By the fire, on a night that never fell
In the past days I have met more new people than I do at home in two years. Some of them quite deliberately, most by chance. Although, writing this down, I notice that the word chance is not quite right. It was more a chain of open doors, and the first of them was opened many years ago in Hannover.
That is where I joined Round Table 77, a service club for men up to 40 whose idea was born in England in 1927 and whose motto is still three words: Adopt, Adapt, Improve. Past forty you move on to the Old Tablers, who by now exist in 37 countries. Along this thread there had been contact to Lappeenranta in eastern Finland for years, and through the Tablers there I found Ville and Rolf here in Hämeenlinna.
The two of them were the first visitors to my exhibition, and they took me in as if I had never lived anywhere else. That is exactly why I value this network: it is not a business directory, it is a personal net that reaches far beyond your own borders.
That evening I was invited to dinner in the garden with Rolf's family. And then, as so often here, the evening turned out differently than planned: Pekka Kari and his wife dropped by spontaneously, friends whom Rolf's family also met for the first time that night. We sat by the fire, and at some point we were talking about energy, about aura, about poetry.
The real surprise was what Pekka does for a living. He is an actor, a writer and a healer in one person. The summer before, his novel Pimeä ulottuvuus was published, on stage he improvises monologues guided by the body language of his audience, and as a therapist he works with energy, with feelings, with what people carry inside. On paper that sounds like a lot. By the fire sat simply a warm, approachable person, like a good friend you have not seen in a long time.
That evening something became clear to me that I had long been unable to name. I am working here on my series Heimat, and I have never tied Heimat to my birthplace or a country. For me it is the feeling of where you are at home. Finnish has a beautiful word for it: kotimaa, composed of koti, the home, and maa, the land. The dictionary defines it as the land where someone was born, or which they call their home. That or makes all the difference.
And when Pekka spoke by the fire about the energy that lives in all things, I suddenly knew what I had been unable to describe in my pictures for so long: it is exactly this energy, which I cannot see myself, but which I feel, in the moment of exposure. My inner drive to photograph exactly this picture, at exactly this moment, in exactly this place.
And all of this on a night that never fell. Hämeenlinna lies at 61 degrees north, the sun set shortly before eleven, and it never got properly dark afterwards, just a long, warm dusk until morning. The Finns have a word for this too: yötön yö, the nightless night. A magical summer night of the kind you rarely get to live, and a very personal exchange with a family that had known me only for days, and with friends who became friends that very evening.
A few days later the circle closed once more: Sami came from Lappeenranta with his wife to visit my exhibition. A reunion after more than twelve years, and it felt as if we had last seen each other yesterday. Sami is a connector of people. That same day he began opening doors for me here in Hämeenlinna, a small net for the coming year, in a town that was completely foreign to me two weeks ago. What a gift.
Perhaps that is the real sum of these days: more new people than in the past two years combined. Not because I went looking for them. But because doors stand open here, if you arrive open yourself.
A night that never fell.“Note from the garden, in the bright night