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Leonoor

Marthe

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Leonoor (1959 - 2023) I was a violin teacher, I got a burnout in 1994 when I was 34 and quit my job at the music school. I went through a deep consciousness process from 1989, letting go of all certainties, 12 years of being very lonely to allow, feel and heal pain, loneliness, sadness of my life and find answers to the many questions I had. When I was 30 years old, a memory suddenly came back of a thought I had when I was 5: 'This cannot be the meaning, can it?' I realised that I had questions for a long time and did not understand why people hurt each other. It became a search for love that would lead to my mother. I missed contact in teaching and making music, but actually everywhere. By starting to give love to my mother, my whole life started to change. I wanted to share my desire to be engaged with meaning and cooperation with more people. That' s why I started my practice for 'Haptonomy and Music' in 2003 to help people talk about themselves and interact in small groups. We got together in my living room with the 10 people I had been counselling for three years. We talked, ate and made music together. Finally, Marthe, my sister and Erik wanted to continue the process and moved into my house in 2006, where I had lived since 1989, and our living group Contact & muziek originated. Our lives changed from being alone and living alone to seeking connection and working together. Living together allowed us to go deeper into everything. We started singing 4-part a capella and I taught myself and my housemates to play two instruments from the renaissance, the viola da gamba and lute. People were touched by the music, especially the singing moved many people. But where Marthe and I found each other in being able to talk to each other, sharing experiences and building up confidence, Jeannette and Erik were unable to share their pain and sorrow. They could not and did not want to talk and be open to another way of living and stopped whatever might be positive. It was still a miracle that we made music and sang. We had quarrels every day, it has been very intense. Looking back, a foreshadowing of the difficult time to come? We all are not used to and did not learn to work together and help each other. Openness, sharing, stimulating and inspiring are words that are easily being used, but really doing it is quite something different.

My mother took this picture of me at the home of my grandmother, my father's mother, in Nieuwpoort, the Netherlands hollyhocks in front of our house July 2021

Marthe, 1977 I am 2 years old.

Marthe (1975) I was not happy at all with my job as a tax advisor in an accountancy office, I couldn't talk to my family, friends, colleagues and people I knew, also not to a psychologist. After so many attempts, a holiday/weekend away and changing jobs also did not help, I decided in 2003 when I was 28 years old that I really wanted to talk to someone now, because things could not go on like this. Fortunately, I found a flyer from Leonoor who started her practice for 'Haptonomy and music'. Leonoor said I hardly talked and encouraged me to start talking more, while everyone around me was saying that I talked too much and especially too much about myself. I was very happy to finally get a different reaction than I had experienced so far. I asked Leonoor not to just believe me when I said everything was going well. Leonoor felt that as an invitation to be allowed to ask deeper questions and was happy that I wanted to go further than most people. It appeared that we both were looking forward to that. We both had no idea at the time that that was the beginning of a cooperation that would bring us together for life.

Janneke, the mother from Leonoor Janneke, my mother passed on her love of nature to me completely, but unfortunately under pressure from the pharmaceutical industry, doctors and my father she swallowed more than 100 pills a week, built up during 30 years, a horrible suffering. After my mother was brought to to a nursing home in April 2017, my sister Jeannette who also lived with us suddenly got seriously sick and died June 8, 2017 unexpectedly for everyone. Because we then were negatively in the media, it became a dramatic turn in our lives, see the page in Dutch overlijden Jeannette (passing away of Jeannette). A year earlier, my brother Jan died, see the bizarre story on the page in Dutch overlijden Jan (death of Jan). My mother passed away May 18, 2019, she was 87 years old. She asked us to make world known what has been and is being done to her and many with her by the pharmaceutical industry. (...) continue reading on the page Janneke (in Dutch).

The robin, my mother, we saw after she passed away in September. We filmed it and posted it on Facebook in Dutch ontmoeting met roodborstje september 2019 (encounter with robin)

cooperating After Jeannette passed away and Erik left in 2019, we started building up a completely new life, continuing to meditate, sing, eat less, but above all working together. We discover a new world, where one stops, the other continues, it is incredible what is possible then. There also comes space for our desire to live differently in a smaller house. In the meantime, we no longer use the first floor and live downstairs. We want more green around us and to be together with people who also want something different than grey pavements, brick houses, only working and doing everything alone. We feel that we were brought on each other's path to share our experiences and to cooperate. When I started to share with Marthe the I contact that I built up with my mother, standing up for my mother together, it became a cooperation between the three of us. We find very important to have contact, talking to each other, empathising and thinking along, communication, listening to yourself, to your feelings and having a connection with nature, colourful flowers, butterflies and birds. With our way of living, we want to experience and show how, you can work together as women, inspire each other and that by being creative, there is much much more possible than we think. We want women and mothers to be more seen, to be able to express themselves and we have the feeling that my mother helps us in everything and is very close, there are still three of us. Cooperating and sharing makes everything lighter.

Leonoor and Marthe in front of the parental (dyke) house from the mother of Leonoor on the Lek (river), 19 October 2019

Shared sorrow is half sorrow, shared joy is double joy.

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