Spider web bonnet

A spider web bonnet of linen yarn. It looked so much better on my colleague's that I gave it to her. (She doesn't like modeling.) I wasn't sure if the pattern would turn out nice when I started, but the longer the tube got, the nicer it looked. Again, the pattern is from Betty Barnden's The Crochet Stitch Bible.

Down boy timeless boy

A seven years old boy with a Down syndrome walked to me a few days ago.

I've been working on weekend camps for autistic and disabled children and youth. Last weekend was his first camp, and his first nightstay outside his home, except at his grandparents. Most children on the camps are autistic, and he, too, had autistic features. He was extremely cute with his slanted eyes and wide smile, very brave, and as many Down children, disarmingly charming.

And, again as most Down children, he was slow. And when I say slow, I mean slow. Often he didn't have much clue of what he was doing, but equally often it was clear that he had a goal he was heading to. It's just that getting there took some time. It could take three minutes to climb inside a car; sometimes it took a couple of minutes to ponder upon if one should choose to drink water or juice.

My first reaction in this kind of situations is always to hurry. Oh my, why does it take this long? We have to be going already. But how to tell that to someone in whose life hurry doesn't exist? He does not speak and understands only simple sentences, simple words. He can use symbols passively: in hearing and when shown pictures designed for wordless communication, or manual signs. (Signs used by deaf people have been adopted to people with difficulties in communication so that they are used together with speech. Often Down children who cannot speak learn to actively use a limited number of manual signs or pictures.) Yet, any symbol for 'hurry' is not likely to ever be among the signs he understands. In his world, there will never be hurrying.

I don't claim to understand how his mind works (anymore than the mind of that autistic boy who escapes from his assistant only to run to the toilet to drink liquid soap). But I did have a lot of time to wonder about it when I was waiting for him to finish whatever he was doing.

One feature common with almost all the Down kids I've encountered is that they trust the world around them. They don't seem to doubt at all that their basic needs will be satisfied. Again, they almost never hide their feelings: be they happy or bored or sad, they are sure to express it. And when they are determined to something, they go for it.

Oh, I like these children. They have taught me many important lessons of happiness.

What this very boy taught me was that he's right. Hurrying doesn't exist. Or rather, it exists only in our minds. We are having a walk in a beautiful forest, birds singing, sun shining through leaves (and a possibility to spot a flying squirrel), and I worry that we are left behind the group. We are left behind. But what about it? What if it takes three minutes to climb a car? What if it takes an hour to eat a snack? Where are we going with such a speed?

It feels for me that while technology gets faster, the society—us—has to go faster and faster too. We have to work more and with more speed. We always have to be somewhere on certain time. People get upset when their mails, text messages or calls aren't answered immediately. Healthy food is expensive, and thus we have to work more to afford it. Economic growth has to continue—faster and faster—until it crashes (which is hopefully about to happen soon). Even things connected to slow lifestyle have timetables. The main reason I do not take yoga classes or take part in meditation group sittings, which are both things I would enjoy, is that I always end up rushing and feeling stressed because I'm late. And that's not something I like to feel even when I kind of have to, and certainly not on my free time.

My mind doesn't like speed. Neither does my body. Among all the people I know, these Down kids who don't understand the concept of hurrying are actually in many ways the wisest.

Hereby, I make a solemn promise. If it ever happens that a Down child is born to me, I promise I will try to learn every lesson s/he has to teach me.

Linen daisies

Too many thoughts today. Refuse to be organized. All the boxes and stuff I should pack are spread on the floor, equally unorganized. Sigh. A good thing about moving a lot, though, is that you have so little stuff that you know it can be packed in few hours.

 

But here's a crochet daisy bonnet of linen-rayon yarn. Pattern can be found in Betty Barnden's The Crochet Stitch Bible (which is certainly my personal bible). Behind it a derelict yard in Haapsalu, Estonia, and Baltic sea.

(I don't like working with plant fibres as much as with wool. They never work quite the way I'd like. Fibers are too long and independent, always going to the wrong side of the hook. But it's summer. Not a wool season. Instead it's a butterfly season. I saw a beautiful orange tip—and a picture of an orange tip trinket someone had made.)

Welcome, dandelions!

The first dandelions are rising their wrinkled heads. When I approach my vegetable garden in May, I sigh in deep despair when I see dandelions, persistently sprouting everywhere and apparently planning to occupy all the carefully nurtured, fertile soil. Like this very individual. She's bound to die.

But, outside my tiny vegetable patch, I love them. Their leaves are excellent salad and tasty in soups, and they clean your liver when drunk as infusion. Dandelion roots I am to thank for dissolving my gallstones. For real. They should be gathered either in early spring or late autumn, cleaned, chopped and dried. For two weeks you drink a big pot of dandelion root tea the first thing in the morning—preferably with dandelion leaves, calendula, yarrow, peppermint and nettle—and don't eat for an hour or two afterwards. Dandelion root increases the amount of gall and slowly helps you to rid yourself of the stones.

And they taste even worse than they look.

Dandelion flowers, again, have this awesome, honey-like taste. They can be used in salads, but as they are usually full of those tiny black insects, they lose their shape and prettiness before you manage to get rid of the bugs. That doesn't matter, though, when you brew sima, a Finnish spring mead, as you can give the bugs hours to leave the flowers (if you stir the flowers once in a while, they evacuate themselves faster). Recommended to do outside, though.

Dandelion mead

2,5 l      dandelions
5 l         water
1 dl       molasses
4 1/2 dl sugar
1           lemon
1/4 tsp  yeast

In bottles
1/2 tsp sugar
4-5      raisins

Gather dandelion flowers when it's sunny (otherwise they tend to be half closed). After removing the bugs, bring flowers and water to boil and let simmer for 15 minutes. Add molasses, sugar and rinsed and sliced lemon. Let it cool until handwarm and add the yeast. Ferment for approximately 24 hours (that is, just leave it to be). Sieve and bottle: add a dash of sugar and a few raisins on the bottom of the bottle and then pour the liquid over them. Put the bottles in a fridge. Your mead is ready when the raisins rise to the surface.

A tub reportage

It's spring. It's finally a real spring. I've seen brimstones, peacock butterflies, a heliconian, a mourning cloak and today, finally, gossamer-winged butterflies (blue-wings in Finnish). 

And I've got a tub for the summer cottage, originally used for storing cereal. I guess decades ago. I'm trying to make it swell, but there are some very persistent caps...

My Khmer past meets my inner skeptic (and clubs her straight on the face)

I keep having dreams of Khmer Rouge, running through forests in eastern Cambodia, and Vietnamese guerillas. The sun is hot, the forest is hot, everyone's sweaty. At least I'm sweaty. And scared, like hell. We all carry guns. I don't know the name of my gun; probably I didn't know it then either. I wonder what I knew. Not much, as I wasn't very old. Maybe ten, maybe twelve. A boy, I was.

Dreams come from different plains, and it's often impossible to trace their origin. These dreams, however, the Khmer dreams, were awoken by reading Tiziano Terzani's book A Fortune-teller Told Me. It's an awesome book. The writer is a correspondent for Der Spiegel in Asia, having lived there for decades. Some time at 70's he meets a fortune-teller and is told not to fly on year 1993. He has almost twenty years to ponder if he should take it seriously or not, and on the last moment decides not to fly on that year. He even manages to deal with his employers that he will only write earthbound stories on that year. As an experiment, he goes to a fortune-teller in every city he visits, to hear his fortune told and to ask about the prophecy. It's absolutely intriguing to read how his scepticism slowly vanishes and how, by meeting monks, shamans, fortune-tellers, he finds new perspectives on existence.

Having studied and practiced Buddhist teachings for years, I have myself dwelled in a Zen temple in Japan and in a forest monastery in the south of Thailand, visited numerous temples wherever I've travelled, and practiced Vipassana meditation daily for years. On the path further from the western skepticism, my thoughts have often followed the same ways as Terzani's. And on my way I've encountered all kind of views to Buddhist teachings.

One of them, and in a way a really interesting one, is the attitude one regularly encounters among westerners who practice meditation. (I should say western men, as I've never met a woman who would say such things without hesitation.) It's the so called scientific approach to Buddhism.

The goal of Buddhist practice is to see things as they really are and through this knowledge be liberated of all suffering. Because no faith in any supernatural phenomena is called for, it suits perfectly for a person of "scientific" upbringing who realizes there's something wrong with the world but either doesn't want or isn't able to see through what he's learned to believe. (I use scientific in quotation marks, because often this worldview is quite far of those of the ever-experimenting scientists.) In a way there's nothing wrong with this: after all it's just one approach and not more right or wrong than any other. Problems arise, however, if one is not ready to let his inherited worldview go. And this does happen a lot.

The idea of Buddhism is that you do not have to, or should, believe anything that you do not experience by yourself to be true. In Pali canon three different kinds of wisdom are listed: one learned (sutamayā paññā), one reflected (cintāmayā paññā) and one experienced (bhāvanāmayā paññā). That is, you may hear something that sounds wise; you may ponder upon it and come to a conclusion it is wise; but you should not believe it unless you have in your own body-mind experienced that it is wise and true. Which is exactly what is often missing in Western thought. And not even just missing—totally underrated and looked down upon. (I could give a bunch of examples of this, but just think how little value your own account of your pains and sensations has when visiting a doctor.)

As a consequence, experiences not fitting to the "scientific" idea of what is true are ignored. The idea that our experiences mean nothing if they are not scientifically proved, is so deeply rooted to our understanding of ourselves and the world that we don't believe what we see or feel, if it anyhow strays from what we have been taught. And this inner skeptic with his/her nasty voice keeps telling us that our own, sensation-based experiences of reality simply do not count.

I often try to to hit this inner skeptic on a face with a club. That would serve her right. But at times she still manages to raise her head, informing me that nothing I experience is true unless a scientist proves it. And then I don't believe what is clear and in front of my eyes. And even more often, she tells me not to believe what someone else has experienced. Like I was the only one who can have a direct experience to things as they are!

It also happens that I keep quiet of things I know to be true, because they do not fit to this "scientific" idea of our world and it's frustrating to encounter other people's inner skeptics. And yet, not telling about it doesn't change it that I do remember my life before.

As you may already guess, it was in Cambodia. I was a child and I lost my mother in a bombing. I remember some places—shacks with metal roofs, the color of the ground, leaves on the ground. I remember how my mother was gone and I had to get by all alone; I remember the fear and how I looked for edible rubbish and tried to find a place to stay for a night.

Memories have come in bits. Two and half years ago, my parents sold the house where I grew up, with very little consulting or interest towards my feelings. After the usual sadness and anger, this woke up a terrible fear. I was so terrified I couldn't get anything done and had to take a sick-leave for two whole months. I was trembling. 'A fear of what, this strong?' I would ask myself. And one day, walking home from a nurse I was regularly seeing, I decided to follow the fear—just to feel it, instead of fearing the fear.

And there I was, in the middle of this bombed village, my mother gone, pieces of rooftops everywhere. Later, on a meditation course, I remembered much more.

But I also remember how, in this life, in 2007, I arrived in Phnom Penh airport. I remember the first ride on a motocycle through shacks and shelters homeless people had built for them on suburbs, and how I felt: I had come home. Yet I don't remember anyone else having this feeling on arrival: they were simply paralyzed of what they saw. (They all said the same thing, 'These people are, just, so, rootless.')

And now these dreams have come. While they are very vivid and I can sense and smell the jungle, see the sweat on the necks of guerillas, hear the sound of the faint wind on leaves of the trees, and the sun is bright, bright, bright—I still can't tell the plot of what is happening. I wake up in a hot jungle, slowly realizing that it is another life in a suburb of Helsinki and the room gradually takes shape around me. I get up and sit on a chair, waiting for the dream to disappear as they tend to do. But when I go back to sleep, it continues from where it was left.

I can even point the part of my body where these memories are stored. My Khmer past. I almost wish my inner skeptic would wake up and rationalize these dreams away. And she does try. But she can only give me weak arguments I know not to be true.

This leaves one question I'm not ready to answer yet. When I died—I was still a child then—I was born again in a wealthy country into a loving family with all the possibilities to do good. And not only that. I was lucky enough to be led back to the meditation technique that helps me to see things clearer. At times the true happiness beyond all the fear shows me signs of how happy one could be. Truly happy.

I am this lucky.

So, the question is: what can I do for those who stayed? Who didn't die fearing, but who had to continue living in fear. What?

Unseasonally Easter

Easter is almost a month in the past and for reasons unclear to me, my spouse is still obsessed with Easter eggs. Or, actually, with the story told to children about who lays the eggs—the famous Easter bunny versus Easter rooster controversy. (Apparently some people have not heard of the rooster, ever, and obviously this won't do.)

My spouse does indeed live with a walking encyclopedia with a sense of humor of an Asperger when it comes to facts. I suspect it's sometimes tiresome. Then at times it's useful. So just imagine his shock when he found out that the encyclopedia contains no information about Easter bunnies and rabbits at all. (And very little interest towards the subject, plus some faint memory that there was something about either animal in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. Probably the rooster. Or, wait, maybe the rabbit?)

It's a good thing I have a lot of free time.

I started my quest suspecting that the bunny‒rooster controversy may have something to do with the east‒west division. Finland is located between eastern and western traditions, which bunch of our own customs added to it, and that's why we are popular among religious and folk scientists. That is also why traditions, as well as dialects, are often divided into eastern and western. My family is from Carelia—that is, east—and I remember being told since child that it is the rooster who lays the eggs. If my theory was correct, it would leave bunnies for the west.

First it seemed that this may actually be the case. The bunny tradition has a middle European origin: an Easter Hare was first mentioned in 1682 referring to an Alsace tradition. Rabbits and hares—like eggs—used to be symbols of fertility, for reasons quite obvious (although I certainly didn't know before that female rabbits can concieve again when still pregnant with the previous litter). It was also thought that hares are hermaphrodites and can thus reproduce without losing their virginity, which led to an association with Virgin Mary. The European hare later changed into a bunny in America.

It seems, however, that Easter rooster is a Scandinavian tradition. Here it claims that it is the rooster (påsktuppen) who lays the eggs, except that eggs laid by him are of cardboard and filled with candy. There are also blogs with Swedes horrified with the idea of a bunny. In Swedish Christian tradition the rooster is considered a symbol of vigilance, and in these beautiful illustrations the rooster claims that the hen has betrayed him, making him thus Jesus and the hen Judas. And while wikipedia keeps quiet about the rooster, googling in Finnish gives a lot of hits.

That about my theory. It seems that egg-laying bunnies dwell in America; hares in Europe; roosters in Scandinavia. But what about Russia, where many eastern Finnish traditions come from? My Russian informant tells me that a Russian saying goes,

"Every child knows that a hen lays eggs."

But why the abundance of eggs? And why chicks? The answer is simple. Because eggs were considered dairy, it was forbidden to eat them during the lent. If they were not let to hatch, they had to be hard-boiled in order to store them until the Easter feast, and then they had to be eaten quite quickly. Naturally it was also a good time to let eggs hatch—that's why the chicks.

Obviously a lot of symbolism is involved. The hard shell symbolizes the tomb of Christ and cracking the shell his resurrection from death. Painting eggs red symbolizes the blood Christ shed when crusified. In traditions even older, Zoroastriand painted eggs for their spring celebration, and in Fenno-Ugric mythology the world is created of a fallen egg.

Apparently people have also been toying with eggs, tapping, dumping, jarping, dancing and rolling them down the hills. Incidentally, the highest peak of otherwise very flat Estonia is called Suur Munamägi (Great Egg Hill, 318 m), and when residing in Southern Estonia I was told it was named so because people used to go there on Easter to roll down eggs.

And still one final piece of information: Easter is named after an old Germanic goddess Ēostre. The month named after her was equivalent to our April and a feast was held on her honor to celebrate spring.