I started reading “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf yesterday on the tube. I was on my way home from French class, and quite tired. It was a library book, and between the pages in the middle of the first chapter, I found a shopping list. On a pink piece of paper, written in blue, blotchy ink in a small, sprawling hand.

900 g cabbage

leek

yellow onion

beetroots

egg

optionally some minced pork

milk

yoghurt

liverwurst

pickled gherkin

blutsaft

frozen puff pastry dough

apples

satsumas

walnuts

almond flakes (spelled incorrectly in Swedish)

healthy porrige

I don’t know if I only was in a wierd mood last night, but for me, it read like poetry. It triggered my imagination. I think this person, who read “Orlando” before me, was going to make a stir fry with cabbage and then bake it into empanada style pastries. She was filling up her breakfast food supply. And I think she was a she, because she also seemed to be needing to fill up on iron. Iron deficiency is such a common issue for young women.

Then a man got on the train and sat down next to me. Quite handsome, my age, with a beard. But he was wearing a baseball cap.

Assholes are people too

it said. I found it hilarious, as a thing, but I’m not sure what choosing to wear it on his head says about him. Nothing too sympathetic, I think.

All in all, a quite amusing tube ride.

I just finished “Bonjour tristesse” by Françoise Sagan. Such a lovely little piece of pubescent melodrama. To begin with so light, easy, carefree. So decadent nineteen-fifties French. And then all that freedom turns on itself and brings on pitch-black darkness and the following cynicisms. Lovely.

And the main character Cecile, in the middle of the book, writes: I understood that I had greater predisposition to kiss a boy in the sun than for getting an academic degree. Just like me – only, the complete opposite. I really understand why it has become such a classic.

And I just fixed my bike. I took a tour around the block, and it works perfectly, all 21 gears and everything. I’m so incredibly capable, I don’t know what to do with myself. I can cook and I can knit and I can fix bikes.

Next, I’ll have to learn how to make yarn. I just have to befriend a sheep first.

Oh, I’m having so much fun picking out the color scheme for the mappings that we are making in class right now.

And OK, I know one should use as intuitive colors as possible when defining one’s symbology, like green for forest and blue for water. But it’s also fun to just play around a bit sometimes too. Make water yellow and wetlands in red. I can’t be just all work all the time.

I’ll change them back to the proper stuff eventually anyway.

I’ve started knitting and crocheting again, several projects at once and there is yarn all over my room. Big and small balls of color spread out over my bed, desk, shelves and floor.

One of my favorite fantasy series as a teenager was about a girl called Alanna who dresses up as a boy and goes to the king’s castle to become a knight. However, she also possesses magic powers, and in this particular universe, the natural talent for magic that some people have has to be channeled. Objects, for example, are excellent ways to channel magic, especially if the object is something that the magician knows well. Basically, the more familiar you are with the non-magical use of an object, the better are you at channeling your magic through it.

If I possessed magic powers, yarn would definitely be my magic object. I feel so confident with yarn. I know how it behaves and I can make it do almost anything (at least within the general restrictions that the laws of nature put on fibers such as wool and nylon).

Right now, I’m crocheting patchwork pillow cases. I love combining the colors. I almost wish I wouldn’t need to go to school at all tomorrow.

Finally, these five weeks of two-hundred percent occupancy are over. Four days ago, I turned in the last master’s thesis prep papers and had a four hour exam about landscape ecology and aerial photograph interpretation. Then, this long, lovely weekend came. Tomorrow, the second, project based part of the landscape ecology course starts. To the SRC I won’t be going back until June, when my internship begins.

I have worked so hard, it feels like I can’t remember the last time I hung out with myself. Just myself. I haven’t had time to, as the First Nation North American saying recommends, sit down completely still every seventh day, so that my soul can catch up with my body. That kind of disconnectedness makes me grumpy, irritable and sometimes even mean. I haven’t been a good friend or classmate or daughter or sister these last couple of weeks.

Therefore, I baked for my classmates and brought it with me to our last day of presentations. Everyone was happy and seemed to really like the biscuits, so I think that my past grumpiness was forgiven – but still. I don’t think I should do this double work thing again. It doesn’t make anyone happy.

I spent the weekend with my mom and friends. On Wednesday, last of April, we celebrated Valborg, first through dinner with mom’s friends and dancing to Nisse and Jakob playing the piano and guitar in our living room (oh, how I miss having someone around who plays on my piano – I need to invite my piano playing friends over more often). After, I went to a bonfire in the Old Town with some high school friends, and we ended up in Elin’s kitchen playing spin the bottle until after midnight.

First of May (a public holiday in Sweden) was incredibly windy, but sunny, and I managed to muster some real fighting spirit at the traditional labor day demonstration together with Lina, here captured by Ashley. There were so many people out, it felt so encouraging. I have a good feeling about the upcoming elections.

On Friday, I went to IKEA and bought some pillows, and in the evening I had a wonderful cheese fondue dinner at Marita’s together with Frida and Elin. Yesterday, I spent some time with my brother, and then I went to Pawel’s birthday party, spending most of the evening talking to Robert and Johan. Such wonderful young men, those two. After, I even had time to swing by the medieval themed pub where Ashley, Jessica, Roweena and some other people were drinking mead.

To round this lovely long weekend off, I spent part of today finally bringing out my bike, trying to fix the tires. Turns out, they couldn’t be fixed. The rubber is too old and cracked. But now, at least I’ve taken the bike apart. Now I just need to buy a new tire and put it together again. My hands got all greasy. I felt so capable.

So, you see, a weekend full of catching up with friends, getting perspective on all the studying. I feel rested and content. Now, I’m ready to go back to university again.

I took a break from school today. Or, I made a power point presentation for tomorrow this morning. But then I went to the market-garden and bought soil, seeds and plants, just like last year, and then I spent almost all day outside in the gazebo replanting all of our pot plants and the newly obtained herbs. The sun was shining and it was so warm that I could sit there, with soil all the way up to my elbows, in a sleeveless tunic and knee-long tights. It’s so nice, to get my hands dirty, to actually do something with them, sit on the floor, barefoot, and shovel soil into pots. Getting grief edges on my nails. (Grief edges as in the Swedish word sorgkanter. Probably the most poetic term for dirt under your nails in any language.)

And the result was amazing. It is still too cold to let the plants stay overnight in the gazebo, but soon, we’ll have an entire little jungle in there. Just you wait. I’m going to do an internship in the city during the first half of the summer, so I’m not going anywhere. I’m so looking forward to June.

Or just May. When the course is done and I’ll be allowed to sleep again.

I just finished a book, “Friheten förde oss hit” by Gunnar Ardelius. It was good. It was about a family that moved down to Liberia in the 1960s, the man has gotten a job in the administration at the Swedish mining company LAMCO and the wife doesn’t want to be there. She doesn’t even know the names of the threatening jungle trees species:

The nameless nature in Liberia made her worried, she missed a connection between language and nature. At home, every plant – trolldruva, nattskratta, besksöta, gullregn, ögontröst, kråkvicker – seemed to say something to her inner reality in the language of the long nights and the large distances. In Liberia she was a flower pulled up by its roots, really she belonged back home on dry slopes, bogs and fens, here she was completely naked and fragile.

There is a concept within geopolitics called heartland. It was first developed at the turn of the last century, and basically captured the idea that some political geographers had of there being regions of the world that are key for world domination. Back then, the most important heartland was identified as East-Central Europe, but the concept has later been used within Latin American geopolitics too.

There was scary authoritarianism in the social sciences in the early 20th century. But if you skip the world domination thing, and instead think about heartland from a more individual perspective. The idea that there are places that have a special significance in a person’s life. A spatial core, if you will. Landscapes, plants, names that pull at our heartstrings. Like a first love – but even more. Places that define us and ground us, however far we’ve journeyed since in our lives.

I love landscapes and I love weathers. From the monsoon rains in coastal Tanzania to the dry desert breeze in the Namib to the thousand shades of green in the temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island, the thunder over the mountain silhouettes at the horizon on the Bolivian altiplano, the otherworldly endurance of the Icelandic hills and rivers, the fragrant post-summer rain air of Sarajevo, the smell of dryness and thyme when the sun goes down behind a Greek island. I love them all and I couldn’t choose where I love it the most.

But in the spring, walking through a typical middle Swedish mixed-old oak forest, the forest floor covered in wood anemones. The afternoon sun so piercingly clear. There is something that falls into place. For a moment, just being is enough. This is where I belong. This is the place I’ll always be pulled back to. This is where things start making sense and where my fragility isn’t a weakness, but a strength. My heartland.

I’ve been hurting people lately. Inadvertently, due to thoughtlessness and miss-communication. And in my attempts to clean it up, I put my foot in my mouth and make the mess even worse, making the hurt spread. I haven’t been able to sleep for more than a week.

So, now I’m avoiding people. It feels like the safest thing to do. In my exhaustion and absentmindedness from all the studying I’m doing, I can’t be trusted to behave around people with feelings and issues of their own. I’m an elephant in an English garden and until the last of April, I will not be able to do anything about that.

I sit by computers and read articles instead. And I study geodatabases, explore the data my teachers have provided the class with. I play around with colors. There is a visual part of GIS work, an aesthetic, that just appeals to me. It’s not only crunching numbers. It is also appearance. Room to have an eye for detail. Aren’t they lovely, the colors?

(Well, there are some issues with projection incompatibility and lack of metadata – oaks can’t grow in lakes, even if they are really really old – but hey, who ever said that anything in life was unproblematic?)

I found a document with quotes from “Över vattnet går jag – skiss till en poetik” by Pia Tafdrup. She wrote (in my translation):

The world is understood from within. Therefore I feel the world through myself. It might sound like hubris, but is rather the opposite – a humble way to approach that which isn’t me.

*

I am alone with the pain. It is all my own, but that is not enough: it is an image of how alone I am – like the fact that I won’t be put to answer for the harm that I have caused upon myself.

*

My poems always carry an intrinsic necessity and are therefore infinitely vulnerable in a meeting with the outside world. It is a special action to show something that no one has wished for or requested. Every time.

Oh, how I miss writing. I never really wrote poetry, but the prose. Kirke asked me the other day if I would write a short story for her that she could turn into a short film. Maybe that’s what I should do this summer.