Captured this scene yesterday afternoon. It looks like it’s later in the day than it is. I started my hour-long trek around the village at about 4:00 pm. The darkness seems to arrive earlier here in the Swedish hinterland. I’ve published the images over at the Vejby Baby site.

Like the rest of this strange year, 2020 is certainly going to offer up an unusual Christmas holiday. A year of a pandemic no one saw coming. I just looked up the origin of the word “pandemic”. Unsurprisingly, it’s Greek and connects the two words “pan” = “all” and “demos” = “people” or, population. A pandemic affects all (or nearly all) of the people, regardless of whether or not you contract the disease.

2021 has a lot of promises to fulfill. But I doubt we’ll see a noticeable reduction of restrictions until midyear. Maybe even later if the anti-vaccine movement succeeds in influencing reasonable people to boycott getting inoculated. I still find it fascinating how the main objective now is for everything to go back to normal. That as long as we get to continue to lead the lives we led pre-pandemic, things will be ok again.

Nobody seems to take this unique situation as an opportunity to begin redefining our relationship with Mother Earth. Which worries me. We’re like that beautiful deer caught in the headlights of a huge truck roaring down a highway at night. Paralyzed and ignorant of what happens if it doesn’t move or change direction. Booom! If you connect the dots, the virus origin, the way it spread, the people it’s impacting the most are all related symptoms of something much more serious.

I was thinking about creativity today in the shower and how fortunate I am to have discovered my ability to unlock/unleash it. To be able to write, paint, photograph and film not only allows me to alternate between different mediums, but also to never ever have nothing to do during my awake time.

Ever since my discovery in the mid 1980s, producing my own stuff has been more important to me than consuming others. I definitely need a certain amount of input and inspiration, but if I only consumed what other creative people made and never let my impressions be expressed and exposed somehow, I’d feel pretty empty.

Once in a while I lecture high school seniors here in Skåne. The main theme is always a combo of filmmaking and photography. But the underlying layer is about creativity and how important it is to me. My hope is to leave these lectures with the kids feeling a little curious about their own creative ability.

I believe everyone, especially those that say to me that they’re not the least bit creative, can be just that. And if they only allowed themselves the time to explore and discover the keys that unlock their particular abilities, the need to constantly and passively consume others creative output, would be reduced and the world would possibly be in a better place today.

The beauty with creativity is that it is 100% free. At least the process is. But you don’t actually need a fancy computer, a painters studio or a truckload of camera gear to express your feelings, thoughts or ideas. It’s actually within the smaller, tighter boundaries that some of history’s most noteworthy and inspring art is born.

The picture above is from The Josh, a fine  hotel in Bangkok.

Here’s my top 40 list of slick songs with groovy licks, smooth vocals, and laid-back beats. Artists like Michael Franks, Gino Vanelli, Richard Page, Kenny Loggins, and Lee Ritenour among many others. If you don’t dig at least some of these songs, you might want to check your wiring.

A few posts ago, I mentioned that I was going to be a guest on my creative and inspiring friend Michael G. Poe’s show, The Fatherless to Fatherhood Initiative Podcast.

Well, the ninth episode has just dropped and can be listened to by clicking here. I hope other fatherless fathers that hear my story – and Michael’s other guests’ stories – will connect and recognize some of the same experiences and emotions that I share.

Sadly, we still live in an era where toxic masculinity prevails and sets the emotional agenda for men – and women. Men are still expected to keep their feelings tucked away beneath a facade of seemingly impenetrable resilience – sheilding themselves from showing and sharing their vunerability. Hindering them to develop and evolve as fathers, as spouses. as humans.

While The Fatherless to Fatherhood Initiative Podcast focuses on fathers that were abandoned by their fathers, there are also plenty of dads that were physically present, but so emotionally distant and/or abusive, that their children still felt abandoned.

In my case, I not only had to deal with not having a father, a mentor, and a role model. my brother and I were raised in a home environment characterized by our mother’s rampant alcoholism. Which is one of these podcast’s themes: how drama feeds drama.

Being able to talk openly about some of this was cathartic and has spurred me on to continue writing about those early years and how the fallout came to shape my life as an individual and father.