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29 lokakuuta 2013

Viikonloppupäiväkirja. Weekend diary.

Perjantai
Näen unia, jotka voisivat olla Calvinon kirjoittamia (tai ehkä myös Studio Ghiblin animaatioista): kaupunkeja täynnä myrskyäviä kanaaleita, halkeilevia keltakivisiä muureja, kaikkialle leviäviä sydänpuita. En oikeastaan koskaan näe unta arkisista asioista tai käy tutuissa paikoissa; jos uskonkin olevani vaikka mummolan pihalla, tajuan herättyäni, ettei mummolassa ole hautausmaata tai karviaislabyrinttia. Päivän ajan palaan unien jälkiutuun, kuin äkkiä pieni määrä maagista savua laskeutuisi päiväkodin eteiseen tai bussiin.

Haluan sanoa myös: katsoessani muiden parisuhteita tiesin aina, etten koskaan vaihtaisi omaa elämääni yhteenkään niistä. Seison mieluummin yksin kalliolla saarella keskellä Baikal-järveä, istun junissa ja laivoissa ja lentokoneissa kirjojen kanssa, lakaisen lehtiä temppeleissä, imen itseeni luumunkukkien koko kauneuden.
Joskus kun mies kaivaa esiin pinon laskuja ja laskee, paljonko ensi viikolla saapuvasta palkasta jää rahaa ruokaan, katson häntä epäuskoisena ja tunnen kuinka todellinen minä irtoaa jonnekin kattoon. Hetken ajan olen varma, ettei tämä avioliitto voi toimia; päälleni kasaantuvat huolet, joita en itse kotiini toisi. Sitten lähdemme uimaan, mutta uimisen sijaan päädymmekin laskemaan vesiliukumäestä imitoiden Angry Birdsejä. (Vaikeinta on olla valkoinen lintu, hauskinta bumerangilintu.) Jäämme katsomaan vesipalloa. Kotona paistan falafelejä ja syömme niitä tahinin kanssa. Kissa kiertyy onnesta kerälle enkä muista, milloin minulla olisi viimeksi ollut niin hauskaa.

Lauantai
Olen melkein koko päivän yksin ja kirjoitan. En romaania, vaikka se kiehuu mieleni pohjassa. Kirjoitan väitöskirjan kommentoitua sisällysluetteloa ja apurahahakemuksen toteuttamissuunnitelmaa. Taon Angry Birdsejä, niin kuin aina kirjoittaessani virallisia asioita. Jos olen oikein epätoivoinen, pelaan muitakin pelejä. Joogavenytykset siirtävät niskasäryn päähän. Illalla käyn taas uimassa.

Sunnuntai
Viiden vuoden Kysymyksiä&vastauksia päiväkirja kysyy, milloin tein viimeksi jotakin hullua. Miten niin hullua? Teen luultavasti hulluja asioita koko ajan, mutta olisin ehkä vähän surullinen, jos ajattelisin ne hulluiksi. Käymme kirjamessuilla, kahmimme Basamin alennushyllyistä euron kirjoja ja ostaisimme palan metsää, mutta sitä ei voi ostaa kortilla. Ilahdun, kun tapaan ystävän miehen, jolla on oma kustantamo. Sieltä menemme bussilla Haartmanin hammaspäivystykseen. Olimme siellä myös tasan viikko sitten, ja mies ehdottaa, että kannattaisi varata valmiiksi aika ensi viikolle. Olen melkein pettynyt, kun päivystysjono on niin lyhyt, koska en ehdi kuin lukea Ikimetsäsäätiön esitteen ja kirjoittaa kaksi korttia, vaikka kirjoja olisi ollut vaikka kuinka monta. Ostamme M-marketista viisi pakettia teetä. Kotona teen palak tofua ja siemenleipää ja alan suunnitella matkaopasta muinaiseen Japaniin.




Friday
I have dreams that could be written by Calvino (or perhaps from Studio Ghibli animations): cities full of stormy canals, cracking walls of yellow stone, heart trees spreading everywhere. I almost never have dreams of mundane things or visit familiar places; if I believe to be for example at grandma's yard, when waking up I realize there's no cemetery or gooseberry maze there. During the day I return to the hazy traces of the dreams, like a tiny bit of magical smoke had suddenly descended to the front room of the kindergarten, or a bus.

I also want to mention: while looking at other people's marriages and relationships, I always knew I would never change my life to theirs. I would rather stand alone on a rocky island in the middle of lake Baikal, surround myself with books in trains and ferries and planes, sweep fallen leaves in temples, breath in the whole beauty of plum flowers. Sometimes, when my husband piles up all his bills in front of him and counts how much money we have for food, I look at him incredulously, feeling the real me floating somewhere on the ceiling. For a moment I'm sure this marriage can't last; worries I would never bring home heap up on me. Then we go swimming, but instead of swimming we glide on the water slide imitating Angry Birds. (It's most difficult to be the white bird and most fun to be the boumerang bird.) We stay to watch water polo. At home I prepare falafels and we eat them with tahini. Ludvig curls up happily and I can't remember the last time I had such fun.

Saturday
I spend most of the day alone, writing. Not my novel, although it's boiling in the back of my mind. I write the commented table of contests for my dissertation thesis and the schedule I'm going to carry it out for a grand application. I hammer Angry Birds like I always do when writing official documents.If I get really desperate, I play other games. Yoga stretches transfer neckache to headache. At night I go swimming again.

Sunday
The five years' Questions&Answers diary asks me the last time I did something goofy. What do they mean by goofy? I probably do goofy things all the time, but honestly, I'd be abit sad if I found things I do goofy. We visit a book fair, hoarding 1€ books from Basam Books' shelves, wanting to buy a plot of forest but that cannot be done by credit card. I'm delighted to meet a friend's boyfriend with his own publishing house. We continue to Haartman hospital's tooth emergency. We were there a week ago and my husband suggest we'd already book a time for next week. I'm almost disappointed for the line proceeding so fast, as I only have time to read the brochure of the forest foundation and write two postcards, although we would have had a big pile of books. We buy five packets of tea from M-market. At home I make palak tofu and seed bread and I start sketching a travel guide to ancient Japan.

08 toukokuuta 2012

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?

12 maaliskuuta 2012

Kidney yang deficiency, and yes, a list

Last two and half years I've been ill with this illness at one point and that illness another. And, as I am no fan of Western medicine, I usually consult first a Western doctor, then a Chinese doctor, then my herbal books (my guru is Matthew Wood with his amazing The Earthwise Herbal) and probably listen to anyone who has anything to say on the subject, then making my own conclusions.

I admit, it'd be easier to just trust the first doctor. But they don't seem very trustworthy, ignoring symptoms I find relevant and telling I have several unrelated diseases that have a different cause. Nay, I believe we are entities, and that it's not just the things we can see with a microscope, but that there are also things we can't see.

Currently, I've been out of shape for a month or two. Or not so much out of shape than just fatigued. I have never before realized how life energy does actually well up from the lower back  ̶  until now that it doesn't. It feels like my lower back was empty, and gray in a way. No energy. And as much as I'd like to get on with whatever I was doing, I constantly need to lie down (and thank the fabulous Finnish library system for the pile of great books next to my futon).

After consulting unofficial sources I suspected it to be because of a kidney yang deficiency, and my Chinese doctor confirmed. Treatment is simple. I get needles  ̶  acupuncture, that is  ̶  once in two weeks; I eat foods that warm kidney yang; I take it easy, keep myself warm and well-rested and do long walks. I take ginseng and weird Chinese herbal balls that are small and black and that you have to take twenty at the time. I make myself to go swimming at least once a week, and take care that I swim slowly and not too long (and that there is a either a bubble bath or an eucalyptus-scented steam sauna in the swimming hall I go to). I do not overhydrate, which I used to do, and which was probably one of the original causes for the problem. I drink less and when I drink I try to drink juice (blackcurrant and lingonberry being my favourites), check regularly that my fingers are warm and have decreased my caffeine intake (I'm a sucker for green tea). I have also started to feel suspicious about juices that are sweetened with fructose - they do not feel quite right in my body. I meet friends and let them keep me cheered up. And the final treatment: I crochet a lot. Calm things should be good for your kidneys.

But when I went to see a Western doctor  ̶  and a good one she is even though working on a public clinic  ̶  I was diagnosed a depression. A depression? When there's nothing wrong with my mood? But she explained to me that depression manifests itself in many ways, and she thought some mild antidepressants would do me good. So, I got a prescription for Citalopram.

Well, should I take the medicine even though I don't feel myself a least bit depressed? She was so convincing that I decided to take them. How I see it, if they help me to get perkier, I will have more energy to exercise and eat well, and that will eventually help for the cause of the whole unbalance, restoring my kidney yang.

Anyway, I feel the biggest change being the change in morning routines. Or rather, that there are routines. Before, after opening my eyes and meditating an hour on my bed, I used to jump up and start hustling up every little thing I saw that needed taking care of, usually in no logical order and starting several things before finishing any. I would eat when I had time. Now, right after meditation, I have to eat. And eat a lot, at least compared to what I used to eat before. And I am absolutely not to switch on my computer before I eat, or it destroys the good rhythm of the morning.

So, in the honor of my friend Heli, the Mistress of List Making, I shall make two lists.

Good Things to Eat in the Morning

 - two organic eggs fried with butter, sea salt
 - several chunks of homebaked focaccia flavoured with rosemary
 - half a cantaloupe
 - an orange
 - a glass of fruit juice, preferably homemade
 - a mugful of green tea mixed with uplifting and warming herbs like peppermint and cardamon


Good Books to Read When Ill

 - almost anything by Jane Austen
 - J.D. Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
 - Ranya ElRamly: Auringon asema
 - Azar Nafisi: Reading Lolita in Tehran
 - Jhumpa Lahiri: The Namesake
 - Vikram Seth: A Suitable Young Man
 - Jun'ichiro Tanizaki: Makioka Sisters