Another early morning takeoff. Cannot remember where I was going. Perhaps Stockholm. Helsinki airport bathed in the morning sunlight and mist lay over the fields. I cannot remember what I was thinking. Probably nothing. Probably something. But I probably was not thinking that “this is a beautiful moment and it will never, ever, return again. Because one second later, the world will have shifted, if ever so slightly.”
Live today. I probably wasn’t. My loss.
(Helsinki, Finland; October 2015)
Lazy Sunday afternoon sunlight drizzled through a window and hit gold: her golden hair, golden violin strings, and golden decorations on the grand piano. There was lovely music in the air, and fluttering sleeves and rustling taffeta skirts. Lady Georgiana Cavendish was alive again just for this day – and she had brought her talented friends. And meringues. And tea cakes. And much humor.
Slowly sipping a fresh cup of darjeeling we enjoyed this parenthesis of a Sunday, an afternoon when time stood still. Where music and meringue towers were most important to all those present.
(Helsinki, Finland; October 2015)
After browsing the free-time activities during a work retreat, I signed up for a canopy tour. I thought it would be like the canopy tours I did in the past: walking on planks and suspension bridges in trees. How wrong I was. Read the small print they say – but who ever does?
Instead we were whisked up on top of a mountain in a ski lift, trussed and clamped into a harness, and sent down the mountain on ziplines, toes skimming the treetops. Hanging from a wire, wind in my eyes, speeding towards a huge tree, I had to learn to brake with my glove on the wire before hitting it full speed. That’s what the helmets were for – or against.
As I stood under the apex of a lark tree, enjoying the sunlight and hum of the wind in the branches, squirrels scattered in all directions with angry complaints: humans don’t belong in the trees anymore. “Have not done so for quite a while so Go Away!”
Yet I could not help but think of John Muir’s tale about when he rode out a storm in the top of a douglas fir in Yosemite. And I thought of redwood arborists who spend days harnessed and hanging from trees, studying the animals and trees that grow from compost deposited on a redwood branch – and even sleeping suspended in the trees.
And I realized I just may have missed a second calling as an arborist, spending my days up in the trees, researching the microecosystem of a single tree branch. I may have missed a chance for happiness by reverting into a modern monkey.
(Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA; October 2015)
Is it a 19th century landscape with oil on canvas? No, it is real: the backyard of our lovely hotel in Bretton Woods. Ruska is Finnish for fall foliage and this is ruska at its best. But what Scandinavia misses is the maple that, when it sucks back the life from its leaves, turns them a dark-blue-blood-red against its light gray trunk. The New England ruska is tinted by royal blood.
(Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA; October 2015)
Imagine a white, long, stately grand hotel. With miles of corridors, white doors, and old Persian rugs. With hidden rooms and the scent of old age, and a bar with an age-old bartender. With guest rooms in which good things have happened – and horrible things, too. With REDRUM spelled on the door.
Yes. REDRUM. The Shining. “Honey, I’m home!” Jack Nicholson’s character going into serial-killer-mode. Except for that the location was changed to another hotel in Colorado just before filming began. Yet sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. The Omni Mount Washington resort in New Hampshire looks like the hotel from the movie. Only the haunted hedge maze is missing.
What a relief, then, that only room 314 is haunted. It is only at night when the hotel creaks and sighs. On a clear day you can see Mount Washington in the distance. And no REDRUM MURDER happened on our watch.
(Omni Mount Washington Resort, Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, USA; October 2015)
There was a long flight, jetlagged people lost in a hotel, and a quick dash to Macy’s for proper winter-weight stockings. There was somebody who knew which direction to take, and finally a skyscraper and an elevator upward.
And suddenly there was a cocktail party on the top floor, and Boston at our feet. A gray day turned into a spectacular golden sunset. And after hours our jetlagged brains were exposed to the crazy show of the Blue Man Group. Best viewed when drunk or near-expired by exhaustion.
Boston, city of smart and innovative minds, today my dull mind was no match against the first glimpse you offered. Rematch another time?
(The Charles River, Boston, Massachusetts, USA; October 2015)
Sporadic smog and frequent blue skies. This is London today. 50 years ago it was the other way around. As we circled above London in the busy morning air traffic, I thought of the generations of Londoners between the ramp-up of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and 1960s when the Clean Air Act began to take visible effect. These people did not see much of a sun unless they found their way out of the city. In 1952 during the Great Smog, thousands of people died and thousands more were made ill by the toxic filthy pea soup that hung over London for 4 days.
Today there is the chance to see a blue sky over London, even without rising a kilometer into the air. Of course the view from up here is much more stunning.
(London, United Kingdom; October 2015)
This blue marble 