“I want to be saved. I want someone to come and give me all the joy and, even more importantly, all the good and special emotions which I still get in glimpses: the meaning of life. Vitality. Art in pure form. Nature’s gift. Everything else falters compared to these dreams, these promises, whose mere existence I only realize in a rare moment.”

“And in that moment, every single time, it is like a revelation. All of a sudden, everything is fine, I am not alone – I am not even myself, I am merely the emotion, taking pleasure from its own existence. I am the frost, I am the birds, I am the white-rimmed leaves waiting to drop from the branches. I am the air, chilly and full of memories of past times when the emotion existed. I am the earth that waits, the deer that grazes warily by the trees, the fox that sneaks past looking for things to eat. I am my self, and I am something completely different. I am free, in focus, but without thought.”

“I have sought love, and I still do, but I am not fully a human being, a social creature. When I am my self, in harmony and peace, I am immaterial. This meaning and value can be brought forth by love, but love is not it. I can follow it alone. Back to the soul. Depths of my heart that doesn’t concern other people. I want those emotions back, and I can have them back without having to seek love first. I need my self. Me without biological limitations. Love could help me, but I… I have to seek other ways.”

A little valley, a sink in the landscape. A tree on a tiny hill. Nature around me, teeming. A clucking stream bending around the hill.

I lift my arms, take it all in. Hanging from a branch in the tree. Effortlessly. Nature is coming. Animals approach. A deer, many birds.

A fox. I understand. I follow her.

The stream is bigger here. A waterfall. She jumps over, I follow. It’s ridiculously easy.

Up a hill, leading to another waterfall above. I practically float up the hill. There is an opening behind the waterfall. We go in.

There is light behind the water. It opens into another valley, more beautiful than the previous one. I see a crooked tree on the top of a hill that’s arranged in great steps.

She speaks. “Follow my lead.” Now we’re in the grass on a hill close by. “Break free of bonds… of limitations.”

We lay down in the grass. She curls up by my left hand. Friendship. Presence. Calm. Then she crawls up to my neck and curls up there. Intimacy. Support. Empathy. At last, the settles down atop my heart. Understanding. Protection. Attachment.

“Of course I know.” She accepts me and guards me. She is, after all, a part of me.

For a short while, we lie like this. Not too short, but not too long. She stands up and walks away. I can manage, now. The sky, once blue, has filled with stars. She runs towards them and grows wings. In flight, she turns to me. “See you around.” She disappears in the night, but not before she has made the trees bloom all around me. A beautiful, protecting sight against the dark sky. I am content, and I lie there for a while longer.

Then I’m outside. I find the little valley and the tree. I sit down on a branch and listen to nature. Thinking about her. And then, as if she’d always been there, she appears in the corner of my arm. Calm.

Here I end the meditation session.

Despite that and the fact that is was December 1st, though, yesterday was a bad day. I can tell the bad ones from the good ones from the very moment I wake up; on the bad ones that moment is typically two hours after I wanted to wake up, and also two hours before I manage to get out of bed. Also it’s always cloudy and gray outside. I can still feel good on a bad day, through effort, using music, movies and art. But if I venture outside I will risk interacting with other people in a manner that might make me feel at a lack of social abilities, and I might lose whatever good mood I have in the blink of an eye and exchange it with grinding anxiety. So on bad days I tend to stay at home.

Today was another bad day, with a sky covered by homogenous rainclouds. Yet it’s been quite a special day, too. Even though nothing happened. Here’s how it went:

I wake up just before 10 am, by my wristwatch ringing from atop a shelf. I let it ring for about fifteen minutes before I bother rubbing my eyes so that I can stare at the ceiling and try to become more awake. Finally getting up to turn off the alarm, I grab my cellphone and lay back down in bed. After listening to music from my cell for half an hour without falling asleep, I finally decide to get up. I turn on my computer and the lights on my christmas tree and fetch some breakfast.

Having realized it’s a bad day, I decide I need to do something pleasing. I decide to check the deviantART favourites of an artist whose work I recently added to my own favourites. I’ve realized it’s one of the best ways to find new favourable works. I find a whole hoard of amazing photos. Have an example:

So many of them are so new and unique, and unexpected! I find myself thinking things like “is Romania really that beautiful?” “Does ice really form like that?” “Do forests like that really exist?” Overall my mind feels expanded.

However, I still feel unsettled and unable to focus on doing something productive. Then I remember how taking walks has done wonders for my perspective before, so I decide to do that. But it’s not exactly Spring these days; the sun is already down, and so I walk through the darkness on raggedly ice-covered ground through a constant drizzle, with the clouds looming heavily over me. The light of the city illuminates the nearby clouds, but that light fades into merciless blackness over the forest.

I’m not in a lonely mood, so that doesn’t repel me. I enter the forest and choose paths I haven’t gone before. And then, whilst slipping downhill on the icy ground, my mind lectures itself and says: “honestly, already the emotion of this experience is far stronger than many of your childhood memories!” I realize the truth in that as I look at some mist rising above a nearby lamp post and notice that I can smell the forest. That makes me smile and gives me hope. Not all memories come from my childhood. New memories can still be created, memories that might even surpass those. I feel I’ve discovered something wise, but then I also think of this quote:

“It’s far easier to write a hundred essays on philosophy, than to practice one single principle.”

There you have me. I’ve philosophized a lot about different things the past years. Now I feel I know quite well what’s right. But that does in no way mean that I follow that philosophy. I used to think myself capable of it, but that is an overestimation. I always try to follow the wisdom I believe in, and through that I might one day manage to practice some of it. But I am merely human, and humans are bound by habit, routine and psychology. It makes the road long. Excitingly, life is, too!

The road I walk on treads close to an open stadium where, seemingly, a match of ice hockey is being played. I stray from it and walk and among the dark trees on the other side until I meet a river. I follow the river to a crossing covered by so much ice I’m not really sure what’s ground and what’s river. When I reach a small nearby lake, I’m far from the nearest lamp post. I walk out on a long wodden pier and gaze into the surrounding landscape. Two words come to me: ‘bleak’ and ‘depressing’. Better can hardly be said about the sight of it. Even the hundreds of crows, now nesting in the forest, are hiding away from the cold and the dark. Still, what I think is this: “There’ll be a new Spring next year, just you wait.”

Walking back, I find myself feeling soothingly detached from the world. Or rather, from my own routines and common emotions. I walk past buildings and places where I’ve walked several times a day for over a year, but my mind is not at all set like it usually is when I walk there. No, right this moment, due to the unusual atmosphere, the world is another. I keep my eyes on the sidewalk ahead of me, to keep from slipping. But the ice on the sidewalk sparkles as if to entertain me. And I am entertained, and pleased. I get to live in another world for a moment.

Back home, I feel inspired and so I write this entry. After it’s finished, I prepare some dinner, and then I watch Edward Scissorhands for the first time in many years.

Today it’s been windy with a few scattered showers, otherwise sunny. Wind of these proportions are rare here in Oslo. Any wind at all is rare here. It felt reminiscent of home in many ways. And when I finally went out to get some groceries, countless old feelings rushed through my head. The sound of the wind, the humid smell and feel of the air, the changing light from small clouds blocking the sun and countless other impressions pulled strings in my brain that led way back, and all sorts of related feelings and half-memories popped up. I felt feelings I’d felt during similar weather back in my childhood, and I could picture it, but all pictures were general and possibly even generated in my head, and not specific memories.

Lately I’ve done this a lot with dreams, too; when I’ve had a dream worthy of writing down, I always get all sorts of flashbacks from other dreams while I’m doing that. Each flashback is related to a specific mood in a part of the dream, and then other flashbacks show up based on the same mood or even on a different mood in the dream of the first flashback. It’s very odd and otherwordly and I love it. The feelings I sense in dreams are always the ones that are furthest from ordinary feelings. And I find that the more the difference, the more interesting a feeling is. It always feels like sitting in a cave and getting to see an image of the outside world. Which is part of why I like these feelings. They shows me things, feelings, perspectives, that I’d forgotten. Part of the outside of my current box.

In each and every mood there’s another world, another way of thinking, another way of living, a separate meaning of life. And experiencing it all is part of my meaning of life.

Which, I coindidentally realized, is also why endings are my mortal enemies. An ending means the destruction of such a mood. I always need to find a perspective that hides the fact that it was an ending in order to deal with them. I hate the idea of the “emotional world” shrinking due to endings. Luckily, there are also always new beginnings. In the long run, this means that the emotional world will become something entirely different after a while, which does agonize me. But that’s the way of this world, and if you don’t manage to keep up with the change, then you yourself will end along with your own past moods, all alone. So the trick is to accept change and never stand still.

In fact, this just gave me a different perception of a human life. For one can always argue that if you change, you’ll eventually lose all you used to be and no longer be your old self. But you’re still you, so if you’ve become another person, which you is the “canonical” you; the old of the new? I say, you’re never the exact same person at two different times. Your mind is like the bank of a river, and who you are changes constantly like the flow of that river. Or more accurately, let the river be a long pool, and let time be the length of that pool. The water in the pool is you, but your personality — what others would call that which really is you — will depend on where one stands along the length of the pool. If the pool is long enough, you might be able to isolate different sections of the pool which represent completely different personalities. If we lived for hundreds of years, perhaps we’d change over and over, practically having lived the lives of several different people, except we’ve kept memories from it all (or perhaps not). All in all, what I’m saying is, a life doesn’t consist of being one person, but of being an infinity of transitions from one person to another, all melding together into a body of water that is the whole you.

After just a few more minutes on my bike, I stopped by a side road in the forest, by a small bowl-shaped miniature valley around a small stream, all covered in pine trees and clovers, yet sparse enough to let through some sunlight here and there. And incidentally, two squirrels went up one of the pine trunks just that moment. They glared at me and tried to look scary, but somehow, perhaps due to their fluffy tails, that attempt failed quite miserably. At that moment I realized I really need to get a digital camera. When I realized I might be scaring them, I walked further down the hill to look for four-left clovers for a while, but then I decided that this section of the forest was too dark to be staying in at such an hour.

I walked across the side road into the forest on the other side, which proved to provide even another kind of mood. No, several. First, this place was much more sparsely covered with trees, and there was a lot more grass and green bushes. Also, there were several rocks very reminiscent of the forests back home. All in all, the moods I found here were quite special in that I’ve felt them a lot before, in my childhood. No memories came to me because of this, only feelings stored from when I’d been in such forests before. It’s very interesting.

Before heading back, I also went some distance on another, dark side road, over another stream and up a steep, rocky hill where nobody could’ve been for a long time. Suddenly I was on another level of the forest, a kind of highlands, full of blueberry bushes and very sparse pine trees. Of course, though, there were paths up there, too. Nowhere is completely isolated in that forest, which is one of the things I don’t like about it so much, but which at the same time makes it gentler somehow.

When I’ve got my breath back from racing all the way back here, I’ll head down to the gym, after which I’ll read for my next exam for a while until I grow tired, buy a few eggs in the kiosk and head back home to make pancakes for dinner.