Life, with the garden
Location: Gnesta, Sweden • • • Visit: June and July 2017
It was lying by the window, curled up, gleaming blue. It must have flown in on a warm afternoon, windows open to let the breeze in, and then not found its way back out. Starved.
It’s a purple emperor (Apatura iris), from the right angle the wings take on the depth of the August night sky.
According to father’s butterfly book, it only lives in the deciduous forests in southern Sweden – but then again, the book is twelve years old and summers have gone all awry, winters too, could a Scania butterfly have caught a northbound wind and ended up lost in our aspen, oak and hazel grove by the mid-Swedish lake?
How did it come to be here, and is that why it died? Or was that just an accident, like with the silver-washed fritillaries and green-veined whites that sometimes get stuck inside the sun porch? Will there be other purple emperors fluttering among the lavender and roses now, or was that the only one?
And what kinds of little accidents does the world have in store for the rest of us?
In the middle of June, I moved. Left the apartment in Skarpnäck where I’ve lived since I was three, and moved into a new one on the edge of town, close to Stockholm University. Between twenty and twenty-five, I traveled a lot and also lived in Uppsala for a while, so it wasn’t the first time I left the apartment, not really, but. I have never emptied it. I have always had my room there, with my bed and my bookshelves. For twenty-six years, it has been Home.
But now, mom was coming back from Liberia for good and I felt it was time to move on. Get a place of my own. Shed the last skin of my childhood, in a way. It felt exciting. And also: strange. A tinge of melancholy. Seeing my childhood bedroom empty. Looking so much smaller than it did when full of memories and furniture. I hosted The Last Skarpnäck Cake Party, it was a beautiful June evening and after, I slept one last night on a mattress on that empty floor.
And then unpacking in the new place. Realizing how much of my stuff is dedicated to chronicling my life. The books that I’ve read and cared about. The photographs I’ve put in albums, from before everything turned digital. All the folders of high school papers and short stories and four generations of blogs, copied and printed. Journals, CDs, earrings. Such an incredible amount of material for a biographer. I wonder what this obsession of documenting my own life says about me. Moving homes, a degree of rootlessness in the process, made me wonder about life. I have not yet finished the thought.
Hanna allowed me to plant my gazebo rhubarb in her allotment garden. I hope it survives the winter. I hope it manages to adjust to its new environment. I hope I do too.
Some time ago, I read two books. It wasn’t an intentional choice, but they happened to be autobiographies and, coincidentally, the authors belong to the same writing group in Portland. After having read them, it kind of made sense. The books were about journeys, about finding a way out of a broken past, big sorrow, drugs and destructive sex, a desperate need to feel something. And a will to tell the story of that journey.
The first book was “The Chronology of Water” by Lidia Yuknavitch. Raw and furious and full of passion. Yuknavitch did a beautiful TED talk about being a misfit.
The second book was “Wild – A Journey from Lost to Found” by Cheryl Strayed. Definitely easier to access, it was turned into a Hollywood movie starring Reese Witherspoon. But also, full of sorrow.
They inspired me. This way of putting your life into words. Especially Yuknavitch’s fragmented telling of her life. She is oceans more brutal than I could ever be, I don’t crash like a wrecking ball into life, but the way of structuring memories into moments, pictures, an assemblage of the senses. Telling a story in the blink of an eye. I think that’s what I’ve been trying to do, a little, since I started writing at age eleven. And then, a lot, when I started blogging at eighteen. And why I have never managed to stop, just shut it down, even when the time between blog posts has turned into months. Never had the heart to. There is a need there, I think. Quiet, but persistent.
But also, it conflicts with a much louder need. The need of doing good. The one that sees the wrongs in the world and wants to make a difference. The one that guided me onto the path of problem-solving environmental research and sustainability science. How could I justify spending time on exploring myself through words, when the world is on fire?
Lately, though, I think I’ve started to realize something. The world is incomprehensively complex. To actually do any good in it, you need to make good decisions and play to your strengths. But how can you ever do that, if you don’t know who you are? Some people might know from the moment they’re born, at least that’s what it seems like. Those together people who just act and do well and don’t worry. But for the rest of us. We need to find our way. Sometimes, just running out into the world without understanding where you come from can lead to skewed judgments and poor decisions and in the end do more harm than good. Sometimes, dealing with yourself is the best thing you can do for everyone else.
And I think, maybe, this is where authors like Yuknavitch and Strayed are contributing to solving a little piece of this complex puzzle of our world on fire. Through their introspection inspiring others to look inside themselves too.
We just have to remember not to get stuck in there. Look inside, and then, look up and enter the world, clear-eyed, whole, and with a purpose.
Katja Malmborg 