a further step outside yourself, walk away from who you think you are, step by step finding what is ancient and pure, LOVE within which like a well can quench every thirst, love for our brothers, sisters, (and NUT JOB Jehovah Witness mother(s), too,) walk away with yourself to the true Center, that which does not change, of who you really are besides the YOU you have invented, and cultivated, sharpened, and honed you of professional life and public interactions. Step away from who you were told you had to be and come into the place of knowing that YOU have arrived, at your real you, right now. FRONT and CENTER! Peace.
Sincerely Yours,
Frau Kolb