HEL-LIS 12.1.

Always in the wrong place at the wrong time except now.

“You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind, and soul.”

This year I came back to Helsinki.

I got a job in the headquarters of a big stock company. I got a proper salary. I got a title and I got coworkers with titles like Corporate Marketing Manager and Design Manager and Strategic Planner. Then I got bored with my job and my dresscode and my life and I tried to make it all better by thinking about what Eckhart Tolle says:

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at the moment.”

So I went back to what matters the most: breathing. 

I breathed through boring meetings. I breathed through Twitter statistics. I breathed through friendships going through what seemed to be their last motions. I breathed through evenings that felt lonely. I breathed through Summer changing into Autumn and finally into the early stages of Winter.

And here I am now, waiting for another big change like I always do. I've now seen Helsinki, Copenhagen and London.

Now it's going to be Bairro Alto in Lisbon for the next ten months and trying to finally learn what the title states, as B. K. Iyengar has been trying to teach me for the past six months:

"You do not need to seek freedom in a different land, for it exists with your own body, heart, mind, and soul."

I see in you what I love

I haven't written in ages.

Everything fell apart. I started hating London, I started questioning what I was doing with it - Autumn was fast: art galleries, projects, magazines, big dreams and small budgets. Falling in love.

Love stayed while everything else disappeared, leaving the bones of my life bare and ready to grow into something new.

Airports became mundane pains, the journey from London to Helsinki as exciting as a bus trip. I left bitter feedback on airport feedback sheets: your system reminds me of a post-Soviet country; when I was too tired I booked airport capsule hotels to breathe and stand under cheap luxury showers. On the day I came back from Lisbon I saw a man who looked like a Hindu god walk past my home street.

I didn't meet as many people as I would've liked to. In Portugal I heard stories of the colonial wars, the ants are the only animals to fear in Africa - they'll kill the strongest man you know, touched the smooth skull of an elephant, played with a puppy in an artist's studio and shared a vegetarian meal with Sikhs at a yoga retreat in the middle of nowhere.

I have probably never been as unhappy as I was during this year - fighting against the ideals of a world where your holidays in the Caribbean or whether the watch on your wrist is Patek Philippe or Longines matters more than what comes out of your mouth. But I fell in love with someone who, by accident gave me one of those watches - after telling me to go engrave something silly on it. Someone who has a dagger tattooed on his ankle, ink on his fingers and more pictures on his arms and legs than I could ever count. Someone who gets fancy for exhibition openings, but wants to wear bucket hats and Hugh Hefner -style robes with me during sunny mornings.

And it's getting better.

NEW MEDIEVALISM

What I've been doing lately: thinking I'm a photoshop wizard, losing faith in humanity. Starting a new project although I can never ever even finish the first one I started.

Finding new theories but only getting into them because of their names - new medievalism, irrationalism.

Gaining weight, losing friends.

Too much to do and too little inspiration.

Life coaching for 90 pounds an hour?

Motherland fatherland

S

O

S

Thieves and ghosts

Moët for the people, heartache for me.

At the crossroads between academia and something completely different. I would call London a miserable detour but maybe it was the best thing that could ever have happened to me - 1,5 years left in the capital and I know barely a handful of souls that want to stay there indefinitely.

I finally bought one of those extortionately expensive courses at that art school in London that everyone used to love but now more often than not look at with nonchalant indifference. I'll be starting a short course in February and spending every Saturday from 10 to 5 escaping the things that surround me.

I returned to the city I was born in for a few weeks - my mother now thinks I have an eating disorder and insists on calling the people whom I kiss under the cover of darkness friends. I guess I am to blame for that - not wanting to confine to the norms of traditional romantic relationships but at the same time suffering tremendously of an indecisive nature that won't let me make my mind up. On one hand I feel like yelling GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE, on the other I can see beautiful vacations and endless Summers. And while I do believe him when he's telling me about a creative break he needs to take after four years filled with success and failure, all I can hear is end end end and I am not blaming myself for not being able to turn this into a comprehensible story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Otherwise it's all gold plated rings and art from 1995 but then again not all that's plated with gold will stay golden and art from 9 years back is still as shit as it was then.

PHILOSOVERSE / SUBMISSION DEADLINE 14.01.2014 from Matilda Kivelä on Vimeo.