The brutal and barbaric attacks on Israel should never have happend and should not be happening. Neither should the brutal bombing of Gaza and its civilians.

The continued attacks on Israel by Hamas and the war on Gaza are deeply tragic and now is not the time for cries that inflame. All of us must keep an eye on and work towards peace. That time will come, even if for some, it is now difficult to imagine.

I hope a truth and reconciliation commission, as existed in South Afrika at the ending of apartheid, will be a part of the Israel-Palestine future peace process. Both sides are deeply traumatized.​ Some kind of shared trauma process will be needed for reconciliation.

​The poem below is written for when the time for peace has arrived again.  Keep your heart focused on bringing about peace, de-escalate, reach out. Feel for the other side, or there will be little hope of peace. In that spirit, and in the spirit of peace, here then the poem: Together
​
Aquarelle: Touching

TOGETHER
​​

Grieving for Israel

Grieving for Gaza

Weeping for my baby

Weeping for your baby

Grieving for my mother, sister, wife and daughter

Grieving for you father, brother, husband and son

Grieving for my city

Grieving for your city

My tears are your tears

Your tears are my tears

My blood is your blood
​
Your blood is my blood

My peace is your peace

Your peace is my peace

My freedom is your freedom

Your freedom is my freedom

Your forgiveness is my solace

My forgiveness is your solace

Your dignity is my dignity

My dignity is your dignity

I am not without you

You are not without me

Together we heal

Together we are

Together we shine



​


​Gabrielle von Bernstorff-Nahat





​

 
My World Lullaby
 
Gabrielle von Bernstorff-Nahat
Copyright All Rights Reserved by Gabrielle von Bernstorff
 
This poem is dedicated to the memory of
Paolo Paolino
He was a young indigenous defender of the Amazon Forest, who was unfortunately murdered by illegal forest loggers.
His memory and embodied heroic actions live on!
May all defenders for the wellbeing of this beautiful planet and world be safe.
 
 
Preamble
 
The world is in great danger, she is in tragic peril. The climate crisis is becoming more intense with each day and season, species are dying and imperialism and aggressive wars trouble countries and millions of everyday people, threatening their lives.
All the more reason to become active, to save the planet, the climate, humanity and flora and fauna. For this task we need to keep our spirits high and our actions on the mark and well
tempered.
This lullaby intends to soothe and strengthen your spirit. We must become like children again and simply love and live our love for this beautiful world, planet blue and you in order to act well.
Find a quiet place, some solitude and meditate on the beauty of where we are. Don’t forget the beauty and generous nature of the world in the middle of all its troubles. Strengthen your heart, body, soul and mind in order to be able to simply stand in awe, in love with this precious and fragile world.
This poem does not tell you what to do, but I hope it will strengthen your love for this beautiful planet and all its myriad of aspects and facets.
Become like a child again and reflect and contemplate the beauty and generosity of the world and then go out and make this world a brighter and better place within your sphere of influence, may it be large or small, the two belong together.
We sing lullabies to our children so that they may sleep and dream well. Please dream and act well!
 
 
My World Lullaby
 
This is my lullaby to the world
From me to you
My world song
She whispers to me
She whispers to you
She is fair, fragile, strong and beautiful
She is giving
So don’t take too much
Don’t take without returning
Stand by her and love her dearly
For 
Her skies reach far and wide
From the sun to the moon
To the milky way stretching over the five continents
And Africa is fair and good
And Europe is fair and good
And Asia is fair and good
And Australia is fair and good
And the Americas are fair and good
And all their people are fair and good
All people are born free, fair and good
 
And Italians are fair and good
And Kenyans are fair and good
And Egyptians are fair and good
And Ukranians are fair and good
And Indians are fair and good
And Iranians with their hair free are fair and good
And Palestinians are fair and good
And Australians are fair and good
And Koreans are fair and good
And Israelis are fair and good
And Kurds are fair and good
And peace-loving Russians are fair and good
And Americans are fair and good
And South Africans are fair and good
And Afghans with their women free and respected are fair and good
And Vietnamese are fair and good
And Taiwanese are fair and good
And Peruvians are fair and good
And Rhoyngas are fair and good
All countries are fine and good
And all their people are fair and good
All people are born free, fair and good
 
We are all fragile and warm
All our blood is the same red
All our flesh is made of this world
The same sun shines on all of us
We all have a soul
We partake in Soul together
We all love freedom
We come out of freedom and return to freedom
Freedom is our foundation
The universe’s promise to us
We shall remain free
Free to love
Free to be with family loved ones and friends
Free to learn
Free to create
Free to shine
 
And the child is fair and good
And mothers are fair and good
And fathers are fair and good
And brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins and nieces are all fair and good
And friends are fair and good
And foes are fair and good
All people are born fair and good
Our flesh is made of the same world
All our blood is the same red
We are all made of the same water
Whom does water belong to anyway?
Don’t walk away
Rest with mankind, womankind and people
He, she, s-he, it they, them, us
We all are fine and fair and good
We are 10’000 years old and older
Endless
We are immortal souls
We have always been here and there and everywhere
You’ve been a wanderer
And a king and a queen
And a merchant
And an artist
And a beggar
And a doctor
And a laborer
Who knows what this life is good for?
So be kind and understanding to every sentient being
 
Hold each other
By your touch I am
By my touch you are
I am not without you
And you are not without me
United in our mutual differences
Loving in our different greatness
For we are all fine and fair and good
We are all born out of love
And we return to love
 
Planet blue is our home
Take tender care
And the skies are fair and good
And the clouds are fair and good
And the rains are fair and good
And snow is fair and good
And the seasons are fair and good
And spring is fair in good
And summer is fair and good
And fall is fair and good
And winter is fair and good
 
And the mountains are fine and great
And the valleys are fine and great
And the high seas are fine
And the low seas are fine
And dolphins and whales sing their songs
They are fair and fine
And the birds sing their songs
And they are fair and fine
We down here below soar with them
Without birds no sky
Without whales and dolphins no water
And the lion is fine and fair
And so is the gazelle
And so is every insect
Without them there would be no earth
We all inhabit this great space between sky and earth
Take tender care
We breathe with the trees
We breathe with the roses
We breathe with the amazon
And trees are fine and fair
All trees are fine and fair
And roses are fine and fair
All flowers are fine and fair
And the amazon is fine and fair
All forests are fine and fair
And the Nile is fine and fair
All rivers are fine and fair
And the Himalaya is fine and fair
All mountains are fine and fair
 
We do not walk alone
The earth and the skies are the shoulders we stand on
The new born babe lives between heaven and earth
And so does its mother
And so does its father
And so does its sister
And so does its brother
And so do their offspring and their offspring
Their thoughts reach far and wide
So do their feelings and their dreams
 
The world is my song
My world lullaby
She whispers to me
And its monuments are fair and fine
And so is the skyscraper, the house and the straw hut
And its schools are fine
And its hospitals are fine
And its civic buildings are fine
And its cities are good and fair and fine
And Kiew is fine
And Khartoum will be fine again
And Bethlehem is fine
And Lausanne is fine
And Hanoi is fine
And Timbuktu is fine
And Perth is fine
And Johannesburg is fine
And Mexico City is fine
And Paris is fine
And Tokyo is fine
And Oslo is fine
And Christ Church is fine
And Istanbul is fine
And Lasa is fine
All cities are splendid and deserve brightness
And the piazza is fair and fine
And the Mainstreet is fair and fine
And the town market is fair and fine
And the bazaar is fair and fine
This is where people meet and trade and where children play
And that is fair and fine
 
Let the children play
Take care of all the children
Nourish the children and their parents
House children and their parents
Love all children and parents
Let the parents work and care for their children
And exchanging is fine
And trading is fine
And moving is fine
And climbing is fine
And thinking is fine
And weeping is fine
And dreaming is fine
And building is fine
 And inventing is fine
What human beings do is fine and good
Human beings are fine and good
All people are born free, fine and good
And so is the beggar
And the one-legged woman
And the demonstrator
And the businesswoman
And the nurse
And the fireman
And the teacher
And the mentally ill
And the president
And the builder
And the doctor
And the artist
And the astronaut
All are fine and good and fair
 
All of us let the children play
Let all children learn
Give children love
Let all children live
Let all men, women, men and persons live
Love the homosexual
The lesbian
The transgender
The no-gender
Love all women, men, persons and children
Let all women, men and persons live
Give them water, food, shelter an occupation
Give them participatory politics
Give them a home, a village, a town and a city, give them the country
Give them schools, hospitals and libraries
Give them fire-stations
Give them markets, shops, cafés, theatres and music
Give them parks, pools and playgrounds
Give them peace and happiness
 
And the laborer does not ask much
And the cleaning woman does not ask much
And the farmer does not ask much
And the civil servant does not ask much
And the gardener does not ask much
Listen to the people
Child world
Woman world
Man world
Person world
God’s garden is immeasurable
 
And peace is fine
And marriage is fine
And single is fine
And birth is fine
And dying returns us to the cycle of life and is fine
And kissing is fine
And studying is fine
And making love is fine
And working is fine when it is fair
And playing is fine
 
We’ve been living like there is no tomorrow
But there will be
So take tender care of planet blue and you and them and us
This is my world song
She whispers to me, to you, to us
My world lullaby
My song to the world
Hear me fellow traveler
This is your voice
Hear me my friend
This is your voice
Hear me my lover
This is your voice
Hear me my companion
This is your voice
Hear me my foe
This is your voice too
You see me
I see you
We see each other
I love you
You love me
We love each other
We love the world
And she is fragile fair and good
The world is in your care
With its skies, sun, moon, stars and planets
With its seasons and the elements
With its soil, mountains and rivers, streams and clouds
With is trees, its flora and fauna
With its birds, tigers, butterflies, bees and frogs
With its fish, crows, elephants and cows
With its generations, children, women, men and people
With its houses, huts and towers
With its villages towns and cities
With its books, poetry, music and songs
With its crafts, pottery and gold
With its prayers, fragility and strength
With its love, intelligence and knowing
With its silence, sounds, sights and touches
Won’t you be by her side
Her heart is beating
Listen to her
Feel her
Know her
Let her rock you to your soul
Make her a brighter place again
Make her a better place
Return her to her perfect self
Fall into her loving arms
Give her your devotion
Give back
Give her a future
Love her
Love her beauty
Go home to her
Smile at her
Plant the seeds of tomorrows bloom
Planet blue and you
And all that inhabit her
Listen to all cohabitants
Birds and bees
Elephants and mice
Himalayas and Mount Everests
Listen to every hill, grass and tree
Listen to its monuments, churches, temples and mosques
Listen to her history and herstories and hear her poetry
And then
Sing your world lullaby
And live your world song.


​February - September 2023
 

Touching - Aquarelles March 2022
​

Painting is a deeply human activity and hence a deeply human ‘product’. In that sense it is never abstract. Color and the figure are somehow present in my paintings, in the sense that boundaries are set for dissolution. The ‘object’ is touched by the world. My body is made of the flesh of this world, says Merleau-Ponty. In that sense we partake in the world, may this be the horizon, the touch, boundaries, memory, emotion and feeling.
TOUCHING is a mediation on closeness, on the embrace on the dissolution of the separation between one and other. It is empathy and love. Especially after the 2 1/2 years of social distancing due to the pandemic, what I seem to miss most is touch. May this be the touch of the gaze, seeing the smile or other facial expressions of my loved ones, friends and, so called strangers, but above all it is the touch of the hand, the embrace, the physical closeness which I have missed most. What does this distance do to us? The loss of physicality and corporeality? It is another retreat into isolation following the imprisonment behind our screens, may this be the PC or handys or tablets. Another flattening out of social relations.
These aquarelles then celebrate closeness, the touch, the merging of one with the other. I am not without you says Ubuntu. I am because I merge with you, with my surround with the world. I partake of you and you partake of me and we partake in this world. What beauty what healing after so many months of isolation.
Touching is love, empathy and partaking in someone or something larger than myself. I am not without you. These aquarelles celebrate union. May this be the touch of your hand, the breath of my love on my skin, the emotion or thought I feel.  I really feel for this especially because of the pandemic. Join in the celebration and enjoy touching again, with your hands, your mind your heart. It is a celebration of being alive.

Gabrielle von Bernstorff-Nahat

Traditional philosophy has exhausted the power to renew language because it wants to stay alone in defining the life of the mind. Poetry is the movement away from the Cartesian " I think therefore I am" to " I am dream", "I am language", "I am poetry" and "I am imagination". The systematization of knowledge runs the risk of becoming a dictatorship of the mind. It is in danger of being reductive. A method is both necessary and dangerous. As a way of approaching things, of initiating a discourse, it must be guided by principles, but these principles have a tendency to become frozen, into a system divorced from its formation, thereby paralyzing discovery. (Bachelard)
 
Poetry works against a systematization of knowledge. Poetry is reason beyond reason. Where philosophy gives room to desperation, poetry takes over thought. Poetry is the place of material imagination. "Matter is dreamed not perceived." (Bachelard) Making is relational and is closer to art than aesthetic principles. Making in the realm of the imagination works against a totalizing method, it is a dispersed philosophy, a poly-philosophy of poly-joints and multiple connections. Bachelard speaks of the "penseur-charnière" and of a "rupture epistemologique."
 
"Poetry is made of words", (Mallarmé), just as architecture is made of light and dark, of materials, space, rhythm and so on. Modern poetry begins when space enters the time of poetry. Mallarmé is the explosion of space into poetry. It is space which allows the psyche to unfold in a free manner. In modern poetry there is another kind of interiority. The psyche opens up into space in the novels of Virginia Woolf and André Breton. "Communicating Vessels" explores the alchemical weave between waking and dream reality. In "To the Lighthouse", "....the blue went out of the sea and it rolled in waves of pure lemon which curved and swelled and broke upon the beach and the ecstasy burst in her eyes and waves of pure delight raced over the floor of her mind and she felt, it is enough! It is enough!" The space "outside" enters the mind.
 
Novalis the poet of shadows could be seen as a precursor to Freud. With both the shadow becomes the place of ontic difference, a place of articulation and experience. The shadow here has become modern because it has moved beyond representation, it acquires a life of its own, it begins to move freely, without transcendental reserve. Poetry, like architecture, lives from its weave, from its suggestive power and from its radiant beauty. Like a poem, architecture remains free. " We shall never enclose its fate in our own." (Bachelard)
 
The architectural image is more than a symbol, representation or mere sign. "The psyche is animated by a veritable hunger for images,...it seeks the positive character of the image." (Bachelard) Material Imagination moves in a weave between action, dynamic and resistance in the world of the mind, soul, psyche and in cultural space. Active imagination is not a reflex; it needs a dialectical dynamic, moving between love, anger, hardness, softness and so on. The poet absorbs the lesson of the stream just as architecture makes the city more like the city, the water more than water and the sky more than the sky.
 
Gabrielle von Bernstorff-Nahat

​Blue is color. Blues are conditions, Saphire-Blue in the Zohar holds everything together. Blue is deep space, heart-talk and infinite, always returning without end. Blues color everything, they impregnate. Blues are also mental. Everything which is blue is also transparent, transcendent and deep. The sky, the clouds, water and the stary night. Blues are nocturnal. Since Romanticism Blue is the color of Reverie : Goethe, Novalis, Mallarmé, Eluard, Gaston Bachelard and Else-Lasker Schüler sing this Azur. Blue is a secret which holds its promise.
The Absence of an image in these blue paintings makes all images possible. Out of nothingness grows the sensibility and invention of the present. This is the deep space holding everything out of nothingness. In the beginning is the imagination the desire for expression. The deep space is an immersion into the depths of music, language, dance, imagination, emotions, the infiniteness. of the universe. This nothing becomes the vectors of all possibilities. Blue is a force and strength. I could recount your names for days, speak of you without mentioning your name. (Xavier Naidoo).
Blue is Chopin and Schuhmann, Beethoven’s troubled heart, Miles Davis and Frank Zappa’s Jazz of the Universe. It is the dream-walker of Australia, the love of lyrical rap. It is the tender strings vibrating of the Oud and the Indian Raga. Blue is everything 56'000 times over. It is Martin Luther King’s prayer and what Malcolm X would have become would he not have been murdered. Blue is a gentle promise. It is the love of Victor Hugo’s Jean Val Jean.
Blues are empathy, melancholy, tears, love the ocean. Blues are warmth and forgiveness. Blue is peace and the color of the age of Aquarias. Blues are also above the senses and purity. Blues are love.  Blue is also all colors because it is close to black. Blue is also red because it comes from the earth and sky and is the color of the heart, of love. Mary’s clothes in Titian, Raphael and Botticelli’s paintings are blue because she carries the sky within her. It is an immersion in God’s garment in an everyday and natural form. Blue is also the blue delphinium of the African highlands or the Iris. Blue promises the golden age. It is the old new dream of paradise. The blue nudes of Matisse dream the age of paradise in blue.
Images in the absence of images have a material fullness, they are the sound of the heart and soul. Being and becoming, the reality of a dream lived in the everyday. Blue is a movement towards black (Gaston Bachelard) This beautiful blue, the poem and reverie of Jazz with is movements away from Abstraction into space you find in oriental arabesques, Ingres, Turner, Monet, da Vinci, Rothko, the caryatids of tenderness of Modigliani, Chagall’s dreams, Yves Klein, Robert Motherwell, Braque and more.
Blue is a cosmogony. A vitality present in the entire universe like the sun moon and stars. Blue is Lapis Lazuli the Stone of the Wise. Immateriality is also in these blue paintings. Life is an upward and downward movement and the day will arrive when the word blue suffices to materialize a blue painting. We shall continue painting anyway, the two are not mutually exclusive, because snow is blue and not white.
The blues shine like the sky, like the night, like a Symphony and places us in a world of drunken sensibility. Blue is Mary’s heavenly robe as well as Eve’s earthly nakedness with Matisse. The nakedness of Matisse’s blue figures are the paradisical condition of human beings on earth.
Blue is never ending, deepest of all colors next to black.  The eye can drown in these paintings without obstruction, moving in the infinite. Blue is fluid, sky, water, air, the blue cloudy hair head of Modigliani’s Jewess. Blue circles the great unknown, what stirs the soul and what moves her.
Blue is peace and non-violence. It is the unseen writing of everything felt, seen and heard. Blue,- is a condition of the soul.

 
The boarder envelopes what is inside and differentiates what is exterior to it.
Seen differently, the boarder is also that which creates the link between what is inside and outside.
Perhaps instead the boarder is in effect a kind of field, imagine looking through a looking glass, the frame expands and the edges become thick like with peripheral vision, the edges slightly out of focus, no longer an object; background and foreground merging.
The boarder then is perhaps the quintessential gatherer. Perhaps this is why there is so much traffic at borders. The border is a link within an expanded field. Boarders are places of pain and joy. These blues capture this duality with hope, the human spirit in its strength and beauty, shining through

 
Memory has a materiality, a physicality: it is corporeal.
« Bodies have all the explanatory power of the mind . » We don’t have bodies the same way we have other objects, because being a body; our corporeality, is something we occupy, something we must live.
Corporeality goes beyond a materialist reductionism. Corporeality is like a flame, it is both substance and process. Bodies are constituted materially and immaterially at the same time.
Memory is lived experience, collective memory, desires and trajectories : a corporeal sharing and communion with the world. I must have a body in order  to see and to be seen. Sight and touch inside and outside meet with the body and through memory. Merleau-Ponty speaks oft he reversibility oft the flesh. Body and memory are intimately connected both are permanent and always changing their expressive potential and what they can do. Like language memory is a ‚wild being‘, the world touching and perceiving itself. I can only see by the touching of the light“, Luce Irrigaray. Memory is a kind of sight, a corporeal vision.