Quality time at home after a crazy month on the road. Tea and a good book. And a new woollen blanket – in theory. In practice it is the cat’s new woollen blanket…
(Helsinki, Finland; February 2015)
Category Archives: Life
As I walked into the arrow I thought…
Did you battle and beat a fear today? I did. I broke an arrow in half by walking into it with the soft part of my throat, right above the collarbone. It was scary, and liberating, like jumping out of a swim jump tower for the first time, head first.
And I could not help but wonder about the battle we lead against our self-preservation instinct, every day. Fear is nothing more but the inborn will to stay alive. Does it, then, make sense to fight our will to live?
Self-preservation means setting boundaries. Saying no to situations that could be dangerous. Bringing on inhibitions. However, what our self-preservation instinct does not realize is that there is no way to minimize risk and thus we spiral into a place where we say no even to life itself.
When our fear, or thus our will to live, takes over the controls completely and irrationally, how can something so right become so wrong?
Resetting our fear does not mean resetting our will to live. It brings us to the sharp edge between what we do without thinking, and what we do because we choose to, over everything else.
And so, walk into an arrow. Once in a while. Just do it. Live today.
(Helsinki, Finland: February 2015)
From loving-to-hate to hating-to-love
Do you also have something you used to love to hate, and then one day you woke up and noticed it had turned into a thing you hated to love? And then slowly, slowly, the hate subsided and you found yourself at least ambivalent, if not slightly attached to the challenge? Did you ask yourself what changed? Was it persistence? Ignorance? Motivation? Or something else?
They say yoga happens when you connect your experience on the mat to your life off the mat. One of the walls I ran into on the mat early on was Wheel Pose. You know the backbend we all easily lifted into as kids, standing on our straightened arms and legs, hanging our heads upside down. Easy-peasy, yes? Since we did it as a kid we can naturally kick into it 15 years later, yes?
No. That pose we all kicked ourselves into as kids seemed impossible to me. I could not budge the crown of my head off the floor. “It is not about arm strength but leg strength”, my teacher said. “It is not about strength at all as much as stacking your bones right”, my sister said. I felt like Neo in the Matrix, trying to understand that it was not my body that was supposed to bend but my mind.
I clearly recall the shock of one of my first led ashtanga yoga classes, where the teacher asked us to go into the pose. I was still working on a Bridge pose variation, where the shoulders and head stay on the floor while the back arches up. Suddenly, there were strange figures lifting up all around me and as I lay on the floor it looked like the shala was invaded by Orwellian, long-legged Martian war machines. Hell’s bells, I thought, these must all have been doing wheel poses straight through their twenties into their thirties. I thought I was the only one in the world whose body forgot how to do it.
And then suddenly one day I mis-aligned my hands, too far from the head. Without noticing what happened I was up, looking at the world upside down. It really was all about forgetting strength and just stacking the bones as they felt most comfortable. It was bending the mind more than bending the body. The next few weeks I worked the pose into something I hated to love, until the one day when I straightened my arms and felt the luxurious stretch in my abs and hips and decided to increase my repetition count from two to four just because it felt so good.
Where did the transformation happen? We never catch the actual “click” as we only pay attention to the effect. The magician snapped his fingers and was gone before we knew it. The end result is all we have, and it can be a marvel. And so here is a challenge: next time I will try to catch the magician in the act. I will try to catch his hem to understand what changed, and why. Perhaps, just perhaps I will be able to understand how to bend the mind after all?
(Helsinki, Finland; January 2015)
(top image courtesy of yogabloga.tumblr.com. Bottom image from Kathmandu, Nepal.)
Oh summer, why are you so far away?
It was a cool, rainy midsummer, but it was still mid-summer. Now it is mid-winter. Oh summer, why are you so far away? Is it not unreasonable to require us to speed through space half a lapse around the sun until we see you again?
(Helsinki, Finland; June 2014)
Interlude
Down time. Slow time. Cat days. Me time.
(Loviisa, Finland; December 2014)
I spy visitors from behind a frosty glass
While we feasted on Scandinavian christmas delicacies, these roe deer feasted on frozen, sweet apples from last summer. It was a cold, snowy christmas night. Hopefully somewhere a barn door was left open by a friendly soul.
(Loviisa, Finland, December 2014)
Falling
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning “no.”
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.(Rainer Maria Rilke)
(Cambridge, UK; October 2014)
Interlude
Diving
The moment I tire
of difficult sand-grains
and giddy pebbles,
I roll with the punch
of a shrivelling wave
and am cosmonaut
out past the fringe
of a basalt ledge
in a moony sea-hall
spun beyond blue.
Faint but definite
heat of the universeflutters my skin;
quick fish apply
as something to love,
what with their heads
of gong-dented gold;
plankton I pushan easy way through
would be dust or dew
in the world behind
if that mattered at all,
which is no longer true,
with its faces and cries.
(Andrew Motion)
(Image courtesy of della-stock.deviantart.com)
About happiness, again
How much does our happiness depend on others? How much is not happiness unless it is recognized and mirrored back by another person? And what happens when we hang our happiness on another person’s regard and acceptance of us?
Yet another day of doubting whether it is worth seeking happiness again. Or is lasting happiness really happiness at all, but rather a contentment, peace, and quiet joy?
(Flowers at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand; April 2011)
Happiness
The light in the Mediterranean is unique. In contrast to many tropical landscapes where sunlight blends with humidity or dust into a soft haze, the Mediterranean sky is as neverending blue as the sea. There is sharp contrast between the rugged rocks and the fluffy green pines, and the white houses and the pink oleanders. Yet what draws painters and dreamers is the blazing sunlight that bounces off every surface, enveloping every object and surface in a soft gleam like watching the world through a camera obscura.
Lapping up the mid-morning sunlight I thought of the painters and dreamers who came to the Mediterranean to seek happiness. I thought of the Greek who seem to live longer than most people, allegedly due to olive oil, yoghurt, and happiness. I thought of people who change professions, relationships, and countries in pursuit of happiness without ever searching inside themselves first. And I asked myself whether happiness really can be found by rearranging the external factors in our lives? By attaching happiness to the environment it will be brought by and whisked away by circumstances beyond our control. Perfect happiness will be followed by equal amount of loss and grief, such is the law of our world.
Before the sun slowed my thought I asked myself if the definition of happiness did not contain a fleeting, temporal component, and perhaps I was better off seeking something else altogether? Maybe leaving the shoes by the door and stepping inside would be a good first move?
(Agios Pavlos, Crete, Greece; August 2014)
This blue marble 