One of the last sentences I heard my late composition teacher Paavo Heininen utter, was when he opened the door to his studio in Järvenpää I was visiting for the first time and said 'täällä kasvaa paperia', 'here grows paper'.

And indeed, there wasnt a surface including the sofa and the grand piano, which wasnt covered in fragments of score and sketches.

I'm frankly delighted of the proliferation of paper on my office desk today. Every time I've taken out a new manuscript paper, it has happened quickly and for the purpose of immediately jotting something down on it. Today's work has had urgency that was lacking yesterday. I promised to have the form of the piece figured out, and the short score ready by Saturday. I'm missing the last section, but otherwise the harmony, the rhythmic outline and gestural choreography is now mapped out for 8 out of 10 minutes.

My handwriting today has been of the kind where the thought is much faster than my ability to write it down, so everything speeds up. This is also the time when notational choices are greatly affected by the first intuition of how this idea could best be jotted down and read by someone else.

This is also a period of happenstances, typos and mistakes becoming integral details and elements of the piece, alongside all the carefully calculated and ruminated-upon material.

When things get stuck some hours of the day, some days of the week or even some months of the year, I find solace in thinking of the bigger picture.

The piece gets done, it has gotten done with in the past. What do I remember from days and weeks when nothing seemed to happen with my previous piece. The piece got finished, and I have moved on.

On days like these, even just showing up at the desk is a sign of respect for the process, even though I have nothing to show for it.

The time spent 'at the piece' can go a long way 'into the piece' eventually.

I sat for some hours without really doing anything, until I figured I might as well further a few hanging projects which are soon due in their own rights. Namely going through applications for a working grant board I'm on, and listening to the pieces recommended for the International Rostrum of Composers this year, in preparation for a radio programme at Finnish YLE radio the week after next.

Listening to the works, varying from solo contrabass with electronics to full orchestra with two sets of soloist groups, and with no thematic connection between them what so ever, I found myself gravitating to a few instinctive parts of my musical taste. This was further accentuated by me being somewhat tired today.

I stuck with pieces that I felt were really going for something defined - not necessarily 'clearly' defined, some of them were beautifully nebulous and untangible, but still - they were going for something. And they stuck with this something for long enough for it not to feel like a random discovery - it is the discovery in the piece, or one of them. It's a crucial discovery, and the composer visibly knows this while composing and communicates this knowledge in the stuff of the music. We are hearing the composer discovering something, and them staying with this discovery.

This I found articulated in several pieces that were lauded at this years Rostrum.

Now how will I articulate my discoveries in southwest? This is something to ruminate over the next two days - come monday, I want to start on the final draft.

I never had a lot of time to write this piece, but since the start it has felt very natural to think this piece into being.

I'm counting in hours now, not in days or weeks. Every moment spent writing southwest seems meaningful.

I don't wish I had more time. If I had much more time, the piece would become very different. This timeframe of almost instantaneous composition fits this piece, especially since I've been working on material very similar to this piece since 2018 or even 2017. The core of the material will keep ruminating even after this piece is finished. It's like a mushroom in rain.

It's raining. A piece comes out. Then the mycorrhiza goes back to sleep to keep the humus fresh.

I had started on the first page of the beginning of the piece in full score format yesterday. I had written it with proportional notation and shorthand, using text where jotting other symbols down felt too defining for this stage.

On a few long train trips in November, in the immediate days and weeks after hearing about this commission, I had written several sections straight into Sibelius and developed them there, with the help of the program's playback tools.

I went through these, my initial readily 'typeset' fragments, and selected a few that fitted my current plan. I'm going to print them tomorrow on paper, so that I can work with them equally alongside my manuscript.

I found myself sloping into short score, away from full score, as I got 2 minutes into the piece. I felt as though I needed a step back from defined notation, inorder to sketch out longer cycles of the piece. Some sections are more detailed, but overall I have a lower threshold to jot things down. The stuff of my writing looks like I will come back to it, so I don't have to worry too much about the definitiveness of it. I can go forward, keep the past open, and what may appear may still affect where I had come from.

Tomorrow I will focus more on the three sections after the first one. I feel like I need to break this chronological way of writing, in order to have a more defined picture of where I'm heading.

Balancing being specific and vague. I'm hoping to finish the short score on Saturday so that I can spend all of next week working in full score.

Getting there, good night!

For what seems like the tenth time, I went through all my papers that have something even remotely to do with southwest.


This time, I opened one of my landscape A3 score papers, and turned to its blank side to draw a timeline for the whole piece.

I knew how I wanted it to start (at least for now) and to end. I pencilled in 10 minutes in between the endpoints, and mapped out the location of Φ and the half-way point. Estimating the length of the intro and outro, I had an overview of how much time I had for the other material within the piece, and I mapped out an order for them.

The first part, light and soft, 2' -foot register on the organ/harpsichord.

Second part, gigue-like material circling away for a good 3 minutes.

Gamba rising above the other instruments initiating an interlude of contrasting material for violin and gamba soli.

A final section, where the gamba presses down on the ensemble, bringing them to a 16' -foot register.

At lunch, I mumbled to the person working behind the till, and I couldn't hear what she was saying. I apologised and thought to myself I mustve been focusing for a few hours since I was so distracted and in my own thoughts.

The piece exists now. All is left to do is to write it.

I give myself credit for appearing at my workdesk with all my project files for southwest, my manuscript folder, empty staff paper, laptop, midi-keyboard and headphones. I even remembered to take my two previous notebooks that contain the seeds for the piece.

Meanwhile my Lithuanian colleague is going paperless.

I didnt get anything done today. Realising that this was happening, i proof-listened to a track for a future recording project and sent my comments to the sound designer. I went for an early dinner.

Im writing this on my phone at my friend’s couch, waiting to post tomorrow, once I get back to my laptop I left at the office.

I have 14 days to write this piece. On top of my mind is both a hesitation and a strong will to follow what I feel is the essence of this piece.

Namely two alternating chords, debris and chromaticism that accumulate over time and an increasing sence of pesanteur, pressing down on the gigue-like circular movement, initiated in bar one and carrying until the end.

Decisions, decisions, decisions. Decisions in the face of ignorance and hesitation.

Hesitation is a winter topos - tremolo and sul pont, as illustrated in Vivaldi - and yet plowing through a passage on a wintery street from A to Z demands commitment and a certain lack of care for detail.

At the core of southwest is this seeming lack of care. At the surface, a choreography of lively hesitations.

I wish I could strike today off the calender, but I feel this contact with the concrete floor is a necessary evil to wake me up for more consistency in my work in the coming days.

Courtesy of a lack of inertia, caused in turn by contemplation in stead of decisiveness, i feel like I’m living by a chess master’s rule:

”Don’t just do something, sit there!”

Today I made a start on the full score for southwest.

I still have to work on the form of the piece – which section follows what, and what proportional lengths are they in relation to one another.

Any sound that I like and that I feel is very much of this piece doesn't exist on it's own. You come to it somehow, and then you leave it.

How you do this is equally important to the identity of the sound or the section. This game of proportions and relationships is a lot of fun, but it's also very elusive to me at the moment.

Starting on the full score even though I don't fully know where I'm heading with the piece, I push myself to decide on crucial aspects of the piece.

A piece can start in any number of ways, and they way I chose today eliminates a lot of potential starts. Moving forward or imagining later sections became a lot easier once I have a feeling of how I arrive towards them.

What's also fun is to then either delete the start of the piece if at some point it feels like the form isn't working, or moving it to another point in the piece. The original teleological ratinale of what follows what is then broken, but if you see the piece as being in bubble-form (the past, present and future of the piece is present at any given moment simultaneously) the order becomes less defining. All sections are affected by each other within the frame (the start and the finish) of the piece.

I'm listening to Byrd today. I love the album featuring Fretwork, Magdalena Consorts and His Majestys Sagbutts & Cornetts, especially Christ Rising Again has a fabulously beautiful and engaging polyphonic grid, and a balanced dual form with a slow and fast passage. Almost naive, humble. It communicates a similar sense of humility and contemplation, yet chromaticism and illuminating use of colour and dramaturgy as Beato Angelico's murals at the San Marco monastery in Florence.

What is enough is enough, and for today, having made a start on the piece is enough of a days work. I will have very little time this week to continue on this, so I put all my hopes and dreams on next week. Coming back to this will be easier now I'm able to ruminate on what follows, since I know where I'm coming from.

I've come back to writing here. The thought of keeping a composition diary has not left me alone, and this new piece I'm currently working on seems to me a good project to bounce some reflection off. It might clear some murky aspects of the process to me, and help me realize the potential of the material I'm working with. The piece will be called southwest.

To give a little bit of background, Johan the AD of Viitasaari festival asked me to write a work for their visiting ensemble Continuum XXI, a specialising in cross-programming HIP baroque works alongside new ones. The schedule for delivery of the finished piece was tight as it was, even without the 2 pieces I had to get out of the way before fully being able to start on it.

Immediately during the call with Johan I 'saw' the piece and how it could unfold, and how it is linked to what I was then currently occupied with, namely a fascinating mean-tone temperament (Pietro Aaron 1/4-comma if you must) and a practice linking early baroque and contemporary music together.

I also saw the potential for 'southwest' to link with a cycle of pieces I've been working on on and off since about 2018, with the first outcome being 'north' for ensemble (2023) and for organ positive (2025). The cycle is still in process, but let it's working title be 'the compass cycle' for clarity.

So although the schedule was tight, I felt as though I had this piece in me.

I've been gathering material for southwest all the while I was working on the two other pieces.

I gravitated towards the concept of the 'diagonal'.

This came about when I was looking through the harmonic material I had devised for compass through the years. The chords for 'south' and 'west' had an interesting potential to mix and merge, so I combined them to give birth to two chords distinct from their parents.

The oscillation between these chords forms the harmonic base of the piece. I've been since looking for ways to include temporal and timbral processes to latch onto the harmonic skeleton.

Today I started by clearing the office from bits and bobs from the previous project. I coiled some cables and built my meantone keyboard setup again.

After lunch I leafed through my most recent notebook which contains all the thoughts and ideas I've been collecting since November when I received the commission to write southwest. I collected key fragments and sentences, ideas and concepts around the piece and wrote them out on one of the last pages of my notebook. I found that I had done a similar summary earlier in March, one that was more concerned with musical, rythmical and timbral questions. Today I was more interested to step back and think more conceptually.

I downloaded images of two paintings that I've been associating with this piece: a painting of the Norwegian glacier Josteinsbreen by Peder Balke and the famour Das Eismeer, by Caspar David Friedrich. The concept of the diagonal is very central to romantic landscape painting, and Das Eismeer is a very schoolbook example of it. The diagonal is a hypothenus of time and gravity, and of gravity and forward motion. A glacier slowly descending down, carving a U-valley for itself.

Friedrich had made three small sketches of ice on the Elbe river during a very cold winter in the late 19th century. I was these sketches when passing through Hamburg when traveling to Belgium for Christmas and New Years'. I wanted to keep these works, their level of detail, their spontaneity and their fragmentary form, close to 'southwest''s project.

After this archival work, I listened to the chords I had devised already some time ago in early December, and looked for ways make new combinations out of them. I also experimented with chromatic transpositions, as I was in any case looking through ways of having mixed 440Hz and 415Hz performers playing the piece together. I felt that it would be interesting to somehow compose this discrepancy into the piece, even though most of the piece's tuning will will be matched with a simple and very common chromatic downward transposition.

I knew I wanted to work with a very small percussion setup, and I was intrigued by the notion of having just a hand drum and a tambourine - this was also the extent of my knowledge of what baroque percussion constitutes. I went to buy a hand drum from a music shop just down the road that had a suitable approximate pitch (close to Bb) and brought my tambourine from home, jingling in my tote bag on every step of the way from home to my office.

I spent the rest of the day experimenting with different nail, thumb and rubbing techniques on the hand drum, and different angle positions for the tambourine. The concept of the diagonal is fascinatingly audible in how the tambourine sounds different when positioned horisontally and vertically, with exciting sound worlds in between across the diagonals.

I pledged to write at least 10 minutes after every composition day, this one took a bit longer, but next time I won't need to give as much context.

Tomorrow I'll have a rehearsal for another project, but I'll be able to get back to this on Mayday's eve.

Thanks for reading!

I was sitting in the far corner of the milder of the two saunas at the former Olympic swimming stadium when I overheard a young father ask his son whether they should go to the lockers to his phone to see if someone had answered a message they had sent.

I started thinking about foraging.

Perhaps because it's the closest reference I have from my own experience to hunting with bait.

The day before I had come back from spending a week with the families of my sisters at our summer house in Northern Carelia. The morning of departure I had taken my nibling to collect blueberries.

I woke up to the fact that I might not have time to collect the critical amount of blueberries this summer to labour into jam that would bridge the winter, so on our last day we pledged to bring back at least half a bucket, conditions permitting. The blueberry-forecast had been boding well all June, with an abundance of flowers that I had tasted for the first time. They are in fact edible in themselves, and make for a great seasoning to porridge and yogurts.

We had half a bucket in time for lunch, and by the afternoon we had produced twenty or so small jars of blueberry jam.

In the forest my nibling was asking a lot of questions. She was curious about my favourite animal, and wondered about the many holes that formed in between the boulders on which we were balancing to navigate through the blueberry bushes. Past an imposing rocky ledge there was a slope gently descending down to the lake filled with blueberry bushes in between towering pine trees. I blinked and looked again and I saw black and dark blue spots everywhere. I had quickly developed the blueberry eyes.

Closing my eyes on the way back on the train I saw the same blue and black spots.

It's an instinct that the young father in the sauna was tapping into. He had sent a message, perhaps asking their partner to spontaneously join them for a swim, and now he was eagerly awaiting to go check the bait if something had been caught in it.

Will there be mushrooms? Will I eat fresh mushrooms tonight? Will we find enough mushrooms to conserve them to bridge the winter?

A. must've pressed send since I heard them making their way through the room. Muffled on the carpet and with a more deliberate sound on the parquet we’d installed the summer before. Since the steps were even all the way to where I was, already lying in bed, they seemed to have managed to miss the slidy spot I always fly over near the small dining table. Lightly singing, dancing steps starting in matte, gathering volume in glossy xylophone preceded by a darted, syncopated space-bar. They asked me if there was a chance that the wind conditions would improve. They’d finished and sent the cover of the single two days early. We could go up to the lighthouse.

I said that I blamed the granola.

I had come back from my trip three weeks before. I had installed the table my parents had brought over from the last secret stash of the grandparent’s in the bedroom so that I would be able to work this coming summer through the heat that takes over the west-facing living room in the afternoon. The table was still covered in towels, fans, t-shirts from the Sapporo brewery waiting to be given out to friends I was going to meet as soon as some of them were back in town from trips of their own. They also conveniently prevented me from starting on the piece for Norway.

Meanwhile my life had made its way back to kindergarten.

Every night since I had come back, at around ten past nine in the evening, A. had found me scrolling through the website of ilmatieteenlaitos, ready to go to sleep when they still had a half-days work ahead of them.

I’m too tired to drive down to the shed to fix our kayaks on the roof and bring them out here tonight. Let’s do it tomorrow. There’s another window on Friday. You’re off work then.

Did you ever end up using that list of Beaufort scale winds for that guitar and soprano piece?

This was back in 2016. Our mutual friend had shown us a issue of Niin & Näin that had printed a list of wind conditions someone had found on a billboard in some coastal town. Word for word. The text was in neon pink.

Boforia: 4

Nimitys: Kohtalainen tuuli

Tuulen nopeus m/s: 5,5-7,9

Vaikutus maissa: nostaa maasta pölyä ja irrallisia papereita, liikuttaa pieniä oksia

Vaikutus merellä: pitkähköjä aaltoja, joiden harjalla valkoista vaahtoa

I had printed the whole thing out and made a visual formal plan of the whole piece. I’d even workshopped some set text fragments with Tuuli. There was something about the word 'Boforia' that didn’t suit the mood of the piece. bof means meh in french. I ended up using a Janosch text where little tiger and little bear go to look for Panama.

Ilmatieteenlaitos said it wouldn’t go over 5 on Friday, and gusts would be only up to 7.

Have you ever kayaked in April? I had kayaked in December, but that it was close to town. 5 is going to be fine. We had that as headwind when we went to Tallinn with dad. The green Pohjantähti has a good hull and with all of our gear its doing to dig nicely on the water. I would borrow a dry-suit from my sister for you.

Söderskär is located south-west of Pellinki, still another 20 kilometers past Tove Jansson’s and Tuulikki Pietilä’s island of Klovharu, where we had gone with A. last summer.

We could make the trip in a day, if we drove all the way to the end of Löparö, where there was a small harbour. From there it was only 13km to Söderskär and the same distance back. The winds would quieten down to 3 after 5pm, so we wouldn’t be in a hurry to stay in the window. We’d be back home by ten.

You forgot to close the blinds?

For more than a week I’d made it a point to remember to close the blinds in the evening, but I still woke up two or even three hours earlier than usual. For the first two nights since I came back I thought it was the sudden abundance of morning light in the east-facing bedroom. The difference between the three weeks before my trip and now had seemed like months. I saw the first growing orange, pizza-box shaped patch of sunlight hit the red shaman-painting on several mornings. This must’ve been just before five o’clock. I only barely notched my eyelids open, but by half-past six I was already awake enough to be amused by a feeling of eagerness to start the day.

I had even bought sweet crunchy granola instead of my usual oaty muesli. A. loved it too. It reminded them of breakfasts in Italy.

I had also gone to sleep much earlier than I was used to before my trip. At first I assumed it was an effect caused by the jet-lag, that would eventually wear away.

But then I found that for several days in a row, nothing kept me up after nine or ten in the evening. Since getting back, I was meeting friends more in the morning or for lunch. After finishing work around seven or eight, I found myself heading home more determined than usual. I still stopped at my local on one or two nights while A. was still working at the living room table. Still I was in bed by ten.

I had put an alarm for 5, but we only got out of bed at 6. I had loaded the coffee and porridge ready in the evening after we had packed, so we were out by 6.30. We'd have the kayak on the water by 9. Having cleared the cobblestones, in the lights coming out of Katajanokka I dashed out to tighten the straps around the kayak.

We had a second breakfast of hot water poured over instant porridge and coffee at the Gumbostrand cafe that had just opened for the season.

After unloading by the small harbour at the southernmost point of Löparö, it took considerable time to find a place to pee. It was early morning, but there was always someone walking along this narrow peninsula. Hardly any trees, and no toilets. There was a billboard for Söderskär with a picture of the chalk-coated tower and a few dark-red fisher-houses on a pancake-shaped rock. We waited for the what looked like the ship that was headed the same way as we would, connecting Söderskär with the mainland to be on its way, and we relieved ourselves in the reeds.

The windiest place of the entire crossing washed over us already while making the first turn away from the harbour towards Kaunissaari. The waves made a characteristic frowning angry man’s face, with menacingly thin wrinkles turning the dark-grey, almost black surface into a sweating forehead. We were in the clear after just a few minutes behind a row of islands protecting us from the south-western. A weathered wooden statue of a viking waved to us.

We didn’t have to pause for drinking as I had fashioned a water-bag with dispensers coming up between the legs and under the spray top so that it could be reached by wedging the tip towards the mouth with the paddle.

My sister had lend me her rowing mittens made in Nottingham, that she had punctured on both sides so that you could slide a paddle in, but only an adjustable paddle that can be cloven in half from the middle with the flick of a switch. They stayed surprisingly dry when I remembered to keep my hands relatively close to the middle on both sides. It only rose to 6 degrees that day, so the mittens were crucial for keeping the morale up.

I saw the lighthouse already half an hour into the trip. It would take us another two and a half to get there. I remember this view from last year. Then you couldn’t really tell it at first from the buoys closer by that had the same form, or the narrow juniper bushes that could grow as high as 3 meters even this far out. Today the tower looked like a fin of a Kraken frozen in mid air-twist.

There was a predictable amount of wind from a predictable direction, and even though the sky was mostly grey over where we were and towards where we were going, still there was serenity. I felt warm, it wasn’t an overkill to put woolen socks on.

We paddled through the first gateway past the protective row of islands and between two orange coloured dome-shaped islands. There were many eiders, and you could hear their mating calls all around.

A. made the point that everything we’d taken on this trip was only in case we capsized. The pump, the life-vests, the dry-suit. All we had on us we were in fact hoping we wouldn’t need to use. Oblivion was never far away. We were carrying symbols of oblivion with us.

It did feel very different being on the water knowing that it was under 10 degrees. That’s the limit you read about on the laminated landscape A4-pages that are fixed to the windows next to the staircase in the kayak-shed. Always use a dry-suit when going out on under 10 degrees water. Never go alone. Or maybe just don’t go at all. I don’t remember very well what it had said.

10 degrees was drilled in my mind as the limit between a day when you can talk about other things than kayaking while kayaking. Over 10 degrees is when even upon arrival on dry land you don’t have to constantly remind yourself of vigilance by feeding the words ’side-tailwind’, ’oblivion’, ’risky’, ’window of opportunity’ into casual conversation.

We capsized with dad two years ago. That was scary, but here we go again.

I don’t remember waves in the summer. But now I find myself making a mnemonic to help me remember the 5 different wave-ecosystems that we’ve been passing and are likely to face on our way back from the lighthouse. The frown. The lozenges. Tove’s lines. The grid. The Big Cradle.

In the summer you even look forward to battling the side-tailwind that tries to repeatedly push you off course. Every seventh wave pushes you into a surf, and you would suddenly double your paddling speed and race on the mane’s hair. You have your sunblock in the chest pocket and your earphones belting Art Feynman feeling good about feeling good, its the way to keep feeling good.

Now in April the same sunglasses don’t give the surfer-vibes. I feel like I’m taking notes. I’m in the first row in class, being called up to the board to write up the five distinct ecosystems of waves that we’d wedged through on the way to the lighthouse. I’d recreate the angry frown, the lozenge-like shapes, lines and dots in between the kayak-keel and the horizon.

Every picture I took had a picture of the front of the kayak as if glued onto it like a neon sticker, except in the one’s I had my finger half on the camera lens. The green of the kayak had a more organic olive tint in real life against the grayscale of the ocean surface, and the security strap coming out from underneath the hole-guard made a smiley on its surface.

After Pirttisaari, the last small islands towered against the open sea like backs and flanks of sea-monsters waiting to turn their slumber on their other sides when you weren’t looking. We started seeing birds that never venture closer to the mainland. There were a couple of guillemots. On the way back I saw two sea eagles.

We saw much more of the sky this far out. It seemed to stretch like a canvas in gravitational demonstrations, where you place a heavy ball on a meshed canvas grid and show how a smaller ball starts orbiting around it. The fluffy clouds I associate with a clear summer day were far away, and their bottoms seemed to be chopped of by the horizon. There were wider and narrower strips of clear blue sky wrapped around several walls of this diorama. Keri lighthouse in Estonia would be only 50 kilometers past Söderskär, I heard you shout into the wind. It’s the island that paddlers crossing over from the eastern side would often land to. The western route goes to the lighthouse at the northernmost point of Naissaar, which is the one we took with dad on our crossing.

A. made observations of the different constellations of small-object forms the black of the top of the breaking waves was making against the otherwise grey and white sea, depending on if it was mirroring the sun or the clouds. The black were small windows into the darkness that every ocean harbours. Even Itämeri, in it's own cuddly way. A. stared into the hypnotising, scintillating grid of lozenges formed on the surface by the refracting light, and I knew that the experience would appear later in a stunning re-composition in one of their tiny fonts and margin graphics. You are brilliant. I felt carried by just the thought of having you by my side.

It was eleven thirty, and the sun was directly ahead of us until it was shadowed by the towering figure of the lighthouse. It hadn’t seemed to come closer at all during the last hour and a half, even though our gaze was transfixed towards it. The changing cloud patterns caused the light to come off the image of the tower towards us at different angles and shades. The lighthouse seemed to play a game of vertigo, like that when going to sleep with a slight fever. To and fro. Waves rocking up and down. We had come past the last small islets and were now in the Big Cradle.

Still, every small rock either above or just below the surface caused a refraction in the regularity of the Itämeri-waves; so-called because their momentum had potentially started from Sweden or even Poland, depending on the wind direction. This refraction formed a grid of criss-crossing shallower waves on top of the Big Cradle. I reminded A. to wait for after the mane’s hairs to dip the end of the paddle, as to not tip too far to the left along with the wave.

All in all we had it easy and got to the mouth of the pancake lagoon on Söderskär in under three hours. We waited for a seventh wave to surf us in. A. took out a smoke after they’d freed their hands from the mittens and passed me one too.

i keep bumping into signs offering an alternative to having to choose between two.

sea and mountains!

golf and girls!

I haven't made any choices during this trip, and it's been so liberating.

Or at least choices that feel like cancelling something out, or opting out of something. It's a fine balance.

I used to suffer from fomo, and maybe I still do. But I think I've managed to get rid of the percentage of regret that comes with making a choice. It's now very small, though still there (only human), very very small.

sea and mountains.

I started this trip from the coast of the east china sea, on the shores of Yakushima. Already on the island, I climbed up to ecosystems that I was experience later in Hokkaido, though in wintertime. Yakushima mountains have a constant Hokkaido spring, summer and autumn.

I ended my trip on the slopes of Mt. Asahidake, the tallest volcano on the north island.

I saw a lot of golf courses. Some of them in people's front yards and parking lots.

I met really cool people, like this taiwanese hiker who had made the ascent of Asahidake on snow-shoes and stayed in the same dorm as me. We later met up in Sapporo and had a big dinner together.

I didn't make any choices, but I was always somewhere partly by choice, partly I didn't know why I was there. I received recommendations from people I met on my trip, I had hunches that I'd like to be in this and that environment. I didn't know anything for sure.

Even now with this trip behind me, I'm still working out the details. What happened and where. Why was I there, why did that happen there? Why did I forget my water bottle on that bus-stop? So that I could go back and pick it up? Did I mean to go back, or was I led on by a materialist or even parental instinct that wants to keep the pack together? Hat, towel, waterbottle and me.

This is the beauty of traveling for me.

It never ends, if you go back and reflect on what happened. Somethings are understood only with hindsight. Perhaps you suddenly get reminded of something that happened on your trip years ago? Perhaps you then realise that you hadn't given that art of the trip any thought since the trip, and you are only now creating that memory actively.

Meeting this taiwanese hiker brought back memories from my first and only trip to Asia before coming to Japan now. I remembered a song that the indigenous Attaya kids sang to us in their school courtyard in Ulay. I remembered the smell of my hosts deodorant. A lot of things I had perhaps not even actively experienced or thought about even when I was in Taiwan.

How to nurture the capacity to remember past experiences? Just as one nurtures the capacity to forget.

I'm very tired now. A bit ill, but getting better. I'm very much looking forward to going home.

Happy: it's been an incredible trip.

Dreading: the pile of books, papers, scores to go through immediately after arriving tomorrow.

I love my work.

During this trip I've been nurturing the 'love' part of it.

Perhaps some day I'll learn to nurture the other.

Perhaps they are one and the same thing.

Hmu, folks. I'm back in town!