Nienna

So much going on right now. Things are starting to look pretty alarming here in Europe - we still don't have a lockdown here in my area, though other German regions have already implemented things much like them. My husband actually was paid in toilet paper today - yes, half in jest, but only half. We were certainly grateful for it! 

My family is still fine, but I'm a little worried about my parents. My mother lives in Spain for most of the year, and she was in Spain when the lockdown came. My father is in northern Germany. Travelling is impossible, and I can only pray that nothing happens to either of them - they're both doing okay and are halfway cheerful (dad being his stubborn old self), but it's disconcerting to know that, if anything happened to them, I couldn't travel.

The news are full of people doing uplifting things and being wonderful to one another. Not in my village. I never felt that the people living here - a lot of older folks - were particularly polite, but now, they feel downright hostile. Even "Good Morning" is going out of fashion. I went running this morning - for the first time in years - and that, finally, did lift my spirits enough to give me some inspiration to draw. Nienna felt fitting. 

I never "got" Nienna when I was younger. (Younger including up to the age of forty-two.) It took 2018 for me to understand the power of compassion and wisdom through grief and suffering. When I was younger, I understood sadness to be something absolute, a condition you either had or didn't. I didn't, and thought I was on the "right side" of things because of it, as if sadness, if it happened, was something eternal, unmoving and unchanging. It's only now that I can appreciate the incredible transformative power that Nienna holds. 

My daughter once again modelled for her. It's wonderful and hilarious that I ask her to model a pose, and she immediately puts on her most faraway expression of  Elven longing while I'm still fiddling with the camera!