another rainy morning, a long morning, we have it to ourselves today. but since we can only do our work for class in the later dusk and dark hours, or indoors, i can't do any work for class, and i can't do any work for myself because rain and cameras are not such good friends. i can't even fiddle with my installation for tonight because unkown to me-as we are always gone from Navetta by this hour- there is a large class taking over the common space. but sit shut in the kitchen and drink tea and tell you about yesterday, starting with image that today remains the most potent of them all, the mushroom feast.
when i came in last night after working outside until dark, i came in through the kitchen to find the table completely covered in mushrooms. the russians (there is a group of about eight russians who all came here together for a printmaking workshop) had been out mushroom picking, and had come home with literally hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms, ten or fifteen different types, even some rare and delicious finnish black mushroom delicacy. i've never seen so many kinds of mushrooms! they were all sitting around the table washing and chopping them, and there were already two full pots of mushrooms on the stove about to boil over. i find this an incredibly charming part of the way of life in these parts: go out in the forest, pick mushrooms (not the red ones) wherever you find them (and berries, as well), and there you have your dinner. even in a little public park where we were working the other day there were two figures in the distance, stooped over scooping mushrooms into their bags.
we got to experience yesterday another charming part of finnish culture, the sauna, pronounced voluptously in the finnish tongue 'saownah.' this trip was arranged for us by the school and we had no idea really what we were in for. we drove down to the harbour next to ukonlinna, the hostel at which melissa and i stayed for two days, and hopped onto a tiny ferry that carried us across the lake (saimaa lake, 'the most extensive lakeland in europe,' containing some 7,000 islands...so i am told) to a a little island called kaapeli. there was a beach with a volleyball court in the dirt and the rest was thiny forested, with a wooden buiding containing the sauna, a smaller pentagonal structure with an open fire in the middle for roasting sausages, a whole village of quaint little outhouses in a hill farther in the woods, several firepits and piers and scattered cabins. i took a nap on a bench by the water, chilly but warmed by the sun, and i couldn't help thinking of myst, that beautiful computer game of my childhood, an enchanted island, silent. unfortunately i could not partake in the sauna because of the cast situation, but i watched with amusement as my companions came all fresh pink out of the sauna, trotted down a boardwalk stretching over roots and moss all the way to a pier, and jumped into the cold, deep black lake...then back to the sauna, and back and forth several times more. what fun! we then roasted sausages and corn and had a beer and warmed up and then set off again across the lake back home to work for the rest of the evening with the installations we had earlier prepared in the woods. we had a model this time, i pitied the poor beautiful girl naked with all those mosquitoes, but she was a trooper.
ah, here comes the sun. where does the time go? in the earlier parts of my trip, time was flowing at a perfect pace. the days were long in a good way; i could get most everything done without being rushed, and time seemed even to move slower than i am used to, yet it never crawled. but now, there is hardly time for anything! we wake, we walk, we work, we talk, we work, we eat, we sleep. time is strange indeed, think of all the things you can do with it: you can kill it and make it, you can keep it and waste it, you can lose it and save it. and despite all of this, time always flies in the end, it is escaping me even now...ten more days, can it be?
time to go work.