Last year, I wrote that staying was a way of answering. This year, the geese are leaving, and the question has become harder. Through Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”, I return to belonging, the cost of fighting for a place you love, and the possibility of carrying that love elsewhere.
A voyage through the calm waters of institutional responsibility, where every sign points onward, every route circles back, and certainty evaporates precisely where accountability begins.
There are distances on maps, and there are distances between lives—the quiet assumption that history happens to other people, in other places. On September 11, 2001 both gave way. A city I did not know became intimate through the mother of the classmate beside me; a landscape I knew by heart became part of the world’s memory. Manhattan entered my biography. Terror entered my childhood geography. Elsewhere became somewhere.
“Everyone” must also include the person who asks an uncomfortable question. The person who wants her work to be recognised. The person who is trying to build a future here.
We can contemplate the transformation of society, what it means to flourish, and Åland’s contribution to the global future. Identifying who wrote what apparently requires a considerably more advanced civilisation.
