in which we close out October
dispatch 29
hello friends.
Today is going to be a little different! I thought that when I touched down in Finland I would be flooded by endless inspiration and that I would write and write. And in some ways that has been true, but a lot of what I have written has been processing work, done in a frenzied half hour of the day in stolen moments. The remainder of the time I’ve spend experiencing.
There’s a video that I love in which Ross Gay talks about his truly beautiful “The Book of Delights”, saying that it was his treatise on delight and the labor of delight. That line is on my mind a lot lately. This trip to rural Finland, where my mother is from and where her family still lives, has meant uncovering some brand new (and yet ancient) magic in the land of my ancestors. I am awed by and grateful for the newness while I am desperately missing my sweet home life. And while the missing is an ache deep in my stomach, it too is a delight. It feels very tender to truly miss something, and in that to know that you are a part of something worth missing.
Delight and pleasure seem simple, but as Gay so wisely noted, they come wrapped in layers of association and experience that make them complex and nuanced. They are personal. We can only delight in what we delight in right now because of who we are right now.
I will be processing this trip for a long time, but I can only experience it right now. And I don’t want to spend this time thinking about what to think, at the expense of feeling what I feel. I am resisting the urge to immediately judge and catalog everything. I don’t want to turn this into essays quite yet.
What I do want to report is that I have taken to the woods. The Finnish woods feel like home though they are totally new to me. New sounds, new shades of green, new discoveries behind every stump and turn. I am learning the ways that the golden leaves of the birch trees dance against the deep and never ending green of the pines in the few hours or sunlight we see each afternoon. I am learning that the taste of lingonberries is better when you have hopped across a brook and run your hands through their low crawling shrubs, gathering them like so many forgotten rubies into your hat. I’m learning that wild berries become less bitter after the first frost when most people have long since abandoned the patches. I am learning that I like forgotten treasures best.
So, I’m not sending a new essay today (though this has gotten longer than I intended already!), but rather some collected pictures of my latest delights. I hope that wherever you are in the world today, wherever you are in time in space, that you are finding the particular delights that speak to you. Hold them tight for the moment that you can hold them at all.
with love until next month,
Lisa
