Takeaway from Sweden: OMNIA MIRARI ETIAM TRITISSIMA – a colouring sheet

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Home again in Jakarta after almost 3 weeks in Sweden. And I’m still amazed by how visiting the home and the tomb of ‘my hero’ – my favorite imaginary grandpa, professor, teacher, advisor, best friend – the Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, in the city of Uppsala, never failed to give me such refreshing re-look on life and to save me from feeling stuck. This time, by his words, from Philosophia Botanica: “OMNIA MIRARI ETIAM TRITISSIMA” which means “find wonder in all things. even the most commonplace”.

The botanist who served as our guide touring Mr Linnaeus home and garden mentioned those words, it struck me like a grace and suddenly the world turned to be – once again – a magical place, and everything around me was fascinating. Full of wonder. Full of miracles.

Funny when you started to see the world that way. You literally couldn’t stop saying “thank you” because you were witnessing fascinating things each step all the way wherever you walked. And you gained a huge amount of fascinating energy too – I was fascinated how I got that!

Long time ago Mr Linnaeus and his work literally saved my dark days in high school. Okay, I exaggerated about the high school, but those were the days when I truly hated school and I thought I went to the wrong school. Learning about science was pain in the a** but one fateful day, we came to an overview on classification of plants. All those latin names that sounded like rhymes. And I spent much of my times marveling on plants.

Life went on – and for years I thought I hated science. Only once again – like, almost 20 years later – I crossed paths with Mr Linnaeus, this time for his 300 years anniversary. That’s when I met two professors of biology from Gothenburg University, assisted them during their tour in 6 universities in Jakarta, West Java and Yogyakarta, guest lecturing about the magnificent world which is Carl Linnaeus’s. And after each lecture, we watched the corresponding movie starring Swedish photographer Mattias Klum and 4 young students.

It was a whole new eye-opening life experience for me. Science was beautiful, if only it had always been taught like that. Mr Linnaeus must have been blessed with a set of magical eyes – physical eyes and the ones in his brain.

But talking about magical eyes, a year preceding Linnaeus’ 300th anniversary, came along with the Swedish Sailing Ship “Gotheborg” to Jakarta a photo exhibition “HERBARIUM AMORIS” by Swedish photographer Edvard Koinberg, a collection of photographic work inspired by, who else, Carl Linnaeus. An exhibition that literally changed how I view the world, Because after that, I’m crazy about taking pictures of flowers and plants and certain animals, the ‘herbarium amoris way’. I still am, and maybe this will continue the same way.

Here are some notes in my old blog (thankfully google still keeps the posts up! :D)

http://amretasgraphics.blogspot.co.id/2007/05/flowerpower.html

http://amretasgraphics.blogspot.co.id/2007/05/linnaeusobsession.html

And…the colouring sheets, you ask? Keep scrolling down:

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if you are familiar with my work, then you know the images in the coloring sheets are taken from my previous collections. But I loved them so much and it seems like they go along well with the words so I decided to “recycle” them, giving a new look. Therefore I let them “open” and you can download them directly from this page below. But don’t forget, I’ve got a lot more colouring pages inside The Artful Freebie Club. If you haven’t yet registered, go subscribe here.