Winter Solstice and I

TODAY THE EARTH has stopped turning us, the Northerners, away from the Sun. It will wait for a few days and will then begin to turn it’s Northern ‘cheek’ to the Sun. The days will not get warmer (should become colder), but they will be longer by a minute a day. And there will be more light!

To me this is the end of one year and the beginning of a new year in my life, despite my birthday being in the middle of summer. And it will be a truly new page.

In autumn I ended my ten-year-long sheep-farmer’s career – it was one of the greatest adventures in my life! My darling sheep have been transformed into an Olympus system with a range of excellent lenses and I’ve been running around forests like crazy stalking roe-deer and shooting birds.

I do not even dare to think what this passion of mine for photography will lead to – it offers such possibilities that one life is not enough, and I’ve already done more than half of the one that I’m living now.

After spending twelve years on a secluded little farm (without a car), having enjoyed every single moment of solitude and introspection, friendships with the parish people and the hard work with my goats and sheep, I am now ready for a more mobile life – mostly living abroad, but coming back to my farm now and again to continue chasing the deer and photographing the roses, which at the moment lie warmly wrapped in all the sheets that I could muster and covered by a thick blanket of snow.

Scary? Yes. A dive into the unknown, while my friends, my age and younger, are preoccupied by the comfortably familiar day to day routines. I would never relinquish, however, the thrill of new knowledge, new experience, new discoveries of my own self. Perhaps it is because I discovered my creative, artistic side (or received a confirmation of it) quite late in my life. Hence - it’s my time.