This year I have seen more moose than in all the years I have lived in Sweden combined.
Photo by Malte Wingen on Unsplash
the king
randomness
in a box
Even the freest people seem to be boxed in, not able to resist the noxious fumes of the confines they have built.
What is the investment for? And how could one stop oneself from making it? It is the natural impulse – to give and give. One gives because s/he wants to and can do nothing else. But this can lead to unintentionally fractious relations, or at least fractious feelings. Or at least an impasse.
But at some point, the question comes: what is one investing in? If the scales come out weighed down on only one side, the imbalance chokes everything, and the walls close in.
Photo by Eugene Lim on Unsplash
Älgjakt pågår
The moose hunt is underway. Again. I noticed all the signs went up along the roadside this sunny-frosty morning. And then I spotted whole groups of people in camouflage and orange suits carrying their guns around in various fields and parking lots all over the area.
Seems a little bit barbaric.
Photo by Stéphane Kirouac on Unsplash
parasitic
It’s strange how something – or someone, like a parasitic worm – infiltrates your dreams. Suddenly things and people you haven’t thought of in months or years suddenly are right there in your mind, throwing questions and possibilities into the fray. Not real questions or possibilities. Just things the mind concocts to throw you a little off balance for a couple of days.
Oh, even Oslo – in the sun – can be beautiful. Even though summer is over and daylight hours are mercilessly short. The coming of autumn and threat of winter have been hardest this year of all years.
grief collective
Facebook does not often give me reason to feel grateful. Today I feel grateful because I was able to reach out, with the platform’s immediacy, to an old (but not graduated-high-school-in-1977-old) and dear friend to express my condolences after a death in her immediate family, share in her angry grief and add to the vast chorus of voices chiming in with love and respect about my own memories of the loved one my friend lost.
Though vague and hazy childhood memories, the woman my friend and her family lost is branded in my brain as a strong, hard-working, straight-talking, no-nonsense woman. I didn’t know her well, but as a part of my friend’s family, I met her many times 30 or so years ago. For me to have retained clear memories of these personality traits in her, after three decades, she must have fully and indelibly embodied these attributes and, more than that, been able to make lasting impressions on all those she met in life. Seeing all the beautiful pictures my friend posted of this woman, her family and herself, all together, I felt such sadness for them, as you do for people who have disappeared too soon, but also the bittersweet feeling of joy you feel in observing a life well and fully lived.
These things also render one a bit helpless but wanting to help, reaching out in a flailing and fumbling way but reaching out nevertheless.
Grief, perhaps unlike death, and all its forms, is tough and unpredictable. As I have written before, it is those who remain on earth and in life who struggle:
“It’s this aftermath that’s hardest to know what to do with. The people who remain: how should they move on? Should they? I mean, do you ever really move on? Are you the same person after you experience a major loss and the kind of grief it visits upon you? Of course it – death and grieving – is a part of life; do you come out the “other side” dramatically changed because, in fact, your world is changed so significantly (because of these absences/losses)? Or is grief the engine of being exactly the same person you were in a changed world (and you start to “let go” or “stop grieving” only once you start to change in facing the new reality)?”
“’Moving on, as a concept, is for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project. I refuse to rush. The pain that is thrust upon us let no man slow or speed or fix.’” -from Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter
My friend and her family have the strength of their faith to help and guide them through and to offer some kind of reason for what they are going through. But more than that, more broadly, the more we can form a loving and supportive collective, no matter how long ago our friendships flourished or how distant we are – literally or figuratively – the more we can at least be witness to the human experience in all its nuance. I won’t say it will make things easier for those left in the wake of loss, but it never hurts to reach out and offer compassion and reassurance.
Photo by Marta Pawlik on Unsplash
A bout of stress
You know how it is: as soon as you have a conversation about something you will see information about that thing -whatever it is- everywhere. A few weeks ago it was fruit flies, last week (or possibly earlier this week) it was aging/living longer lives and this week it’s stress.
The voices tell us:
- Severe stress = memory problems
- Stress leads to making bad decisions
- Stress = bad sleep… and we know what poor/lack of sleep does!
And how does stress manifest? How does it serve?
As a child, I internalized all the anxiety I felt around me; I worried constantly. I did not know – and could not have – that this was ‘stress’ until a doctor diagnosed it as such. It took many more years before my own brand of ‘fuck it’ developed, and even as recently as ten years ago, there were situations that could push my buttons. Life, of course, was more stressful then – moving to a new country, starting a new job, figuring a lot of things out all alone, etc. But first I coped, then I conquered.
I don’t feel anything resembling stress now. I wish I could give that gift to everyone I know.
Photo by Edu Lauton on Unsplash
Marital bliss in a heartbeat
“What is life made up of, anyway? Work and cold, the wind whistling in the trees! Right? How often does a holiday come along?” The Slynx, Tatyana Tolstaya
Years ago, my best friend was getting married. She was already in the US, and I am sure she was planning to go for a Vegas ceremony anyway, but in the lead-up to the wedding, my mom suggested Las Vegas, raving about how it’s quick and only costs about 50 dollars. Since then, my friend and I have joked that her marriage is all my mom’s fault, and if she had not expounded on the instant bargain of a Vegas wedding, maybe my friend would never have married (this is totally untrue and completely a part of the ongoing joke).
But it did make me wonder recently… if Las Vegas is home to the drive-through wedding with no waiting period and almost instant legal matrimony, what other places in the world offer similar spontaneity for those willing (or drunk enough) to take the plunge? See, not everyone in the world can or wants to go to motherfucking America for any reason, let alone for a quickie wedding.
By far my favorite option (if I were going to go about doing this) is New Zealand. Good excuse to go to New Zealand again, even if its incomprehensible distance makes it a poor choice for a “quickie” anything. It has only a three-day period for waiting/getting the license, so while it isn’t instant, it’s not a two-week or three-month wait (which places closer to home and geographically convenient impose). Some other options for shorter wait times include Gibraltar, most of the Caribbean and some of Central America, other places in the United States (like Hawaii) and, oddly, Denmark pops up a few times on some of these lists (touted as Europe’s answer to Vegas, it can be – depending on the location/municipality – a three-day wait and relatively hassle and bureaucracy-free).
There is no real point to this except that it all seems like a hassle. Even the hassle-free choices. But… if one were going to marry anyway, it would make sense to run from the ‘work and cold’ and make a holiday of it. No?
The ‘created place/space’
“There are cities which don’t need literature: they are literature. They file past, chest thrust out, head on their shoulders. They are proud and full of confidence despite the garbage bags they cart around. The City-State, an example among so many others — she pulsated with literature.” –Tram 83, Fiston Mwanza Mujila
It can all return to place somehow, even when the story is about inner life. It does not need to be a city, as Fiston Mwanza Mujila posits, or as Italo Calvino writes about at length in Invisible Cities. This place can be an actual place, geographically, an interior, private place, or even a container/concept that represents a kind of space. A space that is occupied by some need, for example the need to write, to drink coffee, to love, to break out of previous forms or perceptions, the need to pretend or project images of ourselves into another space.
There are so many ways to create and exist in a space or place, for example:
- “stepping off the plane at keflavik i didn’t know what to expect – only that i thought i belonged there. i went through all the stages of excitement, wonder, questioning, noticing all the surface-level weird things that all foreigners remark on animatedly when they arrive. almost 20 years later it’s easy to blur the hardships and forget all the missteps that often made the move seem like a mistake.”
- “sometimes you know someone, even from afar, and feel like you want to hug her close to you and immediately declare your love, make it legal, and marry her. she, in central europe with her bewitching way with words, makes me feel that way every time i read her writing or see her messages in the far, cold nordics.”
- “if he were serene, would he be able to accomplish the feats he does? underneath it all, with just a hint of resistance, he becomes fussy, testy and sarcastic.”
- “how did i get blindfolded? i saw so clearly at the beginning, lost all sight, but eventually, like a hostage with no value, was dumped off somewhere, mostly unharmed. removing the blindfold, the reality is stark.”
- “…and the guy painting on the remnants of the berlin wall – he was a felix, asking the firewall if he liked weed and shared a joint with him, if firewall would just roll it. according to firewall, it was an experience he just had to have. felix, as it happens, is the name of a ketchup brand in sweden; i frequently make people abroad jealous about my ability to get it, even though i don’t use/eat ketchup.”
- “the phone rings. a husky, masculine-sounding voice answers gruffly, ‘computer room, this is odile.'”
- “The point is that fantasies are fantasies and you can’t live in ecstasy every day of the year. Even if you slam the door and walk out, even if you fuck everyone in sight, you don’t necessarily get closer to freedom.” –fear of flying, erica jong
- “compared with my present incarceration, the future holds no interest for me.” –the revolution of everyday life, raoul vaneigem
- “DUSHANBE!“
- “maybe a woman’s version of a midlife crisis involves stopping doing stuff?” –love and trouble, claire dederer
- “but I’ll tell you a secret. when i want to take god at his word exactly, i take a peep out the window at his creation. because that, darling, he makes fresh for us every day, without a lot of dubious middle managers.” –the poisonwood bible, barbara kingsolver
You get the point. You see the ‘place’.
Image (c) 2014 S Donaghy
Secrets
Yesterday I saw a headline that mentioned something like “learning about the secret lives of our ancestors”. It prompted me to think about how often the word “secret” is used, and how once whatever ‘secret’ is divulged, the secret ceases to exist. We’ve just revealed it by stating that whatever follows was once secret. I read a lot of articles in which the writer cites his/her secret love for something, e.g. something like, “My secret love for all things pony”. Yes, perhaps it was a secret until you put it in writing for the world to read. (I am sure I have been guilty of using “secret” this way, too, but the fact that it irks me isn’t new.)
And is the word ‘secret’ always appropriate? That is, aren’t the lives of long-gone predecessors unknown, forgotten or even hidden by time or history rather than secret? Doesn’t the hidden information within a secret – at least the way we use it in modern language – imply intent to keep it hidden?
Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash
rules
Turn yourself off before you are mangled irretrievably by the inevitable forces of the grinding, gnashing machinery of life.
Marvel at all the things you said you’d never do, all the things you laughed at, that you have now done more times than you can count and no longer find funny.
Step up and march forward even after stating your position unequivocally, mistake or not. The only true mistake is not continuing to act.
Acknowledge that convention is sometimes beautiful; you can suddenly see it when the scenery takes shape around it and the figure of the stalwart body imbues it with meaning.
Talk about the disaster(s) big and small and let go of their hold on you.
Create.
Dream.
Photo by Aaron Barnaby on Unsplash