Favourite things

The most beautiful first line of any book I've ever read was Karen Blixen's Out of Africa which begins "I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills". In all its simplicity, it tells you all you need to know in the wistfulness of the past tense she uses. More hopeful and happy is the most frequently quoted sentence from the first chapter that goes "Up in this high air you breathed easily… you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be". The book is a homage to the love not just of people, but to a place in itself and the life long yearning for it. In Finnish there is a beautiful word for it, sielunmaisema which means landscape of the soul. I relate to it, as my life is so closely intertwined with my farm, my own landscape of the soul.

I am lucky that my landscape of the soul is still there, intact and available to me. All my life the farm has been my refuge and bolt-hole from the rest of the world, and many a time while my mother still was alive we used to refer to it as a sanatorium for tired souls not just for us, but for all the people who came and stayed and visited. The quiet of the deep forrests that surrounds us is so profound that it imprints on the soul and leads the most nervous of nervous systems to quieten and breathe. It has such an earnestness about it, that you can hear its different tones of quiet. There is a quietness of pending winterstorms, when the wind is gaining force through the woods, and a quietness of summer mornings, when insects buzz sleepily amongst the flowers. No wonder then, that it was here we retreated when illness hit our family and all our world came to standstill.

In the midst of it, I never thought we would push through and that things would change. Seing it was my young adult child and not myself who was ill, I felt the worst kind of helplessness as there was nothing I could do to change the facts. All I could do was be there, and so I was. But in the end, all things do change, and all times do pass. It was not that we found some kind of miracle cure, as such does not exist, but eventually there came some sort of acceptance for this lot in life. The youngster was advised by some very wise person to "take a holiday from his illness" and while of course the illness tagged along on holiday, it did spark an idea of a different life where both such life confining and deliberating conditions could exist at the same time as a certain freedom to live and choose and frame what life there is on your own terms.

And so begins a new chapter, where the healing forces of nature and nurture have done their lot as much as they can, and a prolonged stay at a sanatorium comes to an end. Or so we hope at least, keeping fingers crossed, as we never know what lies behind the next corner... Still, even if a new and different kind of disaster strikes us, we will take comfort in knowing that we will be alright eventually. In the face of enormous sadness and huge difficulties, as a family we do have the capacity to be happy enough with whatever we end up getting. That in itself is a greater kind of blessing than anything else. Now that the youngsters have left the farm for the big world and a life on their own terms, the farm sits still and quiet. In this I think that sometimes endings are a wonderful thing too.