a school, a school! the smell of a school's art building- the smell of paint and creativity. canvases (both the kind that is stretched on a wood frame and converted into art and the kind that covers the floor during that process), loops and light tables, the hum of computers, ceramic busts perched in windows of wide, stone stairwells, dim hallways hung with crooked student art of all genres, bookshelves upon bookshelves and long, long tables, skylights streaked with rain, excited chatter of ideas, the smell of coffee and cigarettes and rain and plaster. 

we came out of the wilderness into this.

melissa and i have spent the past two days and two nights biding our time at a small hostel on a beach at the edge of the forest. we have done a lot of sitting at picnic tables and docks, reading and writing, admiring the quality of the light and the layering of the clouds. we have done a lot of sleeping. we have paddled out on black water (but saw no mermaids combing the white hair of the waves blown back / when the wind blows the water white and black) under a blue sky, and we have walked at night around a blue harbor under a black sky...yet the last bits of blue still remain at the horizon until midnight, beneath the shooting stars. we have eaten a lot of potato and ham hash (yes), and we have tried tried tried to communicate in finnish: kiitos, huvaa iltaa. we have listened to the bacchanal sound of  guitar and the russian language out of male mouths echo out over the water into the wee hours, and we have done our best to best to take a few days of stagnation for all the goodness it is worth.  

this morning we were picked up by jean erik and brough into imatra proper, to the school facilities which will be home base for our photography workshop. it doesn't start until monday, however, contrary to what we originally thought, so we are sitting here in a computer lab ( a computer lab!) while the printmaking class does their thing next door. we will be staying in small room that is- during the normal school year - a studio for a fourth year art student, though we haven't been taken there yet. 

for now i am content just to be inside a school, to feel the 'creative juices' start to flow, and to acquiesce to a nostalgia for the art building at oberlin- to its similar smell on a rainy day and all the memories and emotions it induces (and to the subsequent chain of memory that flows ever-onward from that).