Author: Peter Klopp

Natural Splendour of the Arrow Lake

/ Peter Klopp / 59 Comments

Wednesday’s Photos

Fungi, Seeds and Berries in Winter

Last week our focus was on the amazing shapes and forms that Mother Nature can produce in the winter. Today we are having a look at the inherent beauty of seemingly dead plants, such as fungi, seeds and berries. Again I present five images to you. I would like to find out which ones my readers like best. Although always welcome and appreciated, no comments are necessary. I numbered the photos, so it would be easy to give a quick personal assessment. Just use three numbers in the order of your preference. Have fun! Enjoy!

 

Fungus Covered Branches

1) Fungus Covered Branches

Berries for the Picking in the Dead of Winter

2) Berries Ready for the Picking in Winter

Cattails over a Frozen Pond

3) Cattails above a Frozen Pond

Delicate Ground Fungus

4) Thriving Ground Fungus

Fruitful Branches over the Arrow Lake

5) Seed Pods over the Arrow Lake

You can also view my photo stream at flickr.com. Photos are taken mostly from the Arrow Lakes area. Simply search for Peter Klopp under people.

Last week’s evaluation produced a rather peculiar result. All photos were equally liked judged by the dozen or so entries, with the exception of #1, which did not seem particularly to please any of my followers. Perhaps Africa surrounded by ice was not a very appealing idea. FB users were notably absent from last week’s contest, because WordPress failed to alert my FaceBook followers.

 

Chapter 34 of the Peter and Gertrud Klopp Story – Part I

/ Peter Klopp / 40 Comments

Storm Clouds on the Horizon

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Key Player #1 in Chapter 34: Gertrud (Biene) Panknin 1965

As the drama unfolds I will introduce for each part of this chapter one person, who played a major role in our desperate struggle for being reunited in Canada.

We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle with against the things our significant others want to see in us.  Even after we outgrow some of the others – our parents, for instance – and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues within us as long as we live. Charles Taylor

The Letter to Biene’s Parents

To merely summarize the troubles we experienced, the opinions we voiced, the arguments we had and the decisions we made, the agonies and struggles of the heart would have distorted the true picture we had created through our correspondence between October 1965 and March 1966. On the one hand an objective approach, if it were possible at all, would never have succeeded in describing the passionate appeals we fervently made to one another in the face of dire adversities. On the other hand a purely emotional account would most certainly have embodied on my part a lot of bias and subjectivity. So for the next two chapters I mostly let the letters speak for themselves. They include more and more often our first attempts to correspond with each other in English. Here and there I corrected a few grammatical errors and edited out some awkward expressions without changing the intended meaning.  The letters in a sense are also a fine record of our progress in the use of the English language. As to those still written in German it is my hope that not too much of their emotional impact has been lost in translation.

September 25th Didsbury

My dear Peter,

…From my mother I had an immediate reply to my letter, which was going to prepare her for the letter from you. With her words my mother has taken a big burden off my heart; for she writes that she is glad that things are working out for us and that she would help us in as much as she could. She congratulates you to your success at your entrance exam and is confident that we somehow will make it together. Strangely, I felt my heart ache, even though I was happy all the same. Please, dear Peter, write to my parents soon; for now they have been prepared. How I wished I were already with you! Then I would know that everything was true and not just a dream.

Be lovingly kissed, Your Biene

October 15th Calgary

My dear Love,

There are a lot of important things I have to tell you. But first of all I have to apologize that my letter is so late. It is quite possible this will happen again and again for the next couple of months, because the academic work is overwhelming. Only with a time schedule from dawn to dusk I am likely to pass the final examination in the spring, Therefore, dear Gertrud (I guess it sounds better in English to say your real name), remember that I am working hard, that I am devoting more love to you by spending every minute available to me for studying.

About a fortnight ago, I wrote a long letter to your parents. I am still waiting for an answer. I don’t know what they will think of me, and in which way they will react. I only hope positively. I explained the situation and spoke of you as Biene without recognizing that, because this name had become so familiar to me, I had forgotten at this moment that a little more formality would be required. I hope they will not mind it. Canada was shown not in terms of a paradise for their daughter, but as the place to start a completely new life with all the uncertainties of the future, which I cannot anticipate now. They have seen the financial problem as well as the problem of my professional career. Now it is up to them to make their decisions, I hope, in favour of both of us…

With a thousand warm kisses, Your Peter

The letter I wrote to Biene’s parents does no longer exist. As the events unfolded it became very clear that I had made a grave mistake by describing honestly and realistically all the challenges we would be facing in a letter that was supposed to make them agree to let their daughter go to Canada and marry me.

Natural Splendour of the Arrow Lakes

/ Peter Klopp / 40 Comments

Wednesday’s Photos

Nature’s Amazing Art Work

Last week we looked at some wintry photos revealing the beauty of our area in the West Kootenays of British Columbia, Canada. Today our focus will be on the amazing shapes and forms that Mother Nature can produce in the winter. Again I present five images to you. I would like to find out which ones my readers like best. Although always welcome and appreciated, no comments are necessary. I numbered the photos, so it would be easy to give a quick personal assessment. Just use three numbers in the order of your preference. Have fun! Enjoy!

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1) Africa Shaped by Ice

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2) Undulations in Snow

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3) The Three Frosty Graces

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4) Tree Stump with a Table of Ice

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5) Mystery Shapes

You can also view my photo stream at flickr.com. Photos are taken mostly from the Arrow Lakes area. Simply search for Peter Klopp under people.

The Most Liked Photo in Last Week’s Post

There were fifteen people of my followers at WordPress and FaceBook, who sent in their evaluation of last week’s photos. Most stated that they found all pictures equally beautiful, but if pressed they would choose …. It turned out that picture #4 (Fauquier Twilight Hour) had a slight edge over the other four. Here is the winning photo:

Fauquier Twilight

Halleluja by Leonard Cohen

/ Peter Klopp / 22 Comments

An Amazing New Year’s Greeting

For New Year our friend in Germany sent us a couple of videos of his family celebrating Christmas, enjoying an impressive fireworks display on New year’s Eve and of his wife Edda playing the Halleluja by Leonard Cohen. Edda is the granddaughter of my Uncle Bruno. If you look at the Kegler family tree, you will find her on Chart IIc. Never have my wife Biene and I received a more touching and more precious New Year’s greeting than this video. A big thank you goes out to Dieter, Edda’s husband, who made this beautiful recording! It is my hope that you like it as much as we do.

Fibonacci Sequence in Nature and Plants.

/ Peter Klopp / 11 Comments

I was so fascinated by the pictorial representation of mathematical sequences and patterns embedded in plants, flowers, trees and even in the spiral shapes of our galaxies that I felt compelled to reblog ‘plantsandbeyond’s’ post. It is my hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

PlantsandBeyond's avatarPlants and Beyond

sunflower

The Fibonacci sequence appears in the smallest, to the largest objects in nature. It is a way for information to flow in a very efficient manner.

flower1

The actual Fibonacci sequence is this series of numbers: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34. Simply put, the next number in the sequence is formed by adding up the previous 2 numbers. (0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, and so on.)

The Fibonacci sequence is named after Leonardo of Pisa, who was known as Fibonacci. Though Fibonacci first introduced the sequence to the western world in 1202, it had been noted by Indian mathematicians as early as the sixth century.

The Fibonacci defines how the density of branches increases up a tree trunk, the arrangement of leaves on a stem, and how a pine cone’s scales are arranged. Yet you will…

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Chapter 33 of the Peter and Gertrud KLopp Story – Part VI

/ Peter Klopp / 32 Comments

Empathy for Peter

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Brand New University of Calgary in the Mid 60’s

In Educational Foundations we studied the great philosophers of education from Socrates to Piaget. For this course also the university had set up tutorial classes to facilitate the exchange of ideas in small discussion groups. I spite of my language difficulties I felt I had a noticeable advantage. I was about five years older and therefore more mature in many aspects of learning. I also brought a wealth of life experiences, which enabled me to enrich the class with new and fresh ideas. To the amazement of my much younger fellow students I was not afraid to criticize the great thinkers of the past. There was venerable Rousseau for example, who advocated locking up disobedient children in a dark room instead of using corporal punishment. Remembering all too well my own ordeals being locked up as a young child in the dingy storage room of Mr. Stoll’s carpentry shop, I declared that in my opinion locking up a child was one of the cruelest forms of punishment and that ultimately spanking justly applied without causing physical harm was to be preferred.

Some other time we were discussing the importance of the family in early childhood development. Having a much broader concept of education in mind, I emphasized with as much conviction as I still have today, “The family is the smallest unit in a society. As healthy cells make a healthy body, so family units that are intact and provide a caring environment for the children are the building blocks for a strong society. Take away the health of the family and the state will sooner or later suffer and begin to disintegrate.” I am sure that I expressed these thoughts quite differently, but the idea came across with electrifying results. The students were most likely wondering, where this immigrant student had all his ideas from. Little did they know that I had studied Mommsen’s ‘History of Rome’ and that the ideas about the importance of the family were as old as the Roman Republic!

One day our tutorial instructor felt the need to divide us into groups of four or five students each. To develop a feeling for empathy, a term that can be easily defined in clinical terms but is otherwise quite an elusive concept, we needed someone in our group, who would be willing to take on the role of a client and come up with a story, to which the others as would-be councillor would react with supportive questions and remarks. A lot of time was being wasted, because nobody wanted to be saddled with the difficult role of the client. After a long pause, I said, “OK, I’ll do it. Just give me a little bit of time to think.”

Then I began without referring to any specific time or place to tell the story of my father, how close we had become before he had left home, how he gave me a guiding hand with my schoolwork, how much I was shaken up by my parents’ divorce, how I had to wait for five long years before I could see him again, how I spent many happy hours at his new home, then how suddenly and unexpectedly I had lost my father all over again and this time forever, when he died of a massive heart attack. By the time I had spoken the last sentence, it was so quiet that you could hear a pin drop in the tutorial room. All other groups had stopped their exercise to listen in to the extraordinary story that was grabbing everybody’s attention. Then the students were getting noisy with shouts of praise and admiration. After the tutor regained quiet and order, he said to me, “It seems your creative story caused quite an outpour of empathy. How did you think it all up so quickly?”

In a strange mix of pride and self-pity, I replied, “I’d wish it had been just a story.” With these words I quickly left the room. In my heart I was thankful to tutor and students for respecting my privacy and not asking any more questions in the sessions that followed.