being yourself

I've been thinking of what people actually mean when they say that with thus-and-so I can/cannot be myself.

What kind of self are talking about?

There is this grumpy Monday morning self that emerges before my cup of morning coffee... and there is the self that is delighted pink just because of some happy thoughts... and there is the sad self and there is the self that keeps on analyzing things...sometimes I really don't want to be myself, because I find myself irritating, maddening, boring and at times pathetic... (but I'm stuck with me, for better or for worse :)

Some selves come out of their hiding only when they feel really safe, and some of the lioness in me only comes out when my kids are attacked, and some selves are very susceptible to weather, sleep and food... At times I feel there's and an entire kingdom within :)

So, maybe what we actually mean is that to be with people who allow you to be all of the above, who allow you to keep on growing, who challenge you and accept you, who are able to see beyond the immediate, forgiving the occasional slip... they are the ones with whom you can be yourself indeed!

I read a phrase that really caught me:

Don't aim at pleasing, but remember that YOU are loved!

that sums it all up: to be myself I need to know that I am loved, and then I can be free to be or not to be... and free to change that which needs changing... and free to look with eyes of mercy on the other selves, be they mine or others...

let mercy triumph over judgement, again!

Clean bed linen and safe people

One of the most comforting and snuggle-inducing memories of my childhood are the evenings when the bed linen had just been changed and I could crawl in bed and just draw deep breaths smelling the crispness and cleanness of my sheets. Especially if it was early autumn, and they had dried outside in the wind, smelling of sunshine and of coming autumn... mmh!

I think that the people I instantly feel close to have something similar about them. They have been through various cycles of life, involving a lot of cleansing and tumbling and shaking and drying, but the outcome is that the dirt is out, they smell nice, and even when you snuggle close, they are still safe and clean.

With people, though, the definition of clean doesn't mean someone who has never had any dirt in their lives, that would exclude all of us. I think the safe-and-clean category is made of people who don't cling to their dirt, who are open and willing to be clean (and cleansed) and who are mindful of what makes relationships safe: trust, respect, kindness, acceptance...

I want excitement and adventures probably more than most people, but that's just outer stuff. I like reckless (within limits :) BUT the people I want closest in my life are like the bed linen of my childhood. They are safe to be with!

The other thing I associate that snuggly feeling with is flannel, the kind of flannel the shirts my Dad used to wear were made of. It is unbeatable!, and so for years I had the best of both worlds: flannel bed linen :) It is the absolute tops on cold winter nights... I wonder what the equivalent in people would look like... ;)

Beautiful people - they are everywhere

Lately I've been really impressed with the beauty of people in general. I find it absolutely astonishing that the world is so full-packed with such amounts of beauty, lavishly poured out everywhere.

And there are so many ways of being beautiful too. The other day I was watching my parents, already old, walking hand in hand down the street, both quite wrinkly and with a physical problem or two, but wearing their dark dark sun glasses, like some retired Men in Black -couple :) I'm pretty sure they dont' see what I see when I look at them, but in my eyes they are SO beautiful.

To mention another one, I was reading the blog of a friend of mine. And she is just doing such an incredibly good job bringing up her son as a single mom. Such beauty of action, of life, of daring to invest in someone, even when its really taxing. I'm not sure she sees what I see in her... the grace-in-action that she embodies... but the way she goes about it IS beautiful.

Generosity is beautiful. Maybe that's why I see so much beauty around me, it seems that I'm surrounded with such bighearted people, who share out of kindness, not because they have too much...

Today as I was having lunch with a very dear friend, the waitress' eyes were just sparkling at the thought that she could treat us to freshly baked bread and butter... in the midst being very busy, such generous care and kindness. Again, I was really touched by the beauty of her gesture.

I think most people are quite beautiful, if one has eyes to see. I'm also convinced that it probably is a secret that they themselves are not aware of... the way a girl listened to her friend looking so intent, or the way a father holds his son's hand when they get on the tram, or the way a young girls skirt was moving as she walked... beauty everywhere, in words, movements, forms, colours, shapes, and sometimes even ruins of various kinds can be beautiful, or tell a story of great beauty and strength. I'm thinking of a few sagging tummies and other parts, some varicose veins and puffed eyes, all "ruins" if looked from the outside, but for those who have eyes to see, they a signs of love, and of daring and of giving generously of yourself to and for the next generation...

Beauty might be in the eye of the beholder, so may we all walk with open eyes!

Home??

Sitting in my hotel room, I just realized once again, that I have been blessed with a most peculiar gift: I feel at home almost anywhere!

Being a researcher, I immediately try to dissect this feeling to see what it is made of, but I think it has to do with presence; I'm present here and now, and so in a way, my home is here too. The rest is just location :)

Also, it might be a habit as well: I've traveled a lot and so I have learned to carve out that little space I call mine wherever I am. In a way the space I possess becomes an extension of my home, a physical place I call mine.

But don't we all do that? in a restaurant the table becomes mine the moment I've sat down or placed my coat on a chair... or like I witnessed today, in a full-packed conference room, a lady got up and the person standing asked, "will you come back or can I sit on your chair?" but since when was that chair hers? or that table mine?

Or is it a question not of space but of "dominion"? If I can decide what happens there, then the place is mine, as in, "no, you cant' , it's my place/seat/table/turn/etc..."

Or maybe this just reflects my vagabond-like nature; I like to roam, and to feel at home is essential to one's well-being, and so this is a functional mindset enabling me to do what I need to do...

One way or another, welcome to my place, wherever that may be ;)

Rites of passage - divorce

For so many things that are important watersheds in one's life, there are different rites of passages.

Births, christenings, confirmation, wedding, graduation, moving into a new house, funerals, etc.

Amazingly, I found that there are no such things for divorce. There are even funerals for pets, but when one's marriage is over and has died, there is only a muted clink of the mail box, or a comment, "have you heard X and Y have also divorced?". All the tragedy of a divorce, all the sadness, all the life that has ended allowed to vanish just like a puff of smoke...

This small puff - all of me revolts at the idea, because it is NOT a small thing for two lives knitted together to be ripped apart as happens in divorce. And the memories...!

Silence simply isn't an option!

So, I wanted to change that, at least for myself. Many years ago, before God and people I promised to love, cherish and to stand by my husband, come what may. Now that he is no longer my husband, I did not want this breaking not get the attention it merits, but wanted to acknowledge before God and people that this marriage has died and now needs a funeral.

I invited for this (what should one call it? divorcening? funeral-for-marriage?) some of the friends who have walked with me for a long time, long enough to know me and gracious enough to love me nevertheless ;)

(One friend came with the 'hugest' bouquet I have ever seen, a bouquet of comfort and hope she called it. It was amazing: it had all my favorite flowers in it, even sweat-peas that I had had so many years ago in my wedding-bouquet! )

None of us had ever done anything like this, so we had no script to follow, but we all agreed that what sounded good and proper, was to do some sort of a reversal of marriage: acknowledging before God and people that this marriage has died and was therefore over, to proclaim forgiveness and release from all bonds, and to pronounce a blessing over me as I am starting a new life.

It was an amazing time!!!! I had thought it would be more like a funeral, with lots of tears and crying, as one does when something/someone one has loved has died, but it had an unexpected strong celebratory quality: there is life after death, and newness of life is a reality, and there is a blessing in starting life over! For a moment I think we all felt the truth of life swallowing death, a foretaste of that which is to come!

I felt utterly privileged, and very much like a bride: starting a new life of which I have no idea how it will be, but surrounded by friends at every side, willing to walk with me; it cannot but be good! Where ever I turned in my small living room, I saw friendly faces, encountered warm smiles, heard words of encouragement and affirmation!
Carried by love and prayers I walk in this newness of life! Feels so light and so free!

I think this ceremony most affected two things. First of all, the perception I have of myself. I now see myself now longer as the to-be-pitied ex-wife, but I see myself as the beloved, daughter, friend, sister, mother - all of which no divorce can wreck. The core of who I am hasn't changed, and now it is no longer obscured by the ashes of my failed marriage.

Secondly, I realized that I am free from the debt marriage creates. No longer do I have to carry burdens of the other one. Visually I just saw myself leaving a very heavy load of stones in a big sack lying there on the road, while I continue to hop, skip and jump ahead :) carrying only my own (manageable) burdens :)

When one is married, one automatically has a debt of love, of loyalty, of faithfulness, of pursuing happiness as one, no longer merely as being 'I' and 'you' but as being a 'we'. This bond was severed, and I am now officially free from this particular kind of debt! I think that because I had not wanted to be free from this debt, the impact was (and still is) so great: I, no longer bound by the particular 'we' and 'us', will not any longer carry burdens in the name of love for my husband! It was right for me to carry them when the promise still bound me. Now my debt and burden-bearing is over!

As a Christian, it was also of utter importance for me too to do all this before God. It seems that He takes promises very seriously, and since my marriage vows were made to Him and with Him as the main witness, I wanted to include God in the act of acknowledging the death of the marriage those promises had upheld. So, that's what we did, this circle of friends and I.

But not only that... as God is also the source of all blessing, and all newness and life, it was also very important for me to once again start my journey into the unknown under His blessing and in His company. I see Him as the endless source of courage, hope, unexplored paths and adventure, and so to know that I can walk closely with Him into all this newness creates in me an expectation that I will also be equipped to live and love wildly, not bound by past experiences!

and that is nothing short of miraculous!!!! There have been times when all seemed to be pointless, and it seemed as all joy had simply left and moved to another universe...

well, now I know that it hasn't!

The best is yet to come :)

feelings and thoughts and truth... what a mix!

I was told last week, or reminded actually, that my feelings are just mere feelings. One does not necessarily need to follow them by actions, to obey what the feelings suggest one should do. Also, my emotions/feelings are not the truth about any given thing/situation/person laden as they are with all sorts of stuff (both inner and outer, past experiences, states of body and soul and spirit etc). I can't determine their accuracy by the intensity of the feeling.... ! An emotion cannot actually drown me, change reality, force me to do anything... It is merely an emotion!!

As a side remark, though, this was so refreshingly counter women's-magazine & Hollywood movies' type of advice, which tells you to go where your heart leads you.

And we all know where that is: usually down- a "I-have-to-do-what-feels-good-for-me-right-now-while-ignoring-everybody-else", but what this advice fails to tell you is where all of this will lead you and it never tells you what really happens after you do. Sometimes, of course, we need to put ourselves first, but I suspect it is not necessary nearly as often as these magazines would have us believe, or as our amazingly selfish hearts tell us.

The same person then proceeded to remind me that also my thoughts are merely thoughts, and as such are not the truth. They may or may not be, but a lot of the stuff I hold as self-evident might not be true at all, especially the kind of beliefs that result in thoughts like "what's the use?" "I'll never succeed" "everybody else has got it so together" .

I need more objective parameters to determine the truthfulness of what goes on in my mind or soul .

So far so good, and all of this may even sound very trivial indeed, and even self-evident ;) but for a person who earns her living by thinking, this actually is a big deal. This realization hit home even more strongly after I've just discovered that my carefully analyzed research data might need to be looked at again and might not even be so clear as I thought (sic!) it was!!!

Add to this then the fact that I tend to trust my intuition and hence feelings about things/events/people, the meaning of undergoing a sea-change takes on a new dimension!

Not only do I need to re-examine my research data, but I need to re-examine the things I think/feel in even greater detail: do they actually reflect the true state of things or not?

Now that is the question!

inhabitant of the Morning Star!

Today I'm moving to an apartment which I have chosen on my own, for the first time ever! I really like the place and the house is called Morning Star!!!!! The house is old, built in 1907 and it is under the protection of The National Board of Antiquities ( which, they state on their website, preserves Finland’s material cultural heritage).

Funnily, it feels like a "one small step for a (wo)man, a giant leap for mankind" . It makes me feel young, inexperienced and exited, all at the same time. I feel standing at the threshold of a great adventure, expecting new & wonderful things to dawn (well, yea, what else if one lives in/on a Morning Star?). I'm finding myself doing things I didn't know I could! And I SO enjoy the sense of freedom that brings. I still can't hammer nails, and don't quite know how to use a drill... but a year from now? just watch-out, I just might become the next female version of Bob the builder:

But before I can get to all that new and exiting stuff, I will have to haul a truckload of my things to the Morning Star, and so the mundane meets the ephemeral: so like the first Moon-walker, I need to do something very concrete to walk into my Morning Star: a giant step, a quantum leap into my wonderful future, so I'm hitting the road right now!

trailing clouds of glory...deja' vu the other way round

After dreaming of all sorts of unrelated things last night I woke up in the morning longing for things I thought I had had in the past.

But then when I sat down and started to think about it, I realized, that I am actually tapping into a longing that probably has never had its realized counterpart in this visible world...

It felt utterly strange, finding myself crying for something as if I had lost it, then only to realize that I actually have not yet experienced it... kind of a deja' vu the other way round...

The poets of old thought that we are born with a tie to heaven that then causes us to be longing for something ... but maybe there is a dream embedded in our hearts, regardless of where it came from that pulls us and draws us with an irresistible longing... and if we try to kill that longing or bury it, we become less alive and less ourselves in doing so...

I think I have been born with this longing for something gloriousn and sparkling and great, involving a lot of laughter, love, harmony, mirth, dancing, contentment and good food. Something like a huge party involving everyone I know... a gigantic Street Party of sorts! I think that is what I have secrectly being trying to create with every single party I've ever given... soon it's the time for a new one, trying to capture a bit more of that!

William Wordsworth said in his Ode to Immortality that he thinks our longing is something we knew in childhood, the sense of endless possibilities calling us to explore... (I love the idea that we come to the world "trailing clouds of glory"), but that it then dies a bit by the light of the "common day". I think I was born with more glitter and glimmer to just buy into the creed of common days! I'm not sure there are any.

On the other hand, maybe it was Mrs Wordsworth who had to change all the diapers etc while her hubby busy was poetisezing (i.e. writing poems ;) and so she might have another opinion of the gloriousness of babies and what they come trailing...

Be that as may... in any case, there is a longing in me which I cannot but wonder about, is it a "has been" or a "not-yet-here" thing that it targets?

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,	60
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come	65
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,	70
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;	75
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

My bucket-list

I saw this movie some time ago with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman talking about the things they want to do before they die (but they were much closer to death than I think I am :)

So, (not that I think I'm close to dying), I've still been thinking about things I absolutely want to see/do during this lifetime (not that I think there are more than one, but that's another story :)

Anyway, here goes:

I want to... (or should I say, I will do the following?)

see the world's oldest tree

participate in an event where there are more than 100 000 people present

see real live hummingbirds

see dolphins and hear them laugh (or whatever it is they do which sounds like it :)

drive a car with a Ferrari-like motor & sound & speed (Porsche, Maserati, etc will also do)

go para-gliding again

see northern lights somewhere above the Arctic Circle (I've seen them once in Helsinki)

attend/organize AND participate in a masquerade

see the sun set over the Pacific Ocean

see parrots in the jungle

learn to hammer nails without twisting them and /or hitting my thumb or any other finger

go white-water rafting

....

I do have other dreams/wishes/ intentions tugged away in my heart, but the above ones are the sort of do-able ones, mostly requiring organization of resources & some planning. My heart is hiding its more demanding dreams, and some of them still sleep...

I'm exited to think that I might be able to tick some of them maybe even this year... not that I have anything planned, but I do believe that if you do not aim at something, you'll inevitable end up somewhere else ;)

Reading my list, I so sound like an explorer-wanna-be ... but who knows, wishes just might come true :)

what is your bucket-list like?

Cui bono?

I've been thinking a lot about change. All kinds of change. Partly this has been prompted by having met a lot of old friends who say things like 'oh, you haven't changed at all' and the last time we met was years ago.

There are some things about myself I would really like to change, but the outward ones are not on the top of my list. I like to be me, "warts, farts and all" (excuse my expression :) , but there are many inner characteristics and thought patterns I would like to see changed.

It takes so much time, though, that at times I am tempted to believe that real change isn't even possible.

That's why keeping a diary is so helpful... I can track my life and it encourages me to see that in the midst of terrible turmoil, and maybe even because of it, I have actually changed in some aspects. I like to think that I'm more patient, more fearless and less demanding.

Well, maybe I'm not the best judge of that... I need mirrors in my life, people close enough to me to warn me when the change I aim at takes me to wrong directions.

Because as alluring as change might seem when one feels stagnated, the all important question is the same all good detectives ask when solving a murder, Cui bono?

I so hope that my answer to that question would not merely be

Anneli