Apples, onions, children, and a bucket of dahlias. My worries came home with us, too. As I approach forty-six, a harvest afternoon and the words of Gwendolyn Brooks bring me back to the question of flourishing: what we gather, what we give one another, and what keeps opening in an imperfect world.
We call trust, meaning and belonging soft while living inside their consequences. On Åland and beyond, dismissing unfamiliar ideas as “flummiga” can close the door on the learning we need. A reflection on storytelling, accountability and the courage to act before the future comes with guarantees.
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.
