Ute's ShadowBlog

winter chills
a warm jacket and mittens
she keeps on walking

© Jan 9, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

winter chills
snow covers the ground
a shovel nearby

© Jan 8, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

morning noise
once a blooming cherry tree
now scattered mulch

© Jan 7, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

In August 2025, I told my story about my first love. Instead of reproducing the text verbatim, I’ll summarize it. I want to highlight and clarify the most important points and avoid boring the reader with unnecessary details. Since I spoke the story quite freely, I only have the recording to work with. However, this written summary comes very close to the story as I told it.

In my first story, I said that my first love is the life I live now, and that it wasn’t always this way. I was a shy child, always sat in the back row, and didn’t like being photographed. I was very quiet, quite anxious, and thought people weren’t interested in my opinion. I was simply a nobody. That’s why I kept silent. I lived like that for over 40 years until, in my mid-forties, I discovered something. This discovery changed my life because I found a deeper meaning, a profound purpose in life. From then on, everything changed. I decided I no longer wanted to work for corrupt management. Although I haven’t had a permanent job since 2001, I’ve always worked, just not for a company. I started writing, self-published a book, created websites, wrote poetry, created artwork, and combined it with my poetry. After a while, I also started taking photographs and combined those with my poems as well. What I want to say here is that my first love was finding a deeper meaning, my purpose in life. And that actually saved my life, because when I was very down and unemployed, I discovered a deeper meaning in my life, and I still live by it.

© Jan 6, 2026 Ute Sonja Medley

morning noise
another tree breathless
a chainsaw roars

© Jan 6, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

winter morning
streets are covered in snow
everything slows down

© Jan 5, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

Last year, a new friend introduced me to a group where participants shared short stories from their personal lives. The group leader would suggest a topic, and the stories revolved around that theme. The stories were all very interesting, some inspiring and others insightful. The participants shared a lot about their lives, and some of the stories even resonated with my own experiences. I really enjoyed attending this meeting once a month. It was a welcome change of pace in my daily routine.

A few weeks ago, I saw that the group leader had written a summary of the meeting and posted it in the Facebook group. Since I felt the summary didn’t accurately reflect my story, I asked him to correct it. However, he refused. Instead, he suggested simply omitting my story altogether. Today, I saw that he had completely revised the summary, and my story was omitted.

Since the group leader mentioned that some participants had a different impression of the story that was told, I decided to publish these little everyday stories here on this blog as well. Some people sometimes don’t hear correctly what is actually said—a kind of selective hearing—or they forget what was said. The leader himself has recordings of the stories, and perhaps other participants in the group do too, but certainly not everyone, and the written word is a good way to ensure accuracy. Therefore, I will continue to publish poems and articles here on my blog, but also stories from my childhood, youth, adulthood, and current life.

so yesterday—
knowing and doing
AI doesn’t care

© Jan 2, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

new data centers
water scarcity abound
AI doesn’t care

© Jan 1, 2026 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)

tables have turned
no one to blame for it
AI doesn’t care

© Dec 31, 2025 MUSE (Ute Sonja Elisabeth Medley)