an unlikely pilgrimage

In a faraway land, where I once lived, a cave sits on the steep hillside above a dark lake.

More than a thousand years ago, a saint lived in this cave. The hillside is impossibly steep and treacherous and the cave is said to be unreachable except by boat - and there are no boats on the lake anymore.

But on dark nights, over too much red wine and whiskey, one or two of my many intrepid friends have whispered to me of a secret path that winds along the lake shore to the cave - difficult to walk, dangerous too, but not impossible if you have courage.

One of my stranger dreams is to find this hidden path and make my way to the saint's dwelling. To reach this wild, impossible place at the end of the world. I may never get the chance - after all, I live two thousand miles from there - but it doesn't really matter in the end. Having this secret plan seems important.

she once asked me

“She once asked me the name of my favourite poet and I replied
God
She laughed and played along and asked me which one of his works was my absolute favourite
I said it was the one where he wrote her into existence”

(unknown)

oatmeal and insecurity

Now: Snow, oatmeal porridge with honey and blueberries, a feeling of insecurity.

Later: A quiet office, pilates class, a question of why.

sorbet in the streets

The cold is easing up under a relentless sun and the snow under my feet is turning into a sorbet-like mush.

March, a long time ago, used to be the month for building the last snow forts, the kind that fortify themselves with a glaze of ice during cold nights. Getting your bike out of storage. The joyful lightness of exchanging heavy boots for sneakers in electric colours. Delicious sunlight on your frozen face. Mild evenings with woodsmoke and dogs barking in the neighbourhood.

March, not so long ago, used to be the dreaded month of working too much and endlessly waiting for winter to end. This year, I'm enjoying it.

I unbutton my heavy, green coat and flex my fingers to warm them up for my piano lesson.When March ends, I will play "Walking My Baby Back Home" during my last lesson ever. A new season will begin.

March is the month of nostalgia and preparing for new adventures.

cold ghost wandering

“Lonely skies, orphan eyes, I’m a cold ghost wandering, waiting for a warm hand to take my own, for a warm heart to lead me home.”

(Josh Riebock)

the road to the Loire is a difficult one

It's in a luscious garden in France, just as the July heat is cooling into a delicious evening, that I decide that I hate my best friend.

Behind us are days admiring the beautiful, rocky coasts of Normandy and Brittany. We have explored the smaller roads, laughing and snacking on fresh apricots and smelly, wonderful local Camembert. But I'm tiring of the sea. The alluring Loire valley, with its rolling hills, fairytale castles and a thousand years of history, is beckoning me.

My friend wants to stay longer by the sea and then take the motorway straight back to the airport.

This is where we hiss our most heartfelt feelings of disappointment at each other and I run off into the old garden just to get away from her.

Travelling together can do that. Even if you are the best of friends who have travelled together before.

The end of the story: we made up, compromised, travelled through the Loire valley and had a few more wonderous adventures.

to see a world in a cup of espresso

A memory:

The waiter in the little seaside café brings me an espresso because my rusty French doesn't seem up to ordering the café au lait I really wanted.

Sometimes the world decides to show you new perspectives of itself. The espresso, coupled with a tiny piece of dark chocolate, flows into me like smooth, black honey.

Around me are sunwarmed cobblestones, squabbling sparrows and a sweet breeze from the sea. I am free, I have my best friend with me and I am on the beautiful coast of Normandy.

to call myself beloved

And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

(Raymond Carver: "Late Fragment")

not brave

I am not brave.

Throw me in the sea and I will panic and drown. Put me in a roller-coaster and I will suffer an immediate heart attack. Force me to endure a flight in heavy turbulence and you will hear me whimper with fear. Whisper the word 'cancer' and I will scream at you to shut up.

But give me honesty and then ask me to take a risk on you. I will calmly assess the situation and then take the jump for you.

road trip with Camembert

For an ideal summer week in France:

* Bring your best friend and rent a car. Try not to faint with fear while driving out of Paris in the mad rush hours.
* Drink real espresso, complemented with a piece of dark chocolate, in a seaside café in Normandy.
* Buy Camembert cheese, newly picked apricots and local cider and throw in a couple of bottles of wine. You will develop a tolerance for the strong smell of mouldy cheese that is fermenting in the hot car.
* Admire the rocky coast of Normandy and Brittany, playground to the likes of Joan of Arc and many a famous painter.
* Sense the shock and grief still lingering over the eerie fields of Omaha Beach.
* Stay at picturesque chambres d'hôte and struggle making conversations with the chatty hosts in forgotten French.
* Fear for your life on the back streets of Le Havre.
* Discover that your friend wants to stay by the seaside but you dream of reliving history in castles and stone age tombs in luscious Anjou.
* Have epic fights with above-mentioned best friend in the idyllic Loire valley and make up in time to have equally epic giggle fits over strange things such as ghost towns and monsters hiding in wheat fields.
* Spend a day of massive thunderstorms in Chartres and its enormous cathedral.
* Come home without your suitcase because the Parisian baggage handlers had an important football game to watch. Allez les bleus!

the day of the Saudi-Arabian camel whip

Penkkarit is being celebrated these days. Final year students of upper secondary schools hail their last day of school by coming to school in fancy dress, arranging all sorts of merriment and parading through town piled onto lorries, shouting and throwing sweets at everyone.

I remember my own penkkarit decades ago, dressed as a stereotypical cowboy (or as such a one was imagined in Finland in the 90s). It was so crowded on that lorry that I hardly felt the piercing February coldness. Twelve years of school were over and the future beckoned.

I was rather incongruously carrying a serious camel whip, a real one brought home from Saudi-Arabia by my brother. It impressed everyone.

Harry Potter and the Regressing Adult

It's been a Harry Potter winter for me and my friends, as we dedicated seven dark evenings to rewatching the films over wine and snacks (and once, memorably, cheese fondue). Say what you want about the wizard boy, he makes for great entertainment. On film as well as in the books.

Some deep reflection, too. And emotions (unless that was just the wine). I can't get into the Potter world without feeling the longing for a great cause and the aching need for love.

Now I'm reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child for the first time. It's a script for a play and so only gives you the bare dialogue and a few stage directions. And yet, I feel deep emotions welling up in me again. Different ones, this time: the cold loneliness of being different and not understood, the anger and the need to rebel just to be seen for who you are.

I think I'm back to being a teenager.

your very flesh shall be a great poem

“This is what you shall do;
Love the earth and sun and the animals,
despise riches,
give alms to every one that asks,
stand up for the stupid and crazy,
devote your income and labor to others,
hate tyrants,
argue not concerning God,
have patience and indulgence toward the people,
take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men,
go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, 
read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book,
dismiss whatever insults your own soul,
and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”

(Walt Whitman)

winter, electric and crimson

It is a heavy feeling, donning a large, green coat. Walking out in sturdy, insulated boots. Being late as usual because it took so long to find your wool mittens and a chunky knit hat. Feeling icy air bite your throat if you haven't wrapped the scarf tightly enough.

It is a heavy feeling, walking out into a cold, cold winter.

But the snow is enchanting everything, the frost shimmers like silver on tree branches. The assault of the cold makes your blood run faster, dispelling all weariness. The air is electric, the sunset is crimson, faraway lights flicker like stars. The world smells of wood smoke and snow, and that heavy feeling is not heavy anymore.

moonlight and love songs - never out of date

The icy darkness of the Nordic winter can't stop me.

My nervousness almost does, sometimes.

Still, I wrap myself in layers of white and green wool every Monday evening and go out, sheet music clasped in thick mittens. I walk with the certainty that as I play this week's song for my teacher I will experience the miracle: A collection of difficult chords that made little sense a week ago have been transformed, through her advice and my own persistence, into music.

There's a small, bright room with a piano at the end of my walk - a portal into an unknown world. There's someone to teach me to play that piano, and there's music that flows - greater than the sum of its parts, wild with emotions.

silence the pianos, let the mourners come

In the dark corridor of the English Department at the university, just outside the literature library where forgotten books were gathering dust, a poster hung on the wall. It had a poem, "Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden, on it.

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Passing by this poem every day, was it then I realised that my blood always sighs with melancholy - of either the happy or the sad kind?

stay scared as hell

“Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out - I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.”

(Albert Camus)

the buzzing at week's end

Saturday, the day of possibilities. Of sleeping late, of setting out on adventures, of partying in glitzy clothes and smoky eyes.

I used to love Saturdays as a child. I got up early in the morning to watch a long and boring Swedish talk show (it was before the time of children's morning TV) just to see a Tom and Jerry cartoon that appeared somewhere midway through. I didn't even like Tom and Jerry - too violent! - but it was my own Saturday morning ritual. I sat quietly, played with my toys and listened to the boring drone of the talk show, peaceful and happy. The house was quiet. A long day of freedom lay before me.

During my years in the hotel business I fell out of love with Saturday. It was a busy, long day of work and sometimes parties that were just a little too wild. During my time as a shop assistant, Saturday turned out to be a short and sweet workday, full of interesting people and with freedom dawning when I locked the door mid-afternoon.

Now I spend my Saturdays working hard at my laptop at home, looking forward to free days ahead. Watching people through the window, often still in my pyjamas. Taking a walk in the early evening on streets still quiet but brewing excitement for the party night to come. Returning home for a movie night with friends or in blissful solitude. If it's the latter, I still feel the Saturday night fever in the air - faraway friends suddenly message me and distant laughter is heard.

purple dusk

Red stars are twinkling in my kitchen and a hot oven heats a chilly flat with the aroma of melted cheese.

I eat a plate of roasted vegetables while typing furiously on my computer and dreaming of adventure. A purple dusk is falling. If the world has purple dusks, anything is possible.

my heart is an old house

“But my heart is an old house
(the kind my mother
grew up in)
hell to heat and cool
and faulty in the wiring
and though it’s nice to look at
I have no business
inviting lovers in.”

(Clementine von Radics)