July 27

Last night I took my 15-year-old daughter Tindra to the town Turku by the coast for a watercolor painting course arranged by a friend of my youth, Hanna Varis. Hanna is an artist who, at the age of Tindra, got her spark as an artist on a course where she got to meet my father Kalevi, who was both a visual artist and a writer. A circle closes.

Next week, Tindra will move back to Åland Islands, where she was born and where she has longed since we moved to these Finnish woods almost four years ago. She has finished her high school here in and is now returning to the landscape of her childhood by the sea. A second circle closes.

More than 16 years ago, I was on a course in South Africa where I experienced a strong and true experience of awakening or enlightenment. I walked close to two weeks in a sacred oneness behind this mundane world, and I knew where I was. I was present in the only real moment of life, this eternal now, here…

The only future that ever emerged from it was a hint of a child who wanted to be born through me. I even bought my wife a big wooden sculpture as a present. It depicted a pregnant woman’s stomach and breasts without a head or limbs. When I got home, my holy space disappeared after some days and I was confused. But less than a year after the course, Tindra was born.

We received Tindra singing Om and carried her together through her childhood to the best of our ability until her mother Lena died three days before Tindra’s seventh birthday. Since then I have had the responsibility for her upbringing towards freedom. I’ve now done the job, which I in spite of my desire was unable to finish with my elder children. A third circle closes.

While driving back those two hours from Turku yesterday, I realized what this is all about. In recent days, I have finally been able to relive the sacred simplicity I got a taste of some 16 years ago. The disappearance of it made me utterly confused while I also at the same time knew it to be my true nature. I realized that I have had to bring up Tindra to her own freedom, or to give it to her, before I could get my own freedom back. I had to give at least one of my nearest and dearest the freedom I knew to be my own as well. This closes a fourth circle.