A windy winter day in Finland, feat. Germany

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!! MAY IT BE A GOOD TIME FOR YOU TO RELAX AND ENJOY YOUR TIME, BY YOURSELF OR WITH SOME IMPORTANT PEOPLE. AND: HAPPY BIRTHDAY JESUS! (yes, I´m totally aware that some say he was born later and not in christmas time. But anyway: I believe He was born as a Son of God: that´s what matters.)

WARM GREETINGS,

Sailalai :)

Weird things

Weird things annoy me. I will share one of them with you, and you are totally allowed to not to understand.

Just the other evening as I was trying to fall asleep, but my hyper brains did not want to, I thought many sort of things. And one thing that made me sigh was the following:

I will never ever know how my native language sounds like in to the ears of not native speaker. I will always understand every single word of it. I cannot say if it sounds harsh or gentle or just ugly, because I cannot hear that. I can say that: haa haa, it´s similar to estonian, but nothing like swedish. Yet I will never ever understand how does it sound like.

I know this sounds weird and it is weird, but it was one of the moments that you realize: this is something that I will never ever under any circumstances experience. So maybe the lack of this experience made me more sad than the fact itself. Because it simply is impossible.

(Now some of you will say: maybe you will get brain damaged and won´t understand anything anymore. But that is totally another issue already and something not to be made fun of. )

Well, at least there are around 6000 (this is varying, as it is not clearly defined where is the line between a language and a dialect.) other languages that I can listen to and analyze.

(Picture by Mauri Kunnas)

Happy Birthday!

It´s Finlands 90th birthday today.
So this post is dedicated to my dear country: Happy Birthday Finland!!
Just to mention: I am not a nationalist, neither a patriotic person. Just happy to live here and greatful for the indepence of our country. It´s should not be taken for granted, I think.
Anyway, I would like to write here a poem from a book called: Meille kallis on maa.
Produced by Keski-Suomen Sotaorvot ry. (Meaning something like The war orphans of Central Finland). The following will be in finnish, sorry for that. But the poem is written by my father and in it he writes about losing his own father, who died in the winter war 14.2.1940, while my father was only one and a half years old. It is called: "Maybe tomorrow" , referring to my father as he was waiting for my grandfather to come home and he never came.

Ehkä sitten huomenna

Pienestä ikkunasta
vaaleatukkainen poika
seuraa katseellaan polkua
peltojen keskellä.
-Näkyisikö ketään?
Tulisiko isä metsänreunasta,
syksyisen illan hämärässä.

Äiti on sanonut:
isä kyllä tulee vielä!
-odottaa häntä joka on jo
kirkkomaassa.
Ei ota uskoakseen, että siellä
isä lepää!
-Kyllä se tulee, on vain vankeudessa
vieraalla maalla.

Sormet puristavat ikkunapuuta,
-Tulee se kun oikein odotan,
äitikin odottaa...
Pojalla ei ole kuvaa isästä.
Ei tietoa mitä se sana merkitsee.
Isä nyt vaan kuuluu olla kaikilla- kaikilla,
-sanovat, että kaatunut sodassa,
kranaattien silpomana.

Poika vihaa kranaatteja!
-Olisi tässä niin näyttäisin.
Isän vei! -Vaikka äiti odottaa,
jokin sisällä sanoo, ei tule...
Pisara pusertuu silmänurkkaan-
Miksi niin kauas menit?
Miksi isä?

Sankarihaudalla puhutaan.
-Isänmaan puolesta kaatuneille
muistomerkki.
-Pelottavan suuri, harmaa kivimies.
Ei niinkuin isä, se oli elävä.
Ei kylmää kiveä!

Syksyn pimeys laskeutuu.
Sormet irtoavat ikkunapuusta.
-Olisi niin hyvä tuntea kun isä
puristaa itseään vasten...
-Ehkä sitten huomenna...

Usko Ohranen

Early morning

It´s cold and dark. No people around. It´s an early morning, one of the very few in my life.
I woke up 04.45 am to go to work. I biked there in silence, saw maybe 6 people and one car. I biked back few hours later, now there was a bit more life on the streets but still this silence was in the air.
I went home and just listened to it: nothing, no cars, no neighbours, no airplanes, no kids playing at the kindergarten next to my home, just simply nothing. Do I even need to tell that I didn´t open my computer, neither put my radio on. I just sat down and listened.
(Ok, at the end I fell asleep. But that´s a sign of total relaxation, right?)
And I need to say that it was beautiful and enjoyable, propably an experience to me as this is not my everyday life.
And gosh, how can someone forget how silence sounds like or doesn´t sound like?
Now I do understand people who wake up early, it´s different than. For a moment world felt different.
God has created beautiful things, and I guess silence is one of the most beautiful.