I’ve been thinking about noise because the north shakes the whole concept, and leaves you with your essence. Which is creativity in whatever form, beyond portfolios and artistic identities.

The noise hands you substitutes that fit well enough, and you carry them around thinking they’re yours. Spend a week in the north, and no matter how sick to the back teeth you are of AI-generated word porridge, or how exhausted by your corner of the internet, your own wanting starts coming back to you. Somewhere between the pines and the boat, the substitutes fall off. By the third week, your hands are full of eagerness to create.

But you don’t need the north to ask yourself: what would you keep? What makes your creativity burn, and what’s just a crowd outshouting your own voice?

I think that’s one of the most useful questions you can ask yourself. Unless you’re keen on chasing likes by filming yourself crying attractively or pretending to be caught dancing. Then the question is probably one of the most useless.

I’d keep almost all of it.

I’d write these letters. I’d write the essays that take three weeks and those I write in one afternoon. I’d keep helping people who have both a burn to create and a wish to stop wrestling with the part of the work called marketing. I’d keep the forest and the garden and the no-sleep of midsummer madness. I’d keep the illustrations even though I sometimes end up arguing with them about light sources.

Which is either great fortune or a diagnosis. Possibly both, but I ignore the diagnosis part, because in the world’s current diagnosis romance we would all have a diagnosis, and because I would take curiosity and joy in many things as a diagnosis any day.

What I wouldn’t keep is absolute truths, polarised certainty, and clients with incomprehensible LinkedIn titles. I didn’t see a trace of those in the northern forests, which might mean they’ve vanished from my landscape for good. Wouldn’t mind that.

But the question has an extension, and it’s this: if I’d do this anyway — and I wouldn’t even call it work, I’d call it life — money or no money, audience or no audience, then the only thing left to decide is the shape of it. Not whether, but how.

The audience part is rhetorical, obviously. I’m writing this in public, to you, and every public writer wants readers. But that’s an open preference, not a sneaky strategy, and an open preference survives a month of nightless nights without changing shape.

The shape is what I’ve been working on this summer. So, about the future — yours and mine, since you’re in this too.

The writing continues, and there will be more of it. I’ve compromised too much at the writing’s expense, and I’m reversing the order.

And to not make that a midsummer resolution, gone by next week, I’ve started writing my first book. It’s utterly exciting, and probably totally unnecessary. I could do useful things, such as automating my invoicing or sorting out the 7-year-old’s clothing that’s three sizes too small. But I am a stubborn human, and not so conscientious, and that’s why my creative burn can happily eat first.

I talk with dead people in the book. We’ve rented a house for our conversations, one with a nice fireplace and nice chairs and some nice whisky on the table. I can’t drink whisky anymore, due to a neighbourhood party in May 2011, but I’m accompanied by those who can, so there will be nice whisky for them, and other beverages for people like me who don’t know their limits.

I’ve also invited them to walk with me through places — train stations, bookshops, self-checkouts — a prospect some of them have found more thrilling than I expected. They’ve been on the side of the dead for a long time, and haven’t had a chance to get involved with the crazes of our time. Lucky for me — it must be boring on the other side.

Before I go, I’m passing the question on: Not what would you start — that list is probably easy. What would you keep?

Hit reply or leave a comment and tell me.

Until next time, from wherever the desk happens to be standing —
Elina

PS. Yes, I’m a gold digger, but for bog’s gold, and I won’t tell you where my mining is. (Unless you pay me.)

Kay Stratton writes memoir and dark humour, and she always makes me laugh. She has a Masters degree in Linguistics, and she brought the linguistic backbone to our chat. You can find her writing at Queen of Oversharing, and it’s exactly as fearless as the name promises.

Jayne Marshall is a fiction writer, essayist, and editor from the UK, currently living in Madrid. She’s an editor who makes you braver, not smaller: she works with writers not just to polish a manuscript, but to help the writer understand why certain changes make the work stronger. You can find her services, books, and other writing at jaynemarshall.com and The Useful and the Beautiful.

This essay grew alongside a conversation. The bear walks-plods, and I try to explain why.

The bear walks-plods makes no sense in English, but in Finnish, you can stack two verbs together to describe a single action, without needing to invent a hyphen for it.

The first verb tells you what is happening, the second verb does the work of saying all the rest: how and when it was, is, or will be done, often in a highly creative onomatopoetic way, giving you a clue about the mood of the doer or the attitude of the teller. The bear walks, but specifically plodding, without hurry, maybe even lazily. The fox ran, but in quick light scampers — the fox run-scampered. There’s the neighbour, run-trotting again — it’s possible the teller has opinions about the neighbour or running as a hobby, or both.

English would try to handle this with an adverb. The bear walked ploddingly. Or a participle. The bear walked, plodding. Either way, one verb does the action, and a grammatical servant trails behind to paint it. You can hear the condescension. The walking matters; the plodding is permitted to come along. Finnish doubles the verb with two beats. It has a root and personality, side by side, neither one subordinate to the other.

I have a theory about why.

Finns are action-focused people. We don’t care who does whatever they are doing as long as it gets done. We have only one personal pronoun that will do perfectly well for all possible genders. If you want to make us desperate, ask us to place a human being in a hierarchy with an honorific, and you’ll see how quickly a word can vanish into awkward silence on its way from mouth to conversation. In casual language, the passive voice, which prefers going-is-being-done to we are going, always wins. The double verb follows the same North Star. You colour the action, not the air around it, so naturally one verb isn’t enough. You need two.

My Eastern Finnish dialect is two things at once. It’s wry and dry, made to be talked with a straight face, leaving part of the reading to the listener. But it’s also a lyrical language, still keeping its little finger in the Finnish and Karelian rune-singing tradition — the multi-sensory, almost spell-like rhythm of incantation.

Which raises a question: why am I telling you any of this in English? I don’t have a clean answer, but I did learn it’s a recognised condition, with a name and everything.

Exophonic writing means writing creatively in a language that isn’t your mother tongue. French linguists began discussing littérature exophone in 1979. German cultural studies picked up Exophonie in 2007. In English the term was proposed by the translator Chantal Wright in 2008, but the spell-check still underlines it as I type, as if to say: are you sure that’s a word?

I am sure. But I understood the hesitation, so I went on searching for exophonic writers and their backgrounds. The list contains big literary names like Milan Kundera and Joseph Conrad. Samuel Beckett switched from English to French in his forties to write sans style — he wanted to escape the richness of his mother tongue and write in a stripped-down voice. Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in English and mourned his Russian for the rest of his life. Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada have both used the gap between languages as their subject.

Their paths into exophonic writing were different: some chose it, some had it forced on them, some used it to escape something, some used it to find something.

I don’t have a dramatic story behind my language choice, and I’m an ambitionless forest wanderer compared to Beckett, who chose French for artistic reasons. I swallowed English the standard way for Finns of my generation: through school, books, music, subtitled movies and television series. At some point, writing ideas started to disturb my peace in English. When, how, and why remains a mystery for me. Five and a half million Finnish speakers might be reason enough to switch, but my writing ideas are stubborn, they don’t take headcounts.

You can’t leave your mother tongue behind. It comes along, occasionally commenting on the unfamiliar landscape, even though it’s bribed to stay silent in the back seat. The question is what it actually brings. The temperament? The rhythm? The colour of the sky?

There are things Finnish does that English can’t, and I’ve made peace with most of them. The double verb can stay in the forest. It can keep its onomatopoetic coat. It’s happy there.

Inside Finnish, it was invisible to me — it was just how sentences worked. From English, the Finnish creative looseness became visible, and that’s one of the gifts of writing in another language: your first language becomes a thing you can finally look at, instead of a thing you only see through.

What’s harder is the emotional labour of creative writing. Walking the line of doubt where you can’t quite tell whether the sentence you’ve just written is strange in an intriguing way, or strange because you’re a non-native speaker who doesn’t know shit.

Native speakers have a certainty that comes free with the language. They reach for an idiom without thinking about whether it’s an idiom. The water they swim in is invisible to them. When I push at the edges of words, I’m not always sure which is which until later, when a reader either underlines it as beautiful or politely doesn’t mention it.

It helps to take your serious face off. A mistake is just a word that fell asleep on the train and woke up at the wrong station, blinking. It’ll have to do. Better luck next time.

But there are also the freedoms. You can say things in a second language that you couldn’t say in your first, because the words don’t have history.

Ikävä — the Finnish word for missing, longing, the absence of a thing — is a distilled compound of grief in November and the echo in empty walls. The English word missing hasn’t sat next to me at departures and funerals and break-ups. In a way, I’ve never missed anyone or anything. I have a different word for it.

I write between the two languages, and the passage between them is its own territory. English is my playground; Finnish is where the reading is left to the listener.

This is, for me, what exophonic writing is when it goes well. The strangeness of the second language isn’t a deficit to overcome, but the condition that opens a space for something neither language could have said alone. A native speaker writes from inside the water; I write from the edge of it, where things look a little different and the wrong word might sometimes be the right one. Whether it works or not rests, in the end, with the reader.

I will never write like a native English speaker would. There are things I can’t say in English. But somewhere in the shadows of my English sentences, I think, the bear will always walk-plod, whistling as female bears sometimes do, unhurried, entirely itself.

My description is: I have a garden, currently May, two homes separated by 700 kilometres of Finnish rural roads, a forest at the far end, a homeschooled child, client work, illustrations that keep changing their mind, a cat and a dog, and these essays I publish with what I prefer to call intentionality and others might call irregularity.

This is all good. I love all of it. This is also the problem.

There’s suffering available to people who enjoy their lives. You can’t cut anything because you love all of it.

The garden? It’s May. There’s no negotiating with May. You either do gardening now or forget it until next May because by June you’re already bored with gardening, and you just want to sit in the middle of flowers. The illustration? Once I’m in, I’m in. The writing? Obviously. The client work? It pays my bills, but that’s not the reason why it exists in my life. The forest? I was born there. You can’t tell me to cut the forest. The child? Any answer to that would extend my scope of English words. Also Finnish.

So instead I stand in the middle of everything I love and feel annoyed that I can’t do all of it simultaneously. Which is, I recognise, absurd. It is also my position.

Each of these creations has a way of taking more ground than agreed. The recent illustration decided to have a psychodrama. It was a portrait — a woman at a table, a coffee cup, a flowering tree outside the window. Pretty simple, I thought. Loose lines, a few flat colours, done in an afternoon. Then, it started having opinions about the light sources. It demanded more shadows. Don’t you think that if a window is behind a figure, the figure should be rim-lit? it said. I painted the figure frontally lit and then spent three sessions trying to see what the illustration was already pointing at, the way you spend twenty minutes looking for your car keys before discovering they’re in the pocket of the hoodie you’re wearing.

The work itself is hardly the problem. The problem is that it comes with a timeline my life cannot accommodate, which means a warm, sunny afternoon in the garden has an invoice in its back pocket: you could have been writing, or finishing the illustration that still disagrees with the light source like it has for the last week.

I pay the invoice and go back to the garden. The garden does not care about my schedules. It has its own agenda, which is simply to exist and grow and occasionally die. It will do that whether I’m paying attention or not. But it exists on my property, and I have dreams where hollyhocks and roses and king lilies and foxgloves and lavenders and delphiniums sway with me on a summer evening.

And then there are the ambitions. Modest ones, in the modern sense, about the quality of my work — but they’re there nonetheless, sitting in the corner and watching. Which is why I’ve been advised to niche down. The advice came from a well-meaning and legitimate source and I’m ignoring it. It mistakes scope for confusion, and I’m not confused. This is the shape of the work — many things, in seasonal rotation, playing together. If I had only one of them, I’d be bored by Thursday. Including the one you’d assume was the centre.

I never planned all this — not the child, the animals, the client work, the garden, the writing. They walked in like stray dogs: looked around, said they love being here, threw their stuff on the sofa, asked for food, kept their manners, and stayed.

Creation isn’t something the human manages and optimises and visualises and calculates into existence. It walks in, like everything else. I believe it in the way I believe in the value of fresh-baked sour rye bread and a clean sauna and woolen socks in winter: completely, and from experience.

It is also, on a Tuesday when the illustration is still unfinished and the garden took the whole morning and there’s a client deadline tomorrow and no essay has been posted for three weeks and the child finds the cat has puked a hairball under the dining table and the child himself can’t find clothes to wear to the pony club starting in an hour, somewhat difficult to sit with.

The trade I’m actually making is this: the life containing the garden, the forest, the stretch between two homes, and the livestock guardian dog who is constitutionally unbothered by everything except what crosses her definition of the property line — this life is not separate from the work. It is the work.

The essays I’ve written intentionally or irregularly — you can choose which one — came from somewhere. That somewhere was a warm afternoon when I planted the delphiniums and a walk on a frozen lake and a 4am morning coffee under a flowering apple tree that did what flowering trees do, which is to bloom without a content calendar. None of those hours were stolen from anywhere.

It’s possible this splitting will eat what I could have been. That the niched path would have made me more influential, more aligned with my talents, more whatever it was the well-meaning and legitimate source could see and I couldn’t.

It’s also possible that one day, when the days have gone small, when there are no more hollyhock seeds to order and no more pony club schedules and no essay drafts, I will sit under the apple tree once more. All was well in my full life.

One on Finland’s south-west coast, the other in its north-east forests.

You’d think they are roughly the same kind, these homes, existing in the same country, being inhabited by people speaking the same language. They are not. There are over 700 kilometres and a different understanding of what time and space are for between them. They are from different worlds.

The coastal home belongs to people. Villages sit next to each other, and if you skip the straight, efficient highways, the small country roads will show you how they’re connected by wheat fields and old mansions and horse pastures and fishing huts, and how they sit there, along the archipelago coast line, steady and weather-proofed, from generation to generation.

I love the nearby town: its old cobblestone streets, riverside cafés, museums, and the feeling a place has when it’s spent 800 years on the same riverbanks — and I try to cheat my eyes when facing a brutalist next to an apricot-coloured Art Nouveau house.

The second home belongs to the wilderness. It has a different history, different spirits, different roots. It’s a home for great carnivores and wild reindeers and elves, and the people there are often, too: modest, capable of handling a lot of space, having a tinge of uncivilised humour in their sleeves wherever they go.

The pines still sing the ancient poetry there, even though forest product companies and the state have tried their best with emptying the forests so that people (like me) in western societies can wipe their butts with soft paper. It’s a form of modern colonialism; gross domestic product made from the bones of what took centuries to grow because the eyes witnessing it belong to woodpeckers and grouses which hardly write rants about it.

I’ve lived like that, between two homes, my whole adult life. I’ve made that drive more times than I can count, in both directions. The first one has changed many times over the years, but the second has always been the same. I was born there, and if there are wishes you can make about your grand exit, I will also leave there.

Did circumstances make me someone who can’t stay on one side of an argument, or have I simply had a lifelong talent for ending up exactly where two worlds meet and argue — it’s probably the latter. I’m twisted that way; I seem to have followed the gaps, and in recent years, I’ve entertained myself by walking the bridge between expression and structure, creativity and marketing.

There’s a split that runs through almost everyone who makes things for a living, and it goes something like this.

On one side: the thinkers, the creatives, the writers, the idea persons, the deep dwellers. They know how to create something that moves you, touches you, expands you, makes you cry and laugh and think differently. Driven by curiosity, meaning, vision, or simply an urge to create, they are sometimes like wild gardens which sprout in every compass point, sometimes like very deep and still lakes.

Many of them — not all, but enough that it’s a pattern — treat the structural side of their work as a lesser thing. Websites are mechanical checklists, sharing is a concession, marketing assets a cold porridge stuck in the throat. They talk about it the way you’d talk about filing taxes. With the same enthusiasm, and roughly the same creative investment.

On the other side: the strategists, the structurisers, the builders, the people whose hands are made for form to follow function. The way they can take a simple idea and turn it into a whole concept is admirable. Hand over your thinking and soon, with their hammers and screwdrivers — usually made of code and pixels these days — they’ve built a house and street signs and labels and a postal address nailed to the door. They know how to build places where you can walk in and make yourself comfortable.

Expression, in this world, is often a decoration you apply once the real work is done. You choose the voice based on the target audience, add personality as a finishing touch. The brand has a story, of course it does, it was written in a brand strategy session number five, and you can find it right there in the guidelines document, section four.

It’s possible that we’re all parochial in our own ways — the creative dismissing structure, the strategist belittling expression, defending the territory they came from by shrinking what they didn’t — trading one village for a larger one with better airports, calling it a worldview. The citizen of the world is its own edited story about what circumstances or tendencies have made you. I guess you can also sit in your garden and observe the human peculiarities and know everything you need to know.

In which group do I belong, I’ve asked myself many times. Who am I, seduced by both beauty and practicality, having conversations with words today and illustrations tomorrow and a website user path architecture the day after that. And the answer is the same as it’s always been: both and neither.

I can’t see structure and expression as opposing forces. I never could. They are like the café in an apricot-coloured Art Nouveau building with carved ornament windows, and the vast sky that opens untamed above the lake and ravens mastering it all. I love them both. I felt the border without having it inside me. And for a long time I had no name for what that meant, or why it felt like standing in a gap that nobody had thought to mention.

I walk the bridge between visions and reality. I am, in other words, just as parochial as everyone else — only about the great And.

But I do wonder — if you prefer your work human and meaningful — you can use your energy to battle the other side without choking in your own fight.

I wonder if you can calculate stories and personality. I wonder if you can find readers, listeners, clients if your work doesn’t have a place to live and a sign above its door.

I spoke about websites and branding with who in addition to writing psychological thrillers and atmospheric noir hosts Traditionally Self-Published. Mica has made it a diverse resource for writers and authors, so if you write, I’m sure you’ll find useful things there. You can listen to our conversation here.

And there will be more talk! In April, I’ll be joining and for a Substack Live, talking about languages, linguistic relativity, writing in more than one language, and works in translation. Or that’s what we’re thinking about now, it might expand. I’ll share more details soon.

Until next time,
Elina

Search engines are part of the work the industry calls marketing. Branding. Digital strategy. They aren’t easy words for me — not because I don’t do the work they describe, but because they arrive pre-dressed in conversion funnels and growth hacks and calling people leads instead of humans, and I’ve always been more interested in what’s underneath: presence, expression, ideas descending to reality.

The work itself is creative — shaping how something speaks, how it’s built, where it stands. It’s no different from any other act of making, except that somewhere along the way, someone decided it belonged in a different department.

Search engines are not sentimental.

They are structural. They map patterns.

Somewhere, a twelve percent traffic dip appears on a dashboard. What follows is a ritual called strategic content recalibration: where yesterday stood a perfectly human sentence, today there’s a blog post titled “How to Maximise Synergistic Outcomes” or “10 Steps to Your Magnificent Self.” No one remembers writing it because it was handed over to AI.

Most of the time, nothing is terribly broken. The site loads without complaint, colours don’t make you flinch, and the promises are ironed before speaking. It’s all fine.

Fine is the uniform of our time. Nothing is wrong with it.

Fine is safe. It uses the correct phrases and promises clarity, growth, improvement, impact, or even a minor enlightenment if the market allows. Fine has learnt to sit up straight in its most photogenic angle and say nothing. It opens its fruit-mistake-labelled laptop with manicured nails and a patient smile.

Though it explains a lot, fine rarely says anything. It fills space and circles and sprinkles confetti, but you understand less than you did two paragraphs ago. You scroll, nod politely, and forget.

When someone whispers “algorithm”, half of the population melts like butter in the sun. The other half acts as if an ancient, hairy monster had risen from a cave, and they ran to write a rage against AI — paired with an AI-generated display image, of course.

Search engines, we are told, are sophisticated. They crawl and index and evaluate as if somewhere in the streets there is a sentient creature, who, with a notebook in its hands, glances behind your window, squints at your homepage, and shakes its head.

Maybe there is, and does it look more like a Sherlock or a municipal building inspector, I don’t know. What I know is that it doesn’t care about panic, charm, or ambition.

It notices things and mirrors back what it sees. It follows roads to houses, checks whether the doors open, and if they do, it maps what’s inside. What is this house about? What is it for? How do these rooms inside it relate to each other?

It finds a hallway that announces transformation, but the doors along it open into rooms that all say the same thing in slightly different fonts. It finds a name on the front door that doesn’t match the name on the mailbox. It finds a room with six doors and no indication of which one leads forward. It notes all of this without judgement. It just writes down what’s there, and moves to the next house.

We prefer to believe the machine has moods. It’s easier than admitting that it simply reads structure, without commentary. And if it has moods, surely there are ways to appease it — the right tactic, the right tags, the right incantation. So we start giving offerings: tricks and hacks and little gestures to please something that isn’t watching.

We add words we would never say at the dinner table. We dilute statements until they sound like nothing in particular, just fine. We wrap simple sentences into protective padding of respectable fog. No one wants to write one clear sentence because one clear sentence feels naked.

And the theatre intensifies because now we are not merely optimising. We are also “answering.” Someone types a question into a search bar, and thousands of pages begin clearing their throats at once. “Let me begin with my journey…”

No.

The question was simple.

What do you do?
What is this page?
Call it by its name.
Call it the same tomorrow.

Coherence doesn’t suffocate uniqueness or dilute originality. It sharpens them; it’s the condition that allows uniqueness to be understood — whether you have poetic wings or a snarky backbone. Your site can carry your unmistakable voice and still be structured enough to be found: fast, readable, and marked up cleanly beneath the surface.

A coherent site has an intentional spine. Headings descend in order. Pages link because they belong together, not because someone was told “internal linking is good for SEO.” It loads before doubt becomes part of the experience.

Search engines don’t decide what deserves attention. They map what holds together.

That’s why coherent cruelty and cheap nonsense rank. They’ve built clear street signs: Free shit! Step inside — limitless solutions for problems you didn’t know you had! Transform yourself by Thursday! Subscribe to your higher self for only €9.99 a month! Follow the dopamine impulse to checkout to desolation!

Coherent creativity ranks too. So does generosity, competence, and wisdom. Work that means something has the same architecture available to it — the same roads, the same doors, the same machines mapping what’s inside. The difference was never structural. It was always about what we chose to build.

If it’s anxious, anxiety multiplies.
If it’s grounded, that spreads.

Coherence is not a value. It’s what happens when structure and expression stop pretending to be separate. And it, inconveniently, reveals us.

This essay is part of a broader body of studio work on coherence, structure, and expression. If you want to go deeper, three studio essays explore the same territory in detail from what makes work generic, to what holds a website together.

→ Read the Studio Essays

Until next time,

Elina

I had invited him, of course. One must make arrangements when crossing metaphysical borders, and I thought he might be curious to see a supermarket.

We walk towards the store. He continues speaking.

Mr. Twain: At home, the need is clean. One imagines a swift errand: in, out, dignity intact. One imagines the self as a creature of intention. I admire this optimism. I once had it. You step outside with that old-fashioned appetite that doesn’t want enlightenment, only bread. It would be satisfied with a bowl of soup and a chair that doesn’t wobble.

The sliding doors part, and the blast of heated air salutes us as we walk in. He in his white linen suit. I in my thick quilted jacket, woollen scarf, beanie, and double mittens. Eternity seems to have exempted him from seasonal adjustments.

We drift toward the vegetables and fruits, where an older couple weighs oranges. The scanner beeps, and the radio tells the daily forecast. Mr. Twain stops, looks around, sighs, brushes his moustache, but doesn’t say anything for a while.

He picks up a carrot.

Mr. Twain: Look at these carrots. They are straight. Suspiciously straight. No hesitation, no fork in the body, no evidence that it ever encountered a stone or a difficult decision. A carrot like this has never struggled. It has been raised for obedience. In my day, a carrot that grew two legs was considered ambitious.

Do we need onions? We already have onions. But do we have the right onions? And did we come here for spinach, or did spinach merely happen to us last time?

Look, there is a tomato that has escaped discipline. Slightly scarred. A little misshapen. It will not be photographed for a catalogue. It knows this. That one, I trust.

Tell me—when you stand here, how do you choose the ones you accept?

Me: Mmmm, I smell them, even though all the other shoppers don’t necessarily appreciate that habit. I always keep a decent distance, though. But I have to feel the ones I’m picking. To touch them—are they raw or rotten or just perfect?

Mr. Twain: Madam, of course you smell them. Any civilisation that frowns upon sniffing a tomato has already made several other, much worse mistakes.

Smell is the last sense that marketing hasn’t fully conquered. You can’t brand a scent without risking truth. Touch and smell are dangerous like that—they report directly to the body, skipping the surface.

You see how the others pretend not to notice? That is the modern contract: “I will not acknowledge your humanity if you do not acknowledge mine.” We all stand politely beside one another, handling food as though it were glassware in a museum, never admitting that we intend to put it into our mouths.

Touching is an act of discernment. You are asking the vegetable a question. “Are you ready? Are you alive enough? Will you cooperate, or must we negotiate?”

The perfectly firm ones are often liars. Still clinging to an idea of themselves. The ones with a little give—those have accepted time. They know where they are going.

If I squeeze a peach, gently and with respect, it should respond like a good sentence: not rigid, not collapsing, but aware that pressure exists.

There is a great deal of information in the hand. More than in the label. More than in the price. More than in the earnest little sign announcing locally sourced, which, I guess, means it travelled with good intentions. So, let the others avert their eyes.

Now—shall we continue?

He sets the carrot back carefully.

Me: Next to the fruit and vegetables, we have convenience food. You didn’t have any in your days, right?

Mr. Twain: Convenience food? My dear friend, in my day hunger was the convenience.

We did not outsource eating to factories; we merely ate what was nearby. If something came in a tin, it was either a miracle, a regret, or both—and you treated it with care, the way one ought to treat anything that claims to be eternal.

What you call convenience now strikes me as impatience dressed in plastic. Meals that require no thought, no hands, no time, no mild inconvenience—only teeth and a vague willingness to forget how things used to be alive.

Look at them. Soups that have never met a bone. Sauces that have never seen a tomato in its natural state. Meals that promise home-style while clearly having never been invited into one.

Convenience, as a concept, began innocently. A shortcut here. A preserved peach there. A can to get through winter. Sensible things. Humane things.

But this—this aisle is not about hunger. It is about avoidance. Avoiding chopping. Avoiding waiting. Avoiding deciding. Avoiding noticing.

See how the packages speak to you as though you are tired before you have said a word.

No effort.
Ready in two minutes.
Just heat and enjoy.

Enjoyment has been reduced to compliance.

I will grant them this: the labels are honest in one regard. They never claim the food is good. Only that it is easy. And ease, it seems, has become the highest virtue of the modern age—above nourishment, above pleasure, above knowing what you are eating.

We had convenience once. It was called leftovers.

Tell me. Which of these items claims to be a meal?

Me: Ahahaha! Well, some of them are complete “meals”, and others are part of a meal. Take a look at the ingredient list, and see what they really contain.

Mr. Twain: Ah. Ingredients. The confession booth of modern food.

In my day, an ingredient list was a sentence long and written in a language you spoke at birth. Milk. Salt. Time. Possibly fire, if things had gone badly.

Now—now you have paragraphs and footnotes and parentheses. Words that appear to have been invented during a legal dispute.

Let us read one together, shall we?

Water. A promising start. Honest. Humble.
Then immediately: Modified starch. Modified from what, and why was it dissatisfied with its original condition?
Vegetable oil. Which vegetable? One hopes not a philosophical one.
Natural flavourings. This phrase should be illegal until it reveals what it means.
Stabilisers. Stabilising what, exactly? My expectations?
Emulsifiers. A word that sounds like it should require a licence.
Acidity regulator. As though the food itself had emotional problems.

Nothing here is made. Everything is managed.

This is not cooking. It is crowd control.

And see how the list grows longer the further it gets from anything you recognised in the produce aisle. Tomatoes need no explanation. A carrot does not come with an asterisk. But the moment food forgets what it is, it must be accompanied by paperwork.

I admire your courage in reading these lists aloud, though.

What do you think—do any of these “complete meals” contain a complete thought?

Me: I’d say they contain many complete thoughts, but from process thinkers. How to make these as quick, as cheap, as easy to run through the making process as possible.

Mr. Twain: Process thinkers! Well, that explains the aftertaste.

You are quite right. These are not meals born of appetite; they are meals born of flowcharts. Each one has been thought through meticulously and felt not at all.

Observe how every decision bends toward obedience. Will it survive transport? Will it forgive reheating, twice? Will it remain recognisable even after all meaning has left the room?

This is food designed not to be eaten, but to be handled. Slotted into schedules. Consumed between obligations without interfering with them.

The thinking is industrious, admirable even—but it is the thinking of a man designing a bridge, not a supper. No one pauses mid-process to ask, “Will this make a human feel alive for fifteen minutes?”

And so the meal becomes efficient, economical, obedient—and curiously lonely. You eat it without resistance, and it leaves without conversation.

There is also this: When a thing is designed to offend no one, it nourishes no one either.

A carrot still risks being itself. This food has been carefully relieved of that burden.

Come—let us step away before it produces a pamphlet… Where next? Bread, perhaps?

Me: Yes, let’s move forward to the bread aisle. In our grocery store, it also contains the pastries.

Mr. Twain: Bread is a subject I trust far more than most men. Let me take a look at the aisle for a moment.

Mr. Twain bends over the bread.

Mr. Twain: What I see are so many kinds of bread that choosing one feels like declaring allegiance. This loaf claims to be ancient, despite being younger than yesterday. That one swears it is artisan, though I doubt any human hand has been involved since conception. Another is seeded in ways that suggest a brief but intense relationship with a forest. Somewhere among them is actual bread, trying not to be noticed.

Madam, this is marvellous: a single idea—grain, water, fire, patience—has multiplied into an identity. Here it attempts to be indulgent. There it pretends to be virtuous. Down the row it disguises itself as science. And many have been sliced in advance, as if to spare us the effort of deciding where to begin.

And then the pastries—ah yes. The sweet cousins who have given up all pretence of being necessary. They know exactly what they are and make no defence. I respect that. A pastry does not promise longevity or balance or restraint. It says, plainly: “I will give you five good minutes and then abandon you.”

And you—which of these loaves do you trust to keep you company?

Me: I’m not sure if you’re very familiar with sour rye bread, are you? It’s the Finnish favourite, and maybe the one I like most. Water, rye, salt. Nothing else. Some of them are even made with sourdough starter which I love.

Mr. Twain: Now that is bread behaving properly.

Sour rye understands something many foods here seem to have forgotten: that nourishment does not require persuasion. Water, rye, salt—a committee small enough to reach agreement. And sourdough! A living argument carried forward patiently, generation after generation, like a family story that refuses to be simplified.

Rye does not flatter. It does not hurry. It does not ask to be liked. It assumes you will either grow into it or remain unworthy. This is an admirable stance.

Me: And oh! I must show you this. This one you don’t know, I’m sure. It’s called rönttönen, and it’s an open-faced rye and barley pie with mashed potato and sweetened lingonberry filling. My 7-year-old loves them, he could live a week by eating only these.

Mr. Twain: Rönttönen, you said? I must sit down.

An open-faced pie that combines potato and lingonberry without apology? This is not a snack. This is a philosophical position. Sweetness and starch agreeing to coexist without one pretending to be the other. And rye and barley holding the whole thing together like sensible elders at a lively table.

In my country, we would have argued about whether this should be dessert or supper until the food went cold and everyone went home hungry. You, wisely, appear to have eaten it instead.

What I admire most is that neither the bread nor the filling tries to refine you. They do not claim to be better choices. They simply say: “This is what works here.”

There is no performance in this food. No aspiration. No marketing copy whispering about balance or guilt or reward.

Just nourishment shaped by place, weather, and long memory.

Tell me, do people still try to make this lighter or healthier, or has it been spared that particular modern violence?

Me: Heavens, no, they don’t. The rönttönen has a protected geographical indication under the EU law and I hope that will keep it untouched. Maybe some good comes from the bureaucracy?

Mr. Twain: Well, then I withdraw every unkind word I have ever said about bureaucracy—for the next thirty seconds.

A protected geographical indication! Imagine that: people rising up, once, to say “hands off my food.” No improvements, no reinterpretations, no wellness versions with chia seeds. This belongs to a place, and the place has seniority.

It is a rare and noble moment when paperwork is used to defend reality instead of replacing it.

Most bureaucracies flatten life into forms that can be stamped. This one, miraculously, keeps someone from asking whether rönttönen could be reimagined. That alone earns it a small statue.

You see, somewhere, at this very moment, a well-meaning person is trying to elevate a perfectly good food by making it portable, protein-enhanced, shelf-stable, and emotionally reassuring. This is how eggs become powders and bread becomes an accessory.

Your rönttönen has escaped because it is anchored—to soil, to weather, to memory, to people who would look a stranger in the eye and say, “No. This is not negotiable.”

That is not nostalgia. That is restraint, a much rarer virtue.

So yes—perhaps some good does come from bureaucracy, when it remembers that its highest calling is occasionally to step aside, raise a velvet rope, and mutter: “This stays exactly as it is. Move along.”

Shall we continue down the aisle, or should we pause here a moment longer and admire a people who, once in a while, refuse to improve what isn’t broken?

Me: Your choice! Now that we are here, we can stay as long as you wish. Though, I’m not sure how long I can stand here before someone assumes I’m unstable.

Mr. Twain: Let them. We are committing the gravest offence of the age—taking our time.

Let us pause right here, between the bread that still remembers fields and the bread that has been engineered to survive a minor apocalypse. This is a good place to think.

What strikes me, wandering with you, is not abundance. It is explanation. Everything here comes with justification. Why it exists. What problem it solves. How it fits into a life that has already been made too fast.

In my day, bread did not explain itself. It merely minded its own business, and assumed you would do the rest. Now you have loaves that promise focus, joy, and occasionally moral superiority. One half expects a handshake and a testimonial.

And yet—your rönttönen does none of this. It does not pitch. It does not improve you. It does not care who you are becoming. It simply says: this is what we eat here. Take it or leave it.

I find that deeply respectable.

This store is full of foods that have been rescued from their own nature. Stabilised and corrected. Given a long future and a short present.

So if we are chatting freely, I will say this plainly: Modern shopping is less about hunger and more about reassurance. People are not buying dinner; they are buying relief from decision-making, from time, from the doubt that they might be doing life incorrectly. Which is why the most radical thing in this building is not novelty—it is simplicity that refuses to apologise.

Until next time,
Elina

I’ve been searching for normality for years, but I haven’t found it yet. I look at the surface and I’m sure I’ve finally found it—oh! there you are, normality—but the moment I give it a second glance it has disappeared. When I try to get a proper look at its hands and feet, they always seem to change.

Normal, according to the dictionary, means conforming to a standard; usual, typical, ordinary, or expected.

This sounds reassuring enough. It gives you a centre point, a middle, something you can orient yourself around. If you’re not sure what to do, you can at least ask what’s normal.

At first I went looking for normal in places where it ought to be obvious.

Like, it’s generally considered normal that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening. This is one of those things that feels so self-evident it hardly qualifies as a belief.

Unless you live above the Arctic Circle.

There, for a portion of the year, the sun does not rise. For another portion, it does not set. This, too, is normal for the people living there. While the sun either does or does not do its thing, they sleep and eat and go to work and argue with their partners about ordinary things, I assume—who forgot to buy bread, and who left the toothpaste cap open.

Normal doesn’t just differ by place. It has a habit of shifting while you’re standing in it. What felt ordinary a few years ago now requires explanation. What once raised eyebrows is suddenly described as sensible.

It feels like sitting on a fence someone else is carrying across a field—you keep changing your position, wondering why staying balanced feels so tiring, and who asked you to sit there in the first place. Since when did we start tracking sleep at a rectangle, or needing to know what strangers had for lunch?

After falling off the fence and failing to find normality in places, I turned my attention to how it shows up in company.

Normal sounds comforting. It usually is. You can rest inside normal for a moment. There’s a kindness in its soft acceptance, or at least some mercy. If you follow it, you don’t have to decide everything from scratch.

Normal allows large numbers of people to move together without negotiating every step. When to queue. When to pretend not to notice. When to pause and let others speak, whether they have a point or not.

But normal is sly. It tiptoes in and starts doing more than organising behaviour. It begins to stand in for thinking, for care, for responsibility. Things aren’t examined anymore; they’re repeated. Deviations aren’t weighed; they’re noticed and corrected – not always harshly, but persistently enough to make a point.

“Well, around here you just don’t…”
“It might look odd if you didn’t…”
“People expect you to…”

This alone would be manageable, and could be worked around with a mild but persistent obstinacy, if it weren’t for another human talent: our remarkable ability to adapt. People adjust. To pressure, to noise, to stress. To the absence of safety, or rest, or care.

Given enough repetition, almost anything can become familiar, and once it’s familiar, it starts passing for normal. This is not because people are foolish. It’s because we’re practical. We learn how to move inside the space we’re given no matter how narrow it has become.

Conditions that would have seemed intolerable from the outside become survivable from the inside. This is how environments—workplaces, families, systems—operate without anyone making a scene. It’s just how things are.

Normal, in this sense, is descriptive rather than ethical. It’s a definition of frequency, not quality.

The normal day of a sheep farmer includes manure, rain, fences, silage, manure.
The normal day of a parent includes interruption, interruption, interruption, and something very tender.
The normal day of a glass cubicle middle-manager includes Slack messages, index finger movement, screen light, calendar blocks, Slack messages.
The normal day of a kindergarten teacher includes wet mittens, lost mittens, tears, laughter, and mittens.
The normal day of a freelance writer includes coffee going cold, staring, typing, checking the time, staring again.

I guess they all eat and sleep and poo—sometimes, at least. So maybe that’s normal enough.

This is usually the point where people start reaching for a different word. They start longing for something else, though they don’t always know what to call it. They might describe it as freedom, or authenticity, or being themselves, but those words come with their own baggage and expectations. Another word slips into the conversation: natural.

Nature has a regularity of irregularity. Carrots and tomatoes and strawberries don’t really look like they look in grocery stores. Some are small and crooked. Some grow in pairs. Some are lopsided, or scarred, or slightly misshapen in ways that make them harder to stack neatly. Most of these poor things never make it to the shelves because they have been removed in service of standards.

Natural is often treated as normal’s moral opposite, but that’s misleading. Natural doesn’t oppose normal. It operates by a different logic.

Natural growth is uneven. It responds to conditions rather than rules. It doesn’t repeat reliably enough to become a standard. It looks wrong before it looks obvious, and sometimes continues to look wrong indefinitely, depending on who’s watching. What grows naturally rarely asks for consensus. It doesn’t care much about coordination. It isn’t especially interested in fitting in, though it can coexist. It tends to develop at its own pace, which is inconvenient for schedules and unsettling for systems that rely on predictability.

Most things that grow naturally will, at some point, be described as strange. This is not a failure of growth. It’s often the only available evidence that something is alive.

The confusion happens when normal is mistaken for natural. When usual and ordinary are treated as synonyms for healthy or right.

People do strange things under this assumption. Entire ways of living are defended simply because they’re familiar. Entire possibilities are dismissed because they don’t resemble what’s already in place.

It’s normal, after all, to expect the sun to rise in the morning—unless you live somewhere it doesn’t. It’s normal to the people who live there. Which is to say: normal can describe almost anything, given enough repetition and agreement.

Natural is more particular. It depends on context, nourishment, timing. It can’t be standardised without losing its nature. This doesn’t make natural superior, but it makes it harder to manage.

Perhaps that’s why normal remains so appealing. It’s portable, well-mannered, certainly has its uses.

The longer I live the more I find myself siding with ands rather than ors, so if there’s a difference worth paying attention to, it may be this:
Normal tells you how things usually go.
Natural tells you what happens when conditions are allowed to do their work.

The two are not enemies, but confusing them has consequences.

The first incident happened on January or February mornings when the thermometer showed -40°C, or -42°C, like it did once or twice almost every winter, and I knew what was about to happen. The school bus was frozen somewhere and wasn’t going to arrive, which wouldn’t have been much of a shame for a 14-year-old hoping to stay at home for a day – except that my school journey was in two parts. First, a school taxi that took children to the village elementary school picked me up and then left me waiting for the bus to town, five kilometres from my home, with no neighbours nearby. If the bus didn’t arrive, I had to walk back home.

I suggested to my mother that I stay at home, but her judgement – “Your grandpa was in the Winter War” – pushed me out of the door. This is how both pride and guilt are passed from generation to generation, in sidenotes. I waited for the bus that wasn’t going to arrive, and then walked home for an hour.

This was before looking glasses got stuck to our hands, and even though some of my classmates already sent text messages with their Nokia 2110s, my Your-grandpa-was-in-the-Winter-War family wasn’t the first to offer a new, trendy toy to their offspring. It’s amazing how much heat a human body can produce as long as you keep moving, and even more amazing how long frost flowers your lashes can build from your own exhale, but the most remarkable thing is how endurance can become entangled with suffering.

The second time I had my share of winter was in high school. I worked part-time at a horse stable and had to feed the horses before going to school. There had been a whiteout overnight, and the road was only a smudged line between snow poles marking the edges so the ploughs wouldn’t lose it.

My father left for work before me, and his advice to his daughter, with half a year of driving experience, was: “Press the gas pedal.” Which was, obviously, the only thing you could do. Otherwise the car would get stuck in the snow – along with keeping it as close to the middle of the road as possible and hoping no one would drive towards you, forcing you into the snowbank. I did. I pressed the pedal of my Toyota and arrived at the stable to find the door hidden under snow.

The stable sat on top of a hill, and the wind had drifted the snow, covering the door almost completely. Drifted snow is tight and tough to shovel. It is reluctant to move. It comes off in heavy slabs that break on the shovel and drop back into the drift, as if nothing has happened.

The horses got their breakfast, but I was late for chemistry, and the teacher who, in my opinion, looked like a dry mushroom squeaked, “Haverinen, you already have seven unexplained absences.”

The third crack occurred on New Year’s Eve, and it was entirely my own fault. I don’t know which New Year it was, or whether several have since merged into one in my mind, but it was New Year’s, and I was standing in a bar queue.

I had already moved away from my hometown, but the holidays had the best parties, when locals and ex-locals gathered together and you had to be on time to get into the only bar the town had. I wasn’t. Instead, I stood in line with another misfortune, waiting for overly drunk drunks to be thrown out and make space for us.

It was -33°C. But does a 20-year-old wear a snowsuit when she goes to a bar? Certainly not. She uses her endurance to get a warm drink into her hand. I think I had fun after all. Some overly drunk drunk got thrown out, and saved my toes.

Where does endurance show up in your life, and where does it quietly turn into something else?

It’s Boxing Day and we’re walking on ice: the 6-year-old, my sister, me, and the dog. The day is three minutes longer than three days before, but you have to climb a hill to actually see the sun, and because clouds fill the sky today, the day is only an extension of a blue moment splitting the long darkness.

The ice echoes and resounds. The wind howls. We’re going to make an open fire somewhere on the lakeshore and do some ice-fishing. My sister carries an axe, lures, bait, and hot chocolate in her backpack; I have dry wood. The open fire will give us what we might lose to fishing.

Walking on water in winter narrows things. You forget what anyone said about anything: the current news drama cycle, the lingering irritations that usually follow you around all fall away on their own and disappear into the open white.

There’s a flat white blanket around us, a white that has no contrast, no shades, no highlights for our eyes to catch. A vast openness that waves in summer now carries weight beneath our feet.

The dog trots ahead of us on the ice, stops once, raises her head against the wind and listens, then continues; she reads the surface and commits, the way animals do when they trust what they know. We follow at a distance, each of us moving by the same quiet information.

I think how odd we probably would look from a distance. A small group moving slowly across the ice on Boxing Day, cutting into the ice with an axe, sitting beside a black hole.

Are you sure it’s safe? Aren’t you cold? Shouldn’t you be somewhere else? But out here, none of that applies. The noise of other people slips off our shoulders. The ice doesn’t respond to urgency, only to presence, and we keep walking, part of the vast openness.

This is how the year ends for me. Thank you for walking with me through these pages this year. I’m stepping into the next one with a desk full of things, shaped by the same vast openness. I wish you a steady start to the year ahead, whatever ground you happen to be standing on.

If you’d like, I’d love to hear how the year closes and the new begins on your side.

The granny who mooned the horses

“Well of course. There she comes again with a full load. Couldn’t she have stuffed even more onto that burden of hers?” There’s irritation and admiration in my father’s voice. From the window you can see a bundle of chopped branch-wood swaying in every direction on the rise along the path from the cowshed. Finally the bundle lurches forward and collapses in a heap in front of the steps.

It’s Elli-muori bringing a load of firewood from the forest.

According to Elli-muori’s principles, firewood is not fetched from the wood shed in summer – firewood is fetched from the forest, which is full of sticks and twigs. The firewood shed is for winter. Father has forbidden Elli-muori from going into the forest many times, but she never listens.

Elli-muori is my grandmother, my mother’s mother. There are two reasons for father’s ban. Elli-muori is over 80 years old, and her eyesight is very poor. The fear is that she might get lost in the forest. We children have also been ordered to keep an eye on her movements, though she has never once gotten lost. She has always managed to find her way back. She’s sly – hides an axe and the rope for bundling firewood under her apron and heads off to fetch wood. In the same way she carries a berry pail under her apron when she goes bilberry picking. We wondered how she could possibly see the berries, but somehow they seemed to be found by feel. And we had to believe it, since she did bring home berries for the pudding.

Elli-muori had come to live with us for the summer. She was a tiny, carefree granny who said she was “Elli-muori,” and that’s the name she was called. She took father’s and mother’s restrictions on her movements with good humour, but she certainly didn’t follow them. She often slipped away to the forest to collect brushwood.

It was hard for me to believe that this little granny had given birth to 16 children, and that she had been one of the most famous moonshine distillers in the municipality. Elli-muori had at least once been caught distilling, and had received a prison sentence. I never quite learned how long the sentence was, but she had spent a few weeks in jail, with my Aunt Mimmi, then a nursing infant, along with her. She hadn’t had to sit out the entire sentence because of the small child; the rest of the sentence was served by her husband, my grandfather Olli. I never met Olli – he died before I was born.

My father had actually become acquainted with his future mother-in-law through her “products” long before he met his future wife. As a young man, during breaks between logging seasons and river drives, father had lodged in the same village. In those days, people held moonshine-laced parties rather often, and father had participated in them with great enthusiasm.

Perhaps there had been something wrong with the drinks, or perhaps he had just been in a foul mood, but one All Saints’ Eve father had wanted to continue the festivities in another village. The journey, however, ended at the gate of the lane. There had been a gatekeeper – either the devil himself or someone else invisible to others.

A fight had broken out. Father had sworn and beaten his imaginary opponent with fence rails so hard that they snapped. Whether it did any good or whether father was getting the worst of it, because he then fetched a manure fork from the cowshed and continued the battle with that. No one knows how the match ended – who won or if it was a draw. Father never got past the gate to the next village. It must have been a strange sight for those who witnessed it.

Neither father nor Elli-muori ever spoke of those old matters. I once tried to ask father what the opponent had looked like, but his face went red, his hand scratched the back of his neck, and he turned to look out the window. Whether he didn’t remember or didn’t want to remember. He probably lost. Father stopped drinking once his bachelor days were over.

There was one thing Elli-muori simply could not believe or understand. She had received a letter saying the state would begin paying her a national pension. How could the state possibly have enough money to be giving it out to people for nothing in return? At that rate, the state would run out of money – go bankrupt, surely.

She had a paper stating that she could withdraw a certain sum of money from the post office. So, when my father had business in the village, Elli-muori wrote an authorisation so he could draw the first instalment of her pension. With that money father had bought a quarter-kilo package of coffee and a small amount of gingerbread biscuits.

It was haymaking time, and our whole crew had been working all day on the field. Only Elli-muori stayed home to mind the house. In the evening, when we came home, we asked how things had gone for the house-sitter. She said she had passed the time by drinking the state-paid coffee. Mother looked into the cupboard and shook her head: “Did you drink a whole package of coffee in one day?” Yes, apparently she had brewed it all since she had, for once, gotten beans paid by the state. Mother later told us that half a jug of cream had gone into that coffee as well.

The day hadn’t been only coffee-drinking, though. A herd of horses that grazed freely around the village had come up to the fence and started pressing the fence rails with their necks. Out she went, shouted, “Off with you to hell!” and lifted her skirt and mooned them. The horses were too embarrassed to look and galloped away.

Elli-muori didn’t wear underpants, and the coffee day didn’t make her sick. She just sighed, “It’s a fine and carefree life when there’s food and warmth.”

Unfortunately, my great-grandmother Elli died long before I was born, so I never got to meet her. I think we would’ve enjoyed each other’s company at the coffee table.

Until next time,

Elina

The 6-year-old and I drove toward the beach, windows wide open because who wants air conditioning when you can let the scent of drying hay fill the cabin.

I have a favourite spot on the quiet fringe of Finland’s archipelago coast. It has everything you’d need for a lazy day: a circular sand beach in the arms of pines and black alders, a small kiosk where you can buy ice-cream and crisps and orange lemonade, a tiny hut to change your clothes, a sauna, a wooden pier that swings in waves.

Still, very few people go there – it’s on an island, and you have to drive there along a bumpy road that twists past small farms, country cottages, and pine hills that poke their heads above the wheat fields. It’s far away from the world, and that’s exactly why we go there, my son and me.

We’ve tried many beaches, but the 6-year-old says they’re too noisy, and I say there are too many families covering their upbringing in head-to-toe swimsuits where no sun or wind or sand can touch their skin, and with so many arm floaties they would keep a small ferry afloat.

The 6-year-old ran straight into engineering a canal system at the edge of the water, and I lay down on soft sand. The Baltic Sea can’t pride itself on bright waters, but we’ve lived on its coast for five years, and I’ve become fond of its softly salted estuary, flat rocks, time-worn fishing huts, and patchwork quilt made of green islands and rocky islets.

The waves kept slapping the shore, a rather lazy-looking gull circled above the sea, and I stared at them and thought about the client case waiting on my desk – we’d had a long talk before the beach trip, planning the autumn and talking about the new direction she was gravitating towards and all the things that would need redesigning and reshaping on her website and communication.

How strange it is that I’ve spent eight years doing work the world calls marketing. I’ve never called myself a marketer, yet here I am, building websites and brands and all the things the industry likes to dress up as strategies and assets. I can talk fluently about ROIs and frameworks the same way I can talk about solid cubic metres and undergrowth in forestry, or hex codes and paddings in design. Useful terms, all of them, but none was the thing itself.

On that beach, expressions were everywhere. In the reeds shivering in the wind, in the clouds drifting past with no urgency, and in me, lying there calm and careless in the sun like a warm stone. Everything expressed because that’s what nature does. That’s what you do until someone tells you to optimise.

You become natural when you stop performing and start expressing.

And marketing, at its simplest, is expression with a direction. A message with a place to go. You make something, and you let people know it exists.

In Finnish, the word for express is ilmaista. It comes from ilma – air. I love that. It makes expression feel like something elemental: fluid and independent. It can arrive as the glory of the first snow in November or as a salty breeze on a hot July afternoon. It doesn’t need permission or performance. It just moves.

When I think about marketing this way – as expression, as air – it stops being a spectacle. It’s just air in motion. It has a direction, but it stays natural in its movements.

Will it guarantee you readers, clients, applause? Of course not. It won’t magically spare you the work you have to do, which is often a lot of work, and work that can swallow the time for the actual work you’re doing.

But it will end the internal wrestling match with the part of your work called marketing. You’ll do it with the tools, words, and platforms you choose – and there are many to choose from. You decide the tone, you decide the pace. You use your energy for expression instead of resistance, and stop acting like it’s anything more than a basic human gesture: letting people know what you’ve made.

The relief doesn’t come from finding your niche or optimising your sales page to respond to every known psychological trigger. It comes when you drop the battle and start expressing what’s already there.

Lying there in the sun, I suppose I’ve always liked building bridges between dreams and reality, and maybe I’ve been in the forest air too long, but I think we can express the same way seagulls and reeds and black alders do whatever it is they do in the wind, without questioning whether our song is worth singing.

I swiped the sand from my legs. The wind picked up across the bay, turning the surface of the sea into small, glittering arrows. The 6-year-old dropped his shovel and waded into the waves. “I am a seal,” he laughed, pressing his legs together and trying to stay afloat. I squinted toward the sun, and jumped from the pier.

Ps. The Museum of 2025 Marketing Practices also came from that July heat, if you feel like wandering there.

From one stop to another, groups of schoolkids boarded with a stream of the restless energy only growing human beings can generate. Backpacks bouncing from one row to another, beanies flying through the air and out of the reach of their rightful owners. A block of six girls giggled loudly, shooting and editing a TikTok reel. Someone was trying to fit an entire chocolate bar into their mouth while shouting insults to their fellow nine-year-olds.

The bus driver said nothing at first. He adjusted his mirrors, waited until the wave of chaos echoed from the back row back to him, and then, with a voice of decades of surviving from engine breakdowns, icy roads, and schoolkid transportation, delivered his verdict:

“No niin.” — So, well.

Instant silence. You could have heard a wool mitten drop. No threats, no swearing. Two syllables, and that was it. The bus rolled on, as if nothing had ever disturbed the greyness of a November morning.

I recently read a wonderful piece by Marci Cornett about the hidden meanings tucked inside Irish words. And then, mentioned the ultimate Finnish expression, and I couldn’t get over it.

For my Finnish readers, this is probably a bromide, seen in too many mugs written with clumsy fonts, but for everyone else, allow me to introduce either the most efficient communication device, or the ultimate social lubricant for people who’d rather not create fuss.

It’s gender-neutral and class-neutral. It can start, fill, or end a sentence—or serve as the entire conversation. It’s the space between effort and acceptance, action and allowing, and it has a complete emotional range within six letters.

No niin.

Language scholars tell you no niin derives from the particles no, “well”, and niin “so”. That’s technically true but utterly beside the point. The real translation depends entirely on tone and situation. Whether it’s simplicity, or pure lack of emotional cadence, everything returns to it eventually. At this point, you’re probably already dying for some examples, so here we go.

The subtle pride

A parent watches a child tie their shoelaces for the first time. “No niin.” This no niin is soft, and it comes with subtle pride. You can use it on yourself, too. When you finally manage to clean the attic closet you’ve been avoiding since 2020, you lean back, exhale through your nose, and whisper, “No niin.”

The warning shot

Like the bus driver in the 7:42 am bus, raise your volume, but keep your tone flat: “NO NIIN!” This no niin restores balance, and is especially effective for parents and teachers. If you ever hear it directed at you, freeze. Do not attempt to reason or explain. The conversation has already ended.

The acceptance

You go out on a January morning after a snowstorm that, according to the forecast, should’ve been a minor one, and find your car buried in snow, looking more of a giant snow turtle than the Ford Transit you had yesterday. The first, descending, almost melodic no niin slipping from your lips, powered with some creative swear words like kilinvittu, doesn’t oppose reality; it says: Things could be worse, but let’s not tempt fate by listing how. You shovel, dig, and scrape until the car re-emerges. Then you realise a plough has built a thick snow-ice wall between you and the road. By the time you could finally leave home, you make quick calculations and as a result end up canceling the meeting you never wanted to attend in the first place, and exhale the opposite kind of no niin: one that means you can put the wool socks on and make another cup of coffee.

The diplomatic disengagement

Uncle Pekka, who has a reputation for giving political monologues at family gatherings, has opened his mouth and begun to get upset about tax policies, again. Everyone knows he’ll soon fall into a rant trance, and he won’t be reacting to spoken words. Someone—most likely his wife—sips coffee and says, “No niin.”

This no niin is released to end a conversation without causing public accusations. Used correctly, it’s the emergency exit not just from political arguments but also from unsolicited life advice. It’s polite enough to reset awkward situations, yet final enough to make sure: We will not be continuing this discussion at this table.

The collective encouragement

What do you say, when there are three people, a chainsaw, a tree that’s fallen on the garage, and no plan? No niin, of course. Or maybe its weighted version even, “No niin sitten.” It’s the Finnish pep talk. It marks the moment before action, and shows the communal encouragement that precedes risk. You can hear it before assembling IKEA furniture, launching boats, or attempting to carry a sofa up a spiral staircase. It’s both perseverance and surrender: We might end badly, but we’re doing it anyway.

The presentations

For years, all teachers and communication experts have tried to teach the stubborn Finns not to start their speeches, presentations, introductions, and any sort of verbal public performances with No niin. Guess what’s still the most common Finnish way to start a YouTube video, a wedding speech, a webinar? Yep. No niin.

The contentment

This no niin could be mistaken for a prayer, but it goes much further because it doesn’t ask for a lottery win or meddle with anyone’s life. In the evening, wrapped in a towel and after-sauna warmth, you stare into the lake mist or sip glögg, “No niin.” This version contains gratitude, relaxation, and joy in varying amounts. It means: Well, life is good.

I was going to demonstrate No niin to you by audio examples, but then I remembered that this guy has already done it. Ismo shows what Finns know intuitively: you can say a lot with fewer words.

Next time you visit Finland and your suitcase arrives in Tampere but you’re in Helsinki, remember no niin. When someone uncivilised serves you light-roast filter coffee with cold milk and calls it a latte, raise your eyebrows and mutter an annoyed no niin. And when you get the first bite of that perfect cinnamon bun and sink into the quiet happiness where nothing needs mending, pat yourself on the back with a smile and say with the utmost contentment, no niin. You’ll blend right in.

So—
No niin sitten.

Elina

I was five years old when I told everyone I was going to write a book. I scribbled words into self-made booklets, and if I didn’t know how to spell a particular word, I threw in random letters of approximately the right length. I illustrated the pages, drew large headings, and stapled the sheets carefully.

Most importantly, I proclaimed my book was going to be published by Otava, a major publisher in Finland. I chose that particular publishing house because Otava means Plough — a part of the constellation Ursa Major — in Finnish, and a publishing house named after stars was the only one that made sense to my five-year-old mind.

I’m almost forty-five now, and there is no book. Yet.

In my defence, I’ve written enough beginnings to fill a bookshelf. Just never the same one twice, and until last year, I kept them all hidden.

If I thought the answers mattered, I could ask:

Was I undisciplined, giving myself too much leash with all the comforts life has to offer? Did I lack the right strategy — or just a better chair? Was I too content living inside my imagination, happily hallucinating the brilliance of my ideas because who needs revisions when you have delusions? Or maybe I simply had more urgent things to do: setting my stories free.

But almost forty-five years have brushed the self-moderation out of me, so by all means, you can entertain yourself with analysis — I won’t.

Apparently, the universe takes pity on chronic dreamers. I call it evolution by exhaustion.

I started writing on Substack a year ago. Publishing the first post was terrible. I was sick. If there’s a fitting punishment for hitting “publish” for the first time, it’s getting trapped in one of those amusement park rides that spin faster than your thoughts. I don’t know how, but I once ended up there on an otherwise beautiful May Day — crawling off the rollercoaster with shaking knees, a wave of nausea across my forehead, and kids laughing somewhere nearby.

For years, I’d been making things for others (and I still love making things there): designing, branding, marketing, writing. I could show up for other people with quiet precision, bring creative and practical solutions, meet deadlines, execute real things — some of them with pretty decent numbers I never bothered to shout about — and enjoy hitting the publish button from the safety of a supporter.

But the evolution of exhaustion is sweet. Once you get tired of your own games, you finally move on. You don’t rant or swim in the story sea of your excuses; you just don’t care anymore. And that’s what happened to me.

I have lifetimes of words waiting to be written. Words I didn’t have when I was five or twenty-five. So I’ll continue, let them fill my cup, spill, and expand. I’m not sure anymore if it’s even my business whether they make any sense or not; I may not know where it’s all heading, but I can promise I’ll arrive with a straight face and a decent pair of boots, and a habit of throwing in letters of approximately the right length.

I’m so glad you’re here, reading these lines. Since I started writing here, I’ve received kind messages, money (!), generous comments. There’s been warmth I didn’t expect, and I’m deeply grateful for it. That makes me feel that here, in this peculiar corner of the internet, I’m in the right place.

Until next time,
Elina

—Elina

Ps. If you’d like your expressions alive enough to kick back—well, that’s my trade. My studio is where we bend frames for your website, your brand, your stories that breathe. There’s a door open for you here. Welcome.

We meet the therapist in a corridor of a medical center where grey walls are brightened by light grey acoustic panels and photos of children playing in sandboxes, all in spotless white shirts. Not a mud stain in sight. Here, human variety is ironed flat to fit the boxes, and texture reduced to the safety of plastic. “You can leave your shoes there,” she says. The 6-year-old has Moomin wellies and no socks, and the therapist laughs awkwardly.

She hands me a contract full of heavy-sounding words like therapy and rehabilitation plan. Since when do you need therapy for being six and learning a sound? Learning a sound is not fucking therapy. Since when do you need a rehabilitation plan just to learn to place your tongue up to your palate, behind your teeth, and vibrate it there: rehab for a rolling R?

We are in an occupational therapy room, and between the jumps and wall climbs the therapist asks the 6-year-old questions to wring meaning from the way he names them. The 6-year-old is quite excited because he thinks the therapist is actually interested in his thoughts and insights.

She tries to test if he knows his months by a leading question: “It’s the month when everyone’s having a holiday.” Everyone? I wonder if the therapist thinks she’s talking to a middle-manager in a glass cubicle. The 6-year-old, who thinks in terms of bilberries and ski season, just stares blankly. For him, July is not a “holiday month”, but a season when the sea is warm and the hay bales start stacking on the fields.

I stare at the walls, because arguing with them seems more useful than arguing with this line of questioning. The therapist continues, “What’s your hobby?” The 6-year-old ponders for a short moment, and replies, “Nothing.”

He knows nothing about hobbies yet. I mean, the real, serious hobbies, the ones you pay good money for, call it exercise, get a professional to supervise, and mark it in the family calendar. That’s a real hobby, coming with management and the seriousness of structure grown-ups can parade with pride with each other at dinner tables and family reunions and official system checks like speech therapy.

The 6-year-old only knows things he does: biking, fishing, reading, drawing, riding a horse, running in the forests, helping with domestic chores, going to cafés and museums and theaters, building Legos, swimming, skiing, making firewood and snowmen, constructing a medieval fighting scene of knights and swords with his friend—no insurance, just two sticks and a lot of yelling—playing Uno and an ice-fishing video game, eating berries straight from the bushes. And while they fill his days with adventures and skills, those are not, unfortunately, real hobbies the therapist could write down to those reports we never see but she certainly writes.

The therapist doesn’t ask how we live and what we do. She’s trained to sniff out subtext, in case potentially marginalised parents might be trying to cheat the system so instead of direct questions she asks the 6-year-old “Do you live in an apartment or in a house with a yard?” to which he answers “In a house.” Did the system forget to tell the therapist that people still live in the countryside, follow the seasons, and run farms where the food ends up on her table? Or perhaps she forgot that even in 2025, this is Finland—where the very existence of cities is still a bit questionable.

I don’t tell her that we have a house with a large garden in the south and 110 hectares of land in the north, and that the 6-year-old could tell her the difference between forage harvester and hay conditioner, and between great spotted woodpecker and black woodpecker, but has no clue what Minecraft is.

“Do you have brothers or sisters?” the therapist asks. “No, but Maija comes and plays with me,” says the 6-year-old. Neither of us is telling her Maija is 71 and she takes him to museums, exhibitions, flea markets, and for french fries—and never talks to him like he’s a child.

After 45 minutes, we leave her with her reports and checkboxes, and go home to unbox a new Lego forest tractor, still pronouncing it with a soft, English-style R.

Maybe it’s when the thing you’re working on stops being itself, and starts to mirror everything around it, no longer having a colour of its own.

I’m lucky to have two houses I call home. One on Finland’s southwest coast, one in the boreal forest farm—and between them over 700 kilometres of road. I’m writing this in the second. Once again, our Ford Transit was packed with cats and dogs and kids and bicycles—and, because they refused to stay home, three imaginary friends strapped to the roof for good measure—and drove through the country, into the land of raven, into another dimension.

Yes, I’m exaggerating. We have only one cat, one dog, and one child who has only one bike.

The distance is not a nuisance. It’s the reset button. By the time I’ve driven that stretch, the polish has worn thin on quiet roads between pine hills and no traffic lights in sight. Whatever I thought was urgent fades, and I remember what actually makes work, and life, alive.

This land has taught me more about creative projects than any method, because it has its own curriculum for creativity, and no patience for pretence. It doesn’t reward jargon; it echoes you between endless skies and pine-needle paths until the survival identity cracks, and then it hands you bilberries and silence to fill the gap and says, here—deal with this.

I don’t know if the land reflects me, or I reflect the land, or both, but it reminds me every time: you can’t fake aliveness. You can’t ignore your own voice in the nightless night, and you can’t stay lofty when the forest keeps tripping you with roots.

What it teaches, over and over, is that life has the last word. Nothing about it is tidy, but everything about it is true. All of which would be charming if it stayed in the forest. But it doesn’t. The same lesson shows up at my desk, in every piece of work I touch. The structures should bend to the creation, not the other way around. A living piece of work doesn’t need polish first; it needs air, dirt, and space to move. A brand that’s boxed up too tight is as useful as shoes two sizes too small: dainty for five minutes, unbearable for the rest. A voice hidden in jargon is not a voice at all—it’s a ventriloquist’s dummy.

What lasts is what’s alive. I see what happens when projects breathe the same way. They don’t tighten into perfect little packages; they expand, surprise, and sometimes spill over the edges. They carry dirt under their nails and humour in their armpits. They last not because they’re polished, but because they’re unmistakably alive.

What this land keeps teaching me, I bring into my work: you can’t counterfeit life, and you can’t counterfeit a voice. Whether it’s your website, your words, or whatever expression you call marketing, we’ll bend the frames, shape the containers so they fit you, and not the other way around.

You don’t have to know where to start. Just send me a note at elina@elinah.studio. I’ll bring clarity and good coffee—and maybe one or two pine branches—you’ll bring whatever’s in your hands.

—Elina

Ps. Yes, there’s a desk behind all those bilberries. Proof here.

Pps. Just a reminder:

I’ve done it more times than I can count, convincing myself it was a necessity, clarity, or maturity. It feels safer that way, until you realise the price is your own voice, and once you get bored listening to your own voice, you can already see the end of the path.

This piece isn’t an argument. It’s a short letter for anyone who’s tired of subtitling their own life—and to the times we scrub ourselves thin.

What I’ve said to myself about needing to be understood was a lie.

Not a white lie, not a lie anyone would ever haul you over the coals for, but a word-laundry softener, a safety blanket woven from disguise threads, a self-preservation dressed up as honesty because it’s easier to believe you missed a step than to face the truth that everyone heard you and simply shrugged.

They understood me just fine. They just didn’t want what I was carrying to the table.

That’s the part I tripped over; kept thinking I should sand it down, dip it in honey, translate it into their language. They nodded at the translation, but I know now, they were listening for their own reflection, and I have no say in what they choose to see in it.

So, I’ve retired from the subtitling business. Got tired of sanding off the edges, flattening, frosting, and clinical-ing the curious.

I’m talking in my own dialect now, and there’s no quiz at the end.

The strange thing is, the moment their approval stopped mattering, my voice stopped echoing—and settled into my mouth. The spaces between words are filled with oxygen, not with held breaths.

I didn’t need them to understand me.

I needed me not to abandon myself while they were busy not listening.

I write about things that don’t always introduce themselves as related, but they appear to ferment quietly somewhere near, then rise up and leak into my writing before I can stop them. I’ve tried tightening the lids. I’ve tried being less perceptive. It doesn’t work. So, here we are: you'll get my words here, and they may or may not make sense to you, and either way, I could ask, what is sense after all, but a consensus of limited mind, and there’s always something beyond.

Subscribe now

She is greeted by a Guide. He seems pleasantly done with urgency.

Guide: Welcome. Please lower your expectations further. This museum is not interactive. It’s a graveyard.

Visitor: Of marketing?

Guide: Of performance.

They walk slowly past the turnstiles made of expired domain names, and under a glowing sign that reads Welcome to the Era of More.

An animatronic figure in yoga pants types rapidly on a laptop with one hand while filming with the other.

Guide: This was called High-Performance Burnout. People built empires from their kitchen tables while slowly vanishing from themselves. You’ll notice the carefully staged houseplants and the curated bookshelf in the background—all part of a ritual known as Relatable Professionalism, the art of looking casual while monetising your glow.

They continue.

Visitor: And this one? All these pinned images with quotes in curly fonts—were they religious materials?

Guide: Ah, no. That was the Instagram Strategy. Quite sacred in practice, though. The fonts were chosen for “emotional resonance,” the quotes for “shareability,” and the whole lot was sacrificed to an invisible entity called The Algorithm. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out what The Algorithm wanted from them. Researchers recovered extensive digital archives dedicated to decoding its will.

Visitor: And this glass case of small pastel tiles?

Guide: Ah yes. That’s a collection of Carousel Posts. Often used on Instagram, usually beginning with a confession or a bold claim: “I’m going to say something unpopular,” or “Nobody talks about this”, and then unrolling a series of graphics revealing absolutely nothing new, but arranged in digestible squares. A marvel of form.

Visitor: Were they successful?

Guide: Well, we must remember they measured success very differently back then. Metrics like impressions, reach, engagement formed the basis of their Digital Faith. Many began their work with sincerity and a desire to make something meaningful, but the system they entered, this thing called Online Visibility, was engineered to punish depth and reward urgency. So they learned to perform: not from malice, but from exhaustion. They began with gold, but were taught to polish it into glitter. Glitter scaled better. It was noise, but the right kind of noise could buy you credibility and pay your bills.

Visitor: This one seems... sinister. A skeleton with “You are the brand” written on it, over and over.

Guide: A cautionary piece. From the 2020s, when personal identity was a full-time product people were told to share their vulnerabilities as a growth tactic. Not for connection or healing, but to “build trust.” It was called Authenticity Marketing.

Visitor (frowning): Sounds like a hostage situation.

Guide: In many ways, it was. The curator calls that room The Trauma Economy. Please do not touch the Emotional Labour Display—it is still smouldering.

Visitor: And this peculiar relic?

Guide: That’s an Offer Stack. You see, they were told that value needed to be “stacked” to be believed. A single session wasn’t enough. You had to throw in PDFs, lifetime access, a secret podcast, early-bird pricing, one-time bonuses, exclusive Discord chats, and a closing countdown timer. If you didn’t add scarcity, you were considered unserious.

Visitor: What were they selling?

Guide: Clarity, mostly. Though no one could remember what it meant by the time the offer went live.

Visitor: Okay, sounds weird. Well, what do we have here? This looks rather fascinating, with all the loudspeakers…

A glass vitrine shakes slightly. The Guide opens the door, and a wall of noise explodes outward from the cabinet—a vintage mic, three ring lights, and a podcaster’s voice chanting, “Value, not volume!” through the amplifiers.

Guide (yelling): This is Broadcasting Over Resonance. At that time, the ones who shouted loudest got all the attention.

The Guide pushes the vitrine door shut against the noise wall and taps the locket. It’s quiet again.

Visitor: You would think they were exhausted and deaf.

Guide: Oh, they were. But they always had the opportunity to brand their silence as Sacred Recalibration so nobody really noticed they were completely burnt out and slightly deranged. The timeline was so tight that one week offline meant career collapse, and people publicly apologised for being quiet for four days.

Visitor: Were they famous?

Guide: Mostly to themselves. And many did try to speak plainly instead. They built with care, and made beautiful things slowly. But it was hard to be seen without selling the spectacle.

Visitor: Were they the happier ones?

Guide: Depends on how you define happiness. The records suggest that they slept better, had friends, and laughed more, but fewer people clicked. And Conversion was everything back in their days.

Visitor: What about these piles of tinned goods? This looks like a shelf of canned declarations.

Guide: That’s Content. A word used to refer to anything a human made—art, writing, video, audio, pottery, love letters, inner transformation. It was labelled, market-tested, and blessed by The Algorithm.

Visitor: What is this—a hawk in a labeled hoodie?

Guide: That was Branding. Or rather, Polishing the Signal. Even then, real inspiration arrived wild and whole, but the structures built to share it treated freedom like a liability. Strategy and spontaneity were pitted against each other, as if soul and scaffolding couldn’t coexist. Eventually, many forgot what they were actually saying, but at least it looked familiar, and because people were so tired and overstimulated, they didn’t want to read or listen—just swipe something easy to swallow.

They pause in front of a looping installation titled The Pivot.

Visitor: This person seems to have rebranded 17 times in one year.

Guide: Yes, it was called the Niche Era. Many believed their message would only land if they found the perfect core promise to then repeat endlessly. It kept them beautifully distracted from doing the actual work they loved.

They walk on, and arrive at an amphitheatre filled with flipcharts and sticky notes with “magnetism,” and “soul-led niche” scribbled on them. A looped voice whispers, “Refine, align, define,” and the actors take turns stepping into a spotlight.

Visitor: And that one?

Guide: That is Authenticity Theatre. A very popular genre. People would publicly share highly curated vulnerability, timed perfectly to coincide with a launch.

Visitor: Did people believe it?

Guide: Only the tired ones, but there were a lot of them.

They reach the final room: The Exit Through the Funnel.

Guide: This is where it all ended. The Funnel—once designed to guide strangers into connection—became so complex, so optimised, so dense with gestures to keep you warm until a sale—lead magnets and nurture sequences, they called them—that even the ones who built it didn’t know what they were selling anymore. The funnel became a labyrinth. Some entered and never returned. There’s still a copywriter and a content manager somewhere there. The curator tried hard to localise them, but could find only traces of rudimentary AI tools and matcha latte.

Visitor: Did anything survive?

Guide: Yes. Presence. Connection. Expression. I know it’s hard to believe, but there were a lot of good-hearted, creative people at that time.

They exit through the gift shop. It sells artisanal iced coffee and tote bags that say “Be the Algorithm You Wish to See in the World.” The Guide waves her goodbye as she steps out with a coffee called The Optimiser’s Remorse in her hand. The sky is clear. She drinks her coffee while a breeze plays with the corner of the museum map.

I write about things that don’t always introduce themselves as related, but they appear to ferment quietly somewhere near, then rise up and leak into my writing before I can stop them. I’ve tried tightening the lids. I’ve tried being less perceptive. It doesn’t work. So, here we are: you'll get my words here, and they may or may not make sense to you, and either way, I could ask, what is sense after all, but a consensus of consciousness, and there’s always something beyond. So, I make no promises except to leave the funnel where I found it.

Subscribe now

It slips into your skin and time blurs at the edges.

It’s light-drunk and mosquito-bitten.

It’s a hymn to berries, sauna, and green that punches your face.

The wonderful Lisa Bolin and I wrote this piece about summer: from the Australian sun that bleaches you to your bones to the bright delirium of Finnish nightless nights.

Read it here.

Enjoy your days,

Elina

Season That Has No Name
You wake up and know exactly nothing, though you have the faint suspicion that you once had a personality. You float through your day on autopilot, vaguely aware that you’re supposed to be something. Productive? Present? Grateful? About what? You don’t even know what day it is.

I’m Tired Season
You are not sleepy, but tired. Soul-tired. You’ve cancelled plans that sounded delightful last week. You’re deeply uninterested in everything that requires trousers, small talk, or new people. You don’t want to explain yourself. You just want to sit quietly. Maybe with potatoes that still smell of soil, wear curly roots like jewellery, and ask for nothing but butter and salt.

I’m Fine (Not) Season
You say “I’m fine” with the smile of someone defusing a bomb. You are not fine. You are holding it together with sarcasm, ice cream, and a to-do list written on a tear-stained napkin. Your body keeps sending messages like “headache” and “rage,” but you doubt there’s a bottom to this. So you translate them as “just tired,” and keep going.

Eat Strawberries and Refuse All Plans Season
You follow the sun like a cat, eat ripe strawberries over the sink, and politely ignore every calendar invite. You are not available for anything that begins with “just a quick…”. You will return when the wind changes.

Not This Again Season
Oh no, it’s back. The old pattern, the old ache, the familiar loop dressed in a new season colour. Even though it claims that Mocha Mousse is a warming, brown hue that answers your desire for comfort, you are certainly not comfortable. You thought you cleared this already, three or twenty-three times, but here it is again, tapping at your shoulder, smelling like a salmon somebody forgot on the table a week ago.

Trauma Cabaret Season
They’ve arranged a full-day monologue stage in your living room. The Inner Critic is up first, reciting a 90-minute piece titled “This Is Not Enough.” Then comes Guilt, offering a shaky interpretive reading of a novel called “What You Should and Shouldn’t Have Done in 2005, 2018, and 2023.” Shame refuses the mic but hums ominously from the corner. Hope tries to interrupt with a ukulele solo, but gets pushed offstage by “I Am Broken” and “I am Not Safe”. You sit in the front row, unable to leave your couch, wondering if anyone booked the Rage Against The Myself for a closing set. You almost applaud.

Learn Beekeeping in the Mountains Season
You fantasise about escaping to a cabin where no one expects you to answer anything except the bees. Your new life involves fermenting things in jars and knowing the names of birds. You don’t actually want to become a beekeeper—you just want the quiet that lives on the other side of decision fatigue, or worse, becoming. You want to hear yourself think. Or not think at all.

Sit it out. The weather’s a mess, but the strawberries are ripening anyway.