Sunday, December 13, 2015

No flicker of astonishment

The photographs were taken on November 15th in Meiko.

I did some shopping today, and it made me tired. There was a little bit of snow today, but it remains to be seen whether it is here to stay. Commuting by bicycle may be a bit slower tomorrow than usually, in any case.

(Posting title is from the poem The Old Meeting House by Alfred Noyes.)

2 comments:

SHE said...

..so endless.. the variety of beautiful.. and, i don't believe I am projecting creative opinion. -but receiving beauty as a natural fact.

and happy Finnish independence day to you! -this inspired some bullet point reading -your independence seems so fresh and new relatively speaking.. but there is a world wide pattern that keeps me optimistic, despite its ugly and slow to backwards to back to slow pace

Blessings!

Juha Haataja said...

Thank you.

In Finland, the preparations for the 100 year anniversary in 2017 are already quite active, and I'm sure there will be all kinds of interesting things to be experienced then.

However, these days there have been some ugly signs of narrow-minded nationalism appearing, probably because of uncertainties concerning the future, as there are problems in the economy, and fear is easily turned to negative purposes.

Also, there are lots of refugees coming to Finland, and great challenges in helping them to adapt, and to help us to adapt to this new situation.

On the other hand, this isn't something new in Finland. My mother was a refugee when Finland ceded the eastern part of Karjala to Russia after the war of 1939-40, and her family lost their home and farmland. It isn't easy to adapt to a new environment, when you are speaking a different dialect, and have grown in a somewhat different culture. How much more difficult it must be to people for whom everything is new, from language to climate to culture.