road trips and midnight escapes

A sublime weekend, driving up with friends to a red house by a lake.

Blasting our music with the windows down, pitching our tents on the perfect lawn, laughing too hard to breathe, going for a swim first thing in the morning, finding a ukulele and adopting it for the night, going to the sauna around three in the morning, falling asleep with the sun rising, brewing tea over a blue flame, singing until our voices grew hoarse.

How lucky I am to be able to surround myself with the people I love, the people who make me feel safe.

(Maybe this is one of those times I'll remember for years and years to come. Maybe this is what it really is to be young and to be happy, unguarded moments like the one below, captured on our journey back home.)

Soffulle kiitos kuvasta!

notes from an island

So there was the sea and the smooth cliffs pouring into it.

There were sunsets to warm the bone to its marrow. (Sunsets I mostly spent on the phone, because sometimes you need more than beautiful views, you need tangibility.)

There were small cold waves to dive into and lots of books to read. (I mostly read Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It's been years since I've last read it cover to cover and it's very different from what I remembered. And I might have outgrown Fitzgerald, oddly enough. He's too melancholy for my state of mind.)

There was a lot of thinking and even more writing. Pages upon pages. Most of it utter nonsense but sometimes there's no need to judge. Not right now.

There was a huge bed to lie back on and listen to my breathing during the nights when sleep didn't come. A small lamp to light up the walls made of wood and outside the steady sighs of the sea.

10½ inclinations by ben okri

1
 There is a secret trail of books meant to inspire and enlighten you. Find that trail.

2
 Read outside your nation, colour, class, gender.

3
 Read the books your parents hate.

4
 Read the books your parents love.

5
 Have one or two authors that are important, that speak to you; and make their works your secret passion.

6
 Read widely, for fun, for stimulation, for escape.

7
 Don't read what everyone else is reading. Check them out later, cautiously.

8
 Read what you're not supposed to read.

9
 Read for your own liberation and mental freedom.

10
 Books are like mirrors. Don't just read the words. Go into the mirror. That is where the real secrets are. Inside. Behind. That's where the gods dream, where our realities are born.

10½
 Read the world. It is the most mysterious book of all.

From A Time for New Dreams by Ben Okri.

expect the unexpected

(Incidentally:

There are some essential things I am learning to do this summer.

Like collapsing into the arms of friends as a way of saying hello, letting myself be folded into familiarity. Trusting the people I love to support me.

I am learning to speak of the future without trepidation. It seems to be the thing we mostly do these days, outline plans for when we graduate, for when we send ourselves into the world with just our wits and hearts, open wide. Over and over, universities and gap years and beyond, into marriage and children and everything that comes along with adulthood.

I am trying desperately to learn to trust. I am fighting the urge to distance myself from the people I love. Because sometimes fear is insignificant when compared to what could be without it.)

on poetry

A few weeks back someone asked me why poetry matters, why I seem to think that we all should read poetry, what is it poetry can give us that the everyday cannot. 

My answer rambled onwards without making much of an impression. And now I only wish I'd had Ben Okri to back me up.

 
"Heaven knows we need poetry now more than ever. We need the awkward truth of poetry. We need its indirect insistence on the magic of listening.

In a world of contending guns, the argument of bombs, and the madness of believing that only our side, our religion, our politics is right, a world fatally inclined towards war ‒ we need the voice that speaks to the highest in us.  

We need the voice that speaks to our joys, our childhoods, and to the Gordian knots of our private and national condition. A voice that speaks to our doubts, our fears, and to all the unsuspected dimensions that make us both human and beings touched by the whisperings of the stars."

Ben Okri: Poetry and Life (from his collection of essays, entitled A Time for New Dreams)

"I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone."




Jonathan Safran Foer: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close