The living know that, at daybreak, the soul will leave them and make its way to the places of its past--the schools and dormitories of its youth, army barracks and tenements, houses razed to the ground and rebuilt, places that recall love and guilt, difficulties and unbridled happiness, optimism and ecstasy, memories of grace meaningless…
The "kaamos"--sunless midwinter--has weighed upon nature for months now. And when the sun appears on the southern sky it is the first sign of new spring's coming, a spring which is still many frosts, weeks and months away. -Urpo HuhtanenThis past weekend, I traveled to the Lapland and back. I had imagined many times before…
“I would far prefer to have things happen as they naturally do, such as the mousse refusing to leave the mold, the potatoes sticking to the skillet, the apple charlotte slowly collapsing. One of the secrets of cooking is to learn to correct something if you can, and bear with it if you cannot.” ― Julia…
When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.”…
In fact, she'd long since disposed of her braid and her dimples, and instead toiled for her husband and her mother, raised the children, loyally ran for him, her lord and master, to the fresh food market, didn't have time for anything, and yet miraculously was always everywhere on time (she tried so hard to…
Being here in Finland, it's fairly tricky. I'm happy the temperature was above freezing today and that the snow is melting; the downside to this, however, is that there are now crazy puddles to navigate (my legs are short; I'm practically doing Olympic style leaps across the street). Also, without ever having studied the language…
Maybe what cold is, is the timewe measure the love we have always had, secretly,for our own bones, the hard knife-edged lovefor the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybethat is what it means the beautyof the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.In the season of snow,in the immeasurable cold,we grow cruel…
For a while, what with all this moving and settling I was becoming frantic, schizophrenic, and even, perhaps, necrophilic, combined with anguish, frustration and ill-temper. But, finally getting into the book-work again, I find I work awfully slowly. There is so much that has been written, by people so much more professional than I, that I…
What is sometimes called a tongue of flameor an arm extended burning is only the longred and orange branch of a green maplein early September reaching into the greenest fieldout of the green woods at the edge of which the birch trees appear a little tattered tired of sustaining delicacyall through the…
Dining with Dostoevsky 