Life, with the garden
Location: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada • • • Visit: March 2012
We’re in the beginning of 2012. The year that I turned 24. The year I could have gotten my bachelor’s degree in geography from Stockholm university.
The year that I will not get my bachelor’s degree in geography, because I’ve taken a term off to go traveling. I don’t know if this is a good way to solve the problem of inspiration, but that is what I came up with. I needed something new. I’m going to western North America.
To get real perspective, I need to get out of my comfort zone. Away from Stockholm, away from the intellectual business of university studies, away from my own language.
Expect spelling mistakes, grammatical hiccups, sentences that wind themselves into knots. Hopefully I will get better with time, especially now that I am in Canada, but I can’t promise anything.
It is exciting, challenging and scary, writing in a foreign tongue, all at the same time. It’s an adventure with words and I can only hope that I am ready for it.
The importance of a name. It sets the tone. It is a starting point. And I’ve spent a lot of time thinking of what to name this collection of texts – the documentation of my five months long inspiration search in North America, and beyond.
In human geography, researchers often speak of different kinds of geographies. Feminist geographies, time geographies, geographies of inclusion and exclusion. The spatial aspects of different structures and networks in our societies. It is an interesting way of looking at the world, and ever since my first fateful semester of geography studies, I haven’t been able to shake off the need to think in these spatial terms. It’s thrilling, to be able to put some of all the confusing phenomena that I am confronted with every day into a greater context. That’s the way I look upon the world now.
And so. The name should start with geographies. What of the end? What is it, really, that I’m looking for? What is the point of all this traveling, the searching? The starting point of my decision to go abroad was the restlessness. I’m looking for inspiration. But, in the end, what I think it all boils down to is belonging. I feel lost, and I am searching for a place in the world where I can feel that I belong. And this is not necessarily an actual place. I rather think that it is more of an abstract place, something that has to be found among people, in a way of being, in a way of looking at the world and your place in it. And it can look very different, depending on situation and need. And by meeting new people and being confronted with new places and new situations, you are kind of forced to think about and define this place where you belong. Perspective and inspiration.
So. That’s a little of what my trip is about. And there we have it. The name. Geographies of belonging.
A March Thursday afternoon, in Edmonton: I’m sitting in the temperate pyramid greenhouse at the Muttart Conservatory, Edmonton’s botanical garden. It’s slightly cold, but with my Peruvian alpaca sweater I won’t freeze. The smell in here is heavenly, a combination of pine and herbs and the early blooming daffodils.
It’s not big, the conservatory, with four greenhouse pyramids: the arid, the tropical, the temperate and the feature (today holding an exhibit of the teddy bears having a picnic), but it’s pretty. The smells and the sound of running water in both the temperate and tropical pyramids have such a soothing influence on me, I could sit here for hours. After having taken the whole tour through all the pyramids, I sat down next to a blooming banana plant in the tropical pyramid and caught up with some writing. When my hands started to tremble from low blood sugar, I went out to eat the small lunch of boiled eggs, an apple and a carrot that I had taken with me, and then ended up here again, in the temperate pyramid.
I think I could enjoy having a garden. My Finnish grandmother was an amazing gardener, and the memories I have of all the flowers in her garden when I came there every summer as a child border on fantastical. The lilies and roses and poppies that simply flowed over in her flower beds. But it’s a lot of work, keeping a garden, and to be honest, what I enjoy the most is just sitting like this, breathing, taking in all the calming shades of green.
It was in my grandmother’s garden that I started writing my only finished novel manuscript at nineteen, and I can’t count all the short stories that have been produced there. I write well in a well-tended garden. Maybe I should start making a habit of going to the botanical garden at Stockholm University, the Bergianska, when I return. As a way to get my thoughts straight. I don’t do yoga – I watch trees.
Katja Malmborg 