Tag Archives: love for plants

Gustavus Is Daubind

GUSTAVUS IS DAUBIND

Beside many wonderful colorful moments in my life I also have experiences which belong to the light-dark version of the existence. It is normal.

This a story from my personal experience living right here and right now, in this reality, bright, lighter, grey, darker, dark.

So, alike million of people all over the World I am also a tenant (not the subtenant).
This is a true story about my attribute „sub“, something like sub human. And as I am part of the society this is a story which mirrors the society. A story looks apparently like a very surfaced story but unfortunately there is a huge deepness in it.

Place: Germany, one of the most technically developed countries in the World.
Time: now and here.

First just a few words about me:
I grow up in a family with lots of love.
I was brought up not to lie, not to steal („just try to steal and I will cut your fingers off”, the father, a soldier in soul and at service), to be good and do good. Ok, to seduce I taught myself by simple living and high thinking ;).
I started to work when I was 17 when I had to work to earn money for my summer holiday and my first job was to clean the windscreens at the gasoline station. It was so funny and I liked it so much. I left without parents when I was nineteen (actually I left without one parent in fact but in reality without both) and since that age I had to work if I wanted to survive. Until I was thirty I have changed over thirty different jobs, which I never understood really as jobs but as play (this blog has the name dancing Lila). After I was thirty I lost count but until that age I was working in bars, I was washing dishes, I was working with children, as a gallery custodian, as a little chef in one of the Sumer Festival in Budva in Montenegro, as a seller, as a painter, as a maid, as a designer, as a street seller, as a drawing teacher, as a book seller, as a assistant of a costume designers (in ex Yugoslavia the costume design assistants really do assist at the costume designing and not make coffees for the chefs like in Germany)… and I was also working as a cleaning woman.
I am a master of patience.
I am not here to spread hate.
I did not come here to bring any damage to anyone and anything on the world.
I am 48 today and I personally wrote the website www.yogajagat.com
I am a natural born admirer of beauty in humans.
I was brought up not to make a difference between people.
I was brought up to keep the environment and myself always clean and tidy.
And I also very much enjoy to live in a chastity, cleanness and purity.

So the places where I live, is it a tent, a place on the beach, a rented room or a flat I all keep clean. Even when I sleep in a car I keep the car tidy, well otherwise I would waste lots of time searching for the things in a messy car and so I would miss much nicer things. Someone said to me once my flat looks sterile, no, it is clean, not sterile.
To come into the flat you have to use stairs and I also keep those stairs clean and tidy. Not once I was a cartoon character from my childhood, a Gustav(us) who is daubind, so started to clean the stairs in front of my door I ended in a backyard.

But some years ago a landlord was ringing at the door:
„You are not cleaning the stairs and if you don’t clean the stairs I will have to find a cleaning woman and you will have to pay it!!!“
„I do clean the stairs. How do you know I don’t?“
„I know! My workers are putting trash in the corners!“
„Ahh, that’s you? Well, if you put trash in the corners after I clean, come and clean the trash. I am not going to do that after you.“
The woman got red, her speech was stuttered. It happened to me many times to see people in front of me stuttered and many times I just felt sorry for these people so I simply hugged them. But that time I didn’t.

I (and the soul I live with) used many of my (our) known techniques to keep the situation at the noble level: to seduce talking friendly and polite, to talk from the heart and to talk the truth, to forgive. But somehow since that speech she never referred to me again verbally.
Once indeed we met in the house when I was cleaning the stairs during renovation of the flat a floor under ours. Huge clouds of dust were coming into the stairway and in our lungs. The lungs are something like holly to me and I teach very old and powerful breathing techniques in a school I run. Our landlord has a messenger in a male issue and this person told me with big laughs on his face that my work is not worth for because the dust will come again.
„For those who have no idea about lungs and hearts it is certainly not worth of it. There is something what is called health, Herr Messanger, that’s why it is worth.“ I said.
He left with no word.

She started to write the threatening messages and letters which I (we) also did ignore thinking: „let it, a person who is rather a demon full of hate and malice than a human has a huge missing of love and tenderness. Who knows which family she grew up in.“ Keep silent, the silence will keep the harmony.
But, I am working and paying to this woman to live in (her) apartment.
As a sub human.
And the silence made my landlord not really hilarious.
And if you don’t rise your voice the change will never come.

My landlord’s way of communication is that of threat. She simply does not know other ways. Threat is the only way. Sometimes she uses three exclamation marks, sometimes six and sometimes only one. She likes to write us massages. On the floor under us an old couple was living. They didn’t like foreigners and they were very sincere to their passion. They used to blame me for every possible and impossible things and our landlord was in a good communication with that old couple. So I was thinking, maybe a landlord is acting in that manner because I am a Ausländer.
Not really.
A female lord, like all the lords of the machinery, wants to control everything and everyone. She namely has power. Power is money and I am a little tenant.
So my noble techniques of seducing had no sense any more and I had to become a member of the society of tenant’s right. In Germany this society works pretty good. The tenants actually have many rights.
Some weeks ago I begun to read about those rights, well, you can’t imagine which laws exist in Germany. So for example if one pigeon on the balcony makes poop you will not have right on rent reduction. But if you have more than eight you do.

Unbelievable what laws do exist. But, they work.

light-and-dark

Mother, father, where are you now? Human race of this kind, where are you going to?

On the picture you see are written the same words our landlord repeats already for years. With one exception this time though. I (we) now have prohibition to put any thing on the stairs in front of our door. We have been also warned that our case will be handed over to a lawyer. A prohibition we got because we were asking why our additional coast were much higher than last year… Those three dots talk not only about me but of thousands of people all over Germany right now.

 

Now, the thing is that I have many plants which in summer for many past years live on the balcony (the balcony is reserved only for the plants not for chairs and us) and in winter: at the stairs in front of the flat door.

You want to come to visit me in a small flat with more than 100 plants in it? :). You are more than welcome.

Heart burning alive.

But, a lord has the right by the law. The law says that the stairs have to be kept free for emergency exit.
The only thing is that the place where our plants live in winter several years already and which can be used by the only one tenant who lives on the next floor, leads into the cupboard.

Now, I am not the only member of the society for tenant’s rights. There are more than 50,000 tenants in only one society in the city which needs protection from their landlords.
In my widest imagination I couldn’t imagine what the lords are able to do to their little slaves.

Searching for a flat right now in Cologne looks like this:
in one day there will be more than 70 requests to visit a flat. The flats are in the most cases rented by the agencies. In Germany you are a piece of paper so if you are lucky to be called to visit the flat, you will have to bring a paper with the main informations about your nationality, your salary in detail and so on. If you like the flat, you will send the further request with more informations about you to the agency. Often there will be very degrading questions in the request. You don’t need to answer the questions but if you don’t the next will do and you are out of the game. The agency will then proceed the papers to the landlord who will than look over the papers and choose three favorite papers. If you are lucky to be between three favorite papers, you will be called for interview. This will be the first time for you and the landlord to see each other.
After six months I (we) have been selected for interview. I even don’t know what the name of the landlord is but he was asking me many questions, many extremely humiliating questions. At least he was expecting me to answer those. This is of course my personal experience it’s not generally. At least I want to believe it is not.

Right now searching for a flat in all bigger cities in Germany is a real brutality. It is built at every little empty space and the prices of new flats, for rent or to buy, are unbelievable for your own eyes, at least for us common tenants.
It is not true anymore that pets are welcome in German flats, in almost all announcement you will read that pets are not welcome.
The fight for a flat became a huge brutal competition. And like in every brutality the most human values will sooner or later be replaced with hate, malice, intolerance, extreme selfishness.
Competition on one side.
Power on another.

The only thing what we can do is not to sell our soul and become demons ourselves full of hate and malice.
Be strong and faithful to your nicest human values and to colors of your soul.
Only nice values count.
Now and then.
Here and now, needed more than ever.
Never give up of your wonderful human values.

Yours.