Karinaland River

  The Shards of my Papa’s Story The elements of my Papa’s initiatory story as a teenager can easily be detected in our fast-changing world in America. These days, I hear myself spontaneously sharing with friends and strangers an abbreviated version. In the past I did this very rarely. Even in our family, Papa’s story had been a taboo. My father evoked the traumatic events only two or three times. Listening, it would pain me to witness the toll the remembering took on him.   So why share now?  First, to honor my father as a man of peace, justice, and integrity. Second, to make clear to others, that I know in my own blood and nerve strings what these coming scary times might bring us. Seeing things early, before they are obvious, visible, palpable. Third, as a warning to those around me to take things seriously. As shocking as it might be. Good luck might keep many of us unchallenged, unscathed. We might stay under the radar, quiet. Perhaps serendipity will save our life. O...

Papa Trilogy –  Part 3   What keeps us in Life? When I am 14, my father speaks the following words to me – I will never forget, still remember the exact spot in our living room, the light of the sunny afternoon pouring in: “If it were not for you kids, I would not be alive.“ It is just the two of us. A thunder clap shakes me awake, I start to tremble, and finally understand to my relief the huge weight I have been experiencing since early childhood, the huge love.      Born in München in 1953, into poverty, I am the first child; my parents unwedded. Still “shell-shocked” from war and displacement. Becoming a father, wakes Papa up over the next few years, slowly he starts to emerge out of a deep suicidal depression. My brother, arriving 11 months after me, is given to the grandparents in East Germany – across the military border. They have a fruit & vegetable garden, chickens, and therefore food. Three years later my parents succeed to take my well-fed brothe...

Papa Trilogy –  Part 2   Three Miracles, an Initiation     Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was and was not a young ordinary soldier, far away from home at the frontlines of war against the enemy in the vast lands of Russia. The 17-year-old boy is confused, this is not how war has been described to him, as glorious and heroic…. He is asked to shoot and kill other young men lying like him in muddy cold trenches. After some time of seeing much blood and senseless death of those across the enemy line and of his own comrades, he writes letters home to his parents. How it all is a lie, how they should not believe a word what their country’s leader is telling them. It’s all a lie! Eventually, his letters are intercepted and he is taken to a military prison in occupied Poland. Away from the front, still far from home. But saved from killing. Here he is awaiting execution with other traitors and deserters. The mock trial and execution are set to happen next day, but ...

Papa Trilogy –  Part 1     Die Stunde Null        Liberation from the Nazis – commemorated every year on May 8  or May 9, it  was also Liberation Day for Germans. They, too, needed to be liberated from violence and persecution. They, too, had suffered, but of course rightfully we could not speak about that since the Germans had been the perpetrators – not only of World War II – but of the worst unspeakable crimes of humanity, the Holocaust.    On May 8, 1945, my father walked out naked from a military hospital in southern Germany, draped only in a blanket, and he surrendered to the Americans approaching. They let the skinny still wounded teenager go. Nobody knew how life could go on. Rubble everywhere. Homeless, hungrily scavenging for scraps of food, begging at farmer’s houses for just one egg, this was my father’s fate for the next several years. Hour Zero had arrived. Die Stunde Null.     In Part 2 of this Trilogy, I wi...

Today July 24 celebrating my Father’s Birthday   Papa would be turning 97        Mama writes: “This year 1985 your Papa turned 60 years old,    Dream and Time, he looks good, right?”     My two siblings, Matthias and Dinah, and I had the immense luck of having a very resourceful, inventive, and unconventional father. The perfect partner to my unique mother. He was a beloved problem solver at his job, later on a revered boss. A very gentle man, beautiful and naturally open, charming. After Papa retired at 65, he took to making ceramics. Earlier he had built a bigger ceramic oven for my mother. Now both of them did ceramics. He had two more years before his death from lymph cancer. In those years he created among other things, square dinner plates in several sizes and square cups. All with that light blue glaze that I cherish. His curiosity and creativity, were active till his last day...   I celebrate his spirit, drink from the cup, eat f...

All Things have a Soul – Papa’s Hobel     This old hand tool – Papa’s plane – is a memento of my father, one of the very few things I took with me over the ocean after his death at age 67. It sits on the low bench of my big living room window. Very alive, ready to create, beautify, be useful. Lastingly solid and at the same time soft – its sculptural quality emanates my father’s soul.      I was 40 years old, pierced by his early leaving, my grief was immeasurable back then. The continent of my upbringing and that of my life in America so far apart. Now I am two years past his life span. It all feels like one huge gift. Life, his legacy, my heritage, the “tools” I was gifted. To invoke wood grain, I pulled out  René  Magritte’s oil painting  D é couverte  from 1928 –  meaning  discovery  – here the unseen beneath the surface is exposed…     American planes are made of metal, in old Germany these tools were made of woo...

  As with all initiations, Death and Life are the great teachers. Death is ready to strike, and if we are full of awareness, then the mystery of life will open up to us. In my case a deep inner warm flame moved into my consciousness at around age six. Post war Germany. It happened on one of our rare Sunday afternoon outings. The whole family in the old Opel , me sitting in the back with my siblings – right behind my father at the steering wheel – as always making sure I was taking the opportunity to learn how to drive, emulating his moves of shifting gears, and paying attention to the road, leaning into curves. In just one of those curves, descending down toward a small underpass, I am suddenly propelled into hyper awareness. A split second before our car is about to enter the tunnel, a massive MILITARY TANK emerges out of the dark – like in a dream. Racing towards us with enormous speed, the huge STEEL TRACK PLATES ready to crush our tiny vehicle and flatten us dead into the narr...

  The last few Wild Strawberries in the Meadow of my Childhood   I wrote the Papa Trilogy about my father’s teenage war experience before the Buffalo mass shooting, before the shooting in Southern California, before the Texas school shooting. Three hate crimes within a few days. So much tragedy, so much grief. So much discouragement, chaos, and yet we need to march on for equal human rights for all. And dream up a world with new priorities.   Spending time in the garden, its wildness and natural chaos bring perspective. In this kingdom, time slows and expands. I weed, kneel and harvest the last wild strawberries. Crouched low, at eye level with the small plants. My cheeks close to earth to glimpse the hidden treasures underneath the foliage. From finger tips the berries land straight in my mouth. Sweetness. All around me, red poppies and pink, lavender & deep purple sweet peas tilting their heads smiling at me kindly. Inviting me into their realm, faces turned toward ...