It feels like I am still trying to catch up with things from when I got back from my vacation in January. The main reason I am so behind with everything is because I have been working 10-12 hours almost every day since January 20th. There have been some changes at the company I work for so I have been asked to do other things than before, hence more work. However I am very grateful for that and I do hope I continue to get more work. Although it does feel weird not to be able to spend as much time in the Blogosphere as I am used to.
But, I, my blog and dog Lisen are not going anywhere. We are just in a more random post period right now. I truly appreciate all comments and feedback as always and will catch up with it all as soon as I get a bit longer breather than a few hours, which I think will be after this weekend.
Now while I have been swamped with work, a lot more snow has fallen outside. Which I love! Because with the snow comes a sense of calmness and light I feel , something very well needed at the moment. And because I work from home the only breaks I really get is when I take my dog Lisen out on walks, which is also the only time I have had lately with an opportunity to take some photos. So below are some recent photos of my neighbourhood here in Lyckeby in Sweden. :-)
The first thing my dog Lisen and I see when we come down the little hill from my apartment building.
Always extra fun to sniff in the snow it seems.
Snow in Lyckeby.
And it is on mornings like these I am very grateful my car is in a garage. :-)
Because I just bought 1,2 kilos of candy! Lol! It was on sale this week and I just happen to have a sweet craving when I passed the candy section at the store. So this is what happened...
I bought way too much candy...
But they had so many of my favourite candies! Which are chocolate and salt licorice. As well as the occasional sour piece. So I was doomed to fail to resist. Lol!
Oh well, I can pretend that I thought it was Halloween this weekend. Because I do always get confused over when to celebrate Halloween in Sweden. If it should be celebrated on the same day as All Saint's day or not? Which is tomorrow. However it does seem like most people who celebrate Halloween in Sweden did so last weekend. But, Halloween or not. I am definitely going to have a sweet weekend! :p
Today I turned 29 years old. A day that has pretty much felt like any other day though. Except for a family birthday dinner and reflection over the past year in my life. The conclusion I made through my little reflection was that I am happy with where I am in my life right now, and I look forward with great anticipation to the rest of it. And my birthday dinner was awesome, so of course I ate way too much! Lol!
Below are some photos of the reasons why I am so stuffed right now. :-)
Fried salmon with boiled potatoes and lemon sauce. Simple and so tasty!!!
Fabulous New York Cheesecake my amazing sister made for me. Thanks sis! :p
My piece. Yuuummy!!!
Now I do not even want to think about how many calories I have eaten today. Yikes! But hey, it is my birthday. I mean, if that is not a great excuse to over indulge then I do not know what is? :p
One year ago today I published my first post on this blog, yay! And yikes how quickly time flies by! But I'm so glad I decided to start this blog, and even more glad that I still love working on it. Because I was a bit afraid I'd lose interest in it eventually. However that is absolutely not the case! I'm still constantly thinking of what I can post about, what new pages would be fun to add and how I can improve this blog. I have also realized that I will never finish this blog, it's under constant construction. Lol! So my first post --> "Still under construction, but getting there" is kind of as much current today as it was one year ago.
Now there are so many reasons why I continue to blog, but the most important reason is that this is indeed the perfect platform for me to utilize my creativity. Even when a post take many hours to complete, those hours fly by because I enjoy it so much! A truly wonderful feeling!
And although I write this blog because I want to share my life, Sweden and lovely Lisen with the world, I also write it very much for myself. I actually think is fun to read my posts sometimes. Hehe. Because it gives me a well needed perspective of my life, a bit of distance I suppose. As well as a reminder of events, moments and feelings I might have forgotten if I hadn't written them down. However I would be lying if I said comments, follows and visitor counts doesn't matter to me, YOU DO! And I'm truly grateful for every single one!
On a more personal life update note. It's now July, the big vacation month in Sweden. I guess I'm on vacation? I say that because work has been very slow lately so I'm not sure what to expect... Anyway, the weather has been so so, kind of humid and cloudy all weekend. Not so humid today though, but cloudy. Lisen is very energetic these days, lol! Almost like a pup again for some reason? But I love it! It's great to see her happy and healthy. I have some fun plans ahead, which I of course will write about here, but I don't want to jinx anything by writing about it before it happens though, hehe. Ops, does that make me superstitious. Hm? Oh well. All in all life is aaall good right now and I would describe this past year as a calm and enlightened one for me, on many levels. :-)
About 6 years ago I felt like I desperately needed to make a change in my life. Not an external change, but internal. I had no idea how to make that change though, nor did I have any type of perception of what that change would entail. All I knew was that my way of thinking, living and interacting with people was not how I wanted it to be. I felt like I was stuck in a type of reflex living and simply did what I thought I was supposed to do. Which was functional for a while. Until I could no longer suppress the intensity of unease I felt in every cell of my body.
Release
So finally I let go of everything. My job, apartment, way of living and went on a 6 month trip around the world with my sister. And believe me - I was scared to death! Even though I never admitted it at the time. Because not only did I leave all sort of security I had behind, I also felt a huge responsibility for my little sister on this trip. It was all on me. I was 23 and she was 19 when we took off. First stop was the USA, then Australia followed by a couple of weeks in South Africa.
First lesson Obviously we survived, hehe. But not only that. My sister and I became a lot closer, friends in fact. Which we never really were before. I also got a well needed perspective of what life is all about. Where of one huge life lesson I learned pretty quickly on the trip was that I can't escape how I feel inside. Which is ultimately what creates my outer world. This in turn made me realize that before I could start anything else in my life I had to create an inner peace first. No idea how I would do that though...
Not sure
But life always gives you what you need. Although it took me a few years to truly understand that inner peace isn't something I can deal with later. I have to actually devote my attention and time into creating it now. It won't just appear one morning. It's a process. And up until about two months ago I had no idea why I even tried to create inner peace so badly. I just felt like it was something I really needed to do.
Tools
Then I read "A New Earth" and "The Power of Now" by Eckhart Tolle. (Which I wrote about in my post -->Good Morning. ) Books I had heard about on Oprah, but not really paid anymore attention to. Then one day my sister tells me she bought them. So I read them and had a quite a few aha-moments. It wasn't like I read something all new, more like things made more sense to me after I read these books. It also made it easier and sped up the process of creating my inner peace. Because now I had some tools to work with. Yay!
Changing my world
Although my inner peace and I are not 100 percent connected all the time, it's always with me in the background now. And it's truly a wonderful, calm and happy place to see and experience the world from. A complete opposite from the world I lived in 6 years ago. It also shows me that it is indeed my inner state that creates my outer world. Because as I have changed from within - the world has changed with me. But I haven't changed the world - only how I perceive and interact with it. Which is what truly makes all the difference.
Still learning
Now, it has taken me 6 years to begin to make some sort of sense out of life and how I can live it to the best of my ability. So these days I feel like a child who has just taken his/hers first steps - Wow, this is so cool! And I want to walk all the time. But it doesn't mean I can walk perfectly, run or even teach anyone else how to walk. What I can do though is share how I learned to take the first step on my spiritual journey.
Inspiration
Besides Tolles books I also recently stumbled across a wonderful documentary called "This Sacred Earth: The 2012 Phenomenon". A lovely documentary by filmmaker Billie Dean about The 2012 Phenomenon (which I find fascinating) as well as about many tings Tolle talk about in his books. Which is why I felt it affected me positively and reassured me that I'm indeed on the right path. So below is the trailer.
And this is my favourite quote from the documentary:
"There is nothing to fear about a date out there. Remember, man is the one who made the dates. The Universe doesn't go on mans time. Time is an illusion anyway, it doesn't really exist. We are probably the only species in the Universe that has found a way to measure something that does not exist."
- Dolores Cannon, past-life regressionist and hypnotherapist, about The 2012 Phenomenon.
This statement made me think about something else I heard, can't remember where though... But imagine if you visited the Earth for the first time and there were no humans on it. Who would you ask "What time is it?".
So I'm a bit, ehum, me. And sometimes I just get weird impulses to do things like this. I mean, I have no idea how I got this idea. Which, on the other hand, is usually how most of my posts emerge. Anyway, yesterday while I was sitting on my balcony and playing with my iphone, all of a sudden I thought it would be fun to take a pic of me. So I did.
However I didn't like that one. So I took one more, and one more and so on... Until I had waaayyy too many pics of myself, lol! But then I thought, why not post some of them? Just to remind myself that I'm alive and just being, ehum, me. So here are a few of the pics:
Hm...
Or perhaps I should call it a haunted apartment building. Anyway, in the pic above you can see which building I'm referring to. I lived there with my family for a few years when I was a teenager. It's located in Galgamarken, a couple kilometers from Karlskrona. Actually the name Galgamarken literally translates to Gallows ground, but I'll explain more about that a bit further down in this post.
So, when I lived there I had a lot of weird, unpleasant experiences that still to this day give me the creeps. The most intense experience I had began with a bad dream and ended with me seeing a white bundle of light disappearing through my window. And once I realized it was gone, I also realized that I was completely exhausted and out of breath.
In fact even today I seriously dislike, or perhaps I should call it fear, that building. I mean if I have a dream where I move back into that apartment, it's no longer a dream - it's a really bad nightmare! Yikes! But can this building really be a haunted one? Well, perhaps Galgamarkens past can provide some answers.
Ok, so Galgamarken, or Gallows ground, is located on a hill approximately 2 kilometers from Karlskrona. These grounds has been known as Galgamarken ever since the town of Karlskrona was founded in 1680. And the reason it got this name is because it was widely used as an execution ground, particularly for executions of Snapphanar, in the 1600s.
A Snapphane? Snapphane was an invective used in the 1600s for the very worst people in society, like robbers and bandits. It was also used as a term for the brigands, peasants and troops who supported or participated in the Danish part of the Danish-Swedish wars of this period. A Snapphane was considered an outlaw and Swedes could execute them without trial.
Hm... Not the most charming tale perhaps. And today Galgamarken is full of apartment buildings. However, I have also lived in another building in Galgamarken and it was not at all creepy. Which is why I relate my experiences more to that particular building than the entire grounds. All I can say is that you won't see me living in that building ever again! Uh-uh!!!
Because dogs, like most animals, live in the moment all the time. Without too many thoughts or worries on their mind. At least that's how I perceive them. And it's so nice to simply live in the moment, though a bit more difficult for me to actually do. But I'm learning every day.
In the meantime I thought I'd share some pics of Lisen and Diva enjoying their doggy lives, and living in the moment. Doing some stuff I actually think would feel amazing to do myself, lol! But how would that look though...like I'm a lunatic perhaps? Lol!
The pics above are from yesterday when Lisen and I took a breather at some old castle ruins here in Lyckeby. As you can see, Lisen truly enjoyed herself. :-)
And these pics are from the forests of Rödeby earlier today. A visit Lisen and Diva also enjoyed every minute of, as did I. :-)
