Your Chance To Receive An Erikka In Your Life!

For anyone interested in having me as a part of their daily life -here is your chance. I am currently without a permanent home, without any money whatsoever, without a job and without plans. Complete freedom! If you want me in your life, here is your challenge:

Please find a job for me that either requires no previous experience, or is within old peoples care, such as home care assistant or care worker in an old peoples home, or animal care. I am willing to do any job, but preferably one that includes working with people.

If you have a home for me to live in, that would rock. I love community living, so wherever I live it needs to be together with or close to people.

Living far away from here is not a problem, provided you can be really creative in getting me from here to there without money...

My three current alternatives:
1) Staying in my home town and sharing a flat with my best friend Mirja.
2) Moving to Stockholm and living in community living with some friends from 24/7 prayer.
3) Moving to Edinburgh and living together with someone somehow in some way doing something.

My favourite alternative right now is number three. I have a definite love for always picking the hardest alternative...

So now is your chance to fight for my appearence in your life! Feel free...

an old friend of mine

So this old friend of mine moved in with me. To be perfectly honest with you he can be a bit of a hassle at times. He is constantly tailing me, and the problem is he upsets people with his rigid manners, and the fact that he seems a little lost at all times, as if he doesn't quite have his act together, some pieces missing, so to say. But then again, he is an old friend. I very literally held my hand around his heart as he was having a tough time, his very last tough time I am glad to say. Not much left of his heart nowadays, though, sad to say, but at least he has left all heart aches behind. He did turn a little hard and rigid though, as I said, lost his swing in a way. And the missing pieces of his, personality, bothers my family a bit. It did cause a small internal battle, but I actually had to tell him not to keep hanging on to my skirt all the time and just stay in my room out of the way of my Mum. He was a little hurt at first, with all right, because he doesn't really have another skirt to hang around, and as he no longer is attached to the ass he originally hung out with, he might feel a little lost. But I had to tell him that as much as it is nice having him tailing me some times, in the long run I won't be a good substitute for a lion's ass. I just can't live up to the swiftness, the fast moves, the strength of a young, strong lion. I just don't have the hairiness of a lion's buttocks (thank God for that!) and I just don't know the right tailswing to do it justice. No, I said, as much as I love you, dear old chopped off and stuffed Lion Tail, Remain From My School Day Practicum Days of Cutting Up Animals at Zoos, you will have to stay in my room, safely outside eyesight from more easily upset creatures. Plus, wearing you as an ornament makes walking down stairs or driving cars very complicated...

the woman

Emotions and revelations are like blood and fire. Forgive me for not always being thankful for God's never ending ability to place within my reach what I currently need. Well, Father, what I need is all good, but what about the fact that I don't want it?

You started this, God, not me. Well, I can remember myself carefully reflecting on the subject. I started out, a few months back, by asking a little upset: What's the deal God, is there no female part of you at all? What about Holy Spirit? What about Hebrew grammar, is there no equivalent to say the German language with it's female/male words? Couldn't there be a female side of Holy Spirit? And yes, you did answer just a few days later, through someone who had no idea what I silently had asked you, who was just talking on the first chapter of Genesis and happened to be a Hebrew scholar, that the Hebrew word for Spirit in Genesis chapter one is in it's female form... And then we were off. Well, not for yet a while to come, but it all started there.

For then came the slow process of meeting Mary in every Catholic Church of my trip. And then, on a walk during my pilgrimage when I was walking out of Leon, I found myself crying in realization of the pain of giving birth in a stable. And the overwhelming discovery of my own womanhood, how in some intangible way I found myself being a woman but couldn't put my finger on why I was discovering this now or when I became her or if she has always been there or who she really is.

And all the time that Mother Figure, with her brown-redish, curly hair, glittering eyes, flashing, beautiful smile. The woman no amount of philosophy or psycology can tame with their analyzes of her existence. The woman from every Bob Dylan song, giving Shelter from the Storm, the woman every woman battles with in one way or another; we cannot make love to her, we cannot hide in her womb any more, we cannot quite flee her; we can try, or we can settle for hating her, or becoming her.

I hate psycology. I know I will have to change my mind about this eventually, but for now I hate how all my emotions and revelations get stripped down into one thesis or another, into explanations and theories. And I hate how this Woman will have a thousand different names in psycology and religions, but in my simple faith in Jesus Christ I seldom encounter her. Help me, brothers and sisters, why did Freud and the rest of the gang I do not read or study get monopoly on Mother images and womanhood?!

And then of course the book dropped out of the shelf. Well, it didn't actually drop out, it just stood out and kind of placed itself in my hand in a friendly manner, and even though I felt the God is giving me this book- alarm go off I didn't really understand the terror and agony this involved. If one is battling with The Woman and wondering who she is and how to deal with her, why not read Herman Hesse's "Narziss and Goldmund" and make things bitterly worse?

Can one really survive such a book, with it's painfully broken hopeless life view and yet deep deep life desire no despair quite reaches through? Or maybe, that is the whole point, that it is the despair that is fueling that life desire, that the despair and the pain is so linked to the desire for life, and everything life brings. Maybe it is all along the lines I have been working on in my mind, about love and pain being so tightly knitted together in the female heart and mind, and love so physically leading to birth and pain in our bodies.

But then, what do you do with a book that ends with a man dying and his last words to his best friend being, But how do you then once want to die, Narziss, if you have no mother? With no mother you cannot love. With no mother you cannot die.

Figuring out what to do with this woman seems so hopeless, because if I love her I must hate every other woman on earth as everybody else suddenly fades and go bitter, but if I ignore her and pretend she doesn't exist as a shade, no more than that an image, or dream, an answer to an unspoken question, if I ignore her, then I find myself desperatly compensating by trying to become her in every way.

Who is she then, this imaginary picture of the perfect woman, beyond good and bad, beyond life and death, beyond love or hate, in whom's womb I cannot crawl back in, with whom's body I cannot make love, by whom's side I cannot stand measure and whom I cannot become, nor flee, nor hate?

(And what the heck does she have to do with all this about God's female side and the virgin Mary?!)

the language

I learnt a new language on my trip. And it isn't Spanish.

It is a language with no words and if ever it has a voice it is in singing only. I so feared the life that no words can capture, as I am sure frequent readers of my blog can remember me battling with earlier. And as that life came to me, silently, not abrubtly but throughout long, walking days, it turned out to be the only life completely true. Words of ours will always lack.

My new language, which of course is as little only mine as is the wind or the stars, has a childish magic to it, and is as impossible to comprehend as latin would be if it suddenly lost its grammar. I can just reach out my hand and touch this new language and every time get surprised at what I find...

It prays with its hands. I reach out my hand and touch a loved one and suddenly my hands turn in to prayer. My skin itself turns into love, something deeper than me, beyond my control. It is so very natural, so very earthly, not at all supernatural or scary, yet more spiritual than anything else. It is as if this new language lives in my hands, and in my voice when I don't speak, and in my arms, and most of all in my chest, as if it spreads like silent words with no meaning out of my chest to the person I am embracing. I cannot explain it with words of course, but I am trying because I am so sure there must be others who speak this language, and I am sure they all have known it for a long time, because I am feeling like a child discovering what the world always has known and I am seeing for the first time.

I thought men and women sought out eachothers bodies mostly for the reason of sex and multiplying and satisfying a hunger for nurture and care, but not for the mere reason of speaking a secret language no one can understand with words. I didn't know that beyond the sexual and the romantic exists a touch that has so obvious boundaries that they are no boundaries at all, a touch thats only goal and mission and reason for existing is love. And no prayer could exist without it.

Sometimes I wonder if that touch isn't what prayer really is. Because when I am far away, and I pray, I still feel my hands place themselves around the heart of whom I love and am praying for, and the language is all around, communicating, speaking wordlessly, and I feel no distance at all, just the aching longing distance of space, and really, I'm not sure that actually is an existing distance when it comes to love...

the swedish light

I never knew what makes Swedish winters so special. I never realized that the mysterious light comes from the sun never quite leaving the horizon, which gives a peculiar side light effect all day long. My home country is cold and very dark. As I wake up it feels like it's already evening: midday never comes. But the physical coldness is compensated by the warmness of seeing my family again. It feels like home. It never used to feel like home, but for every time I come home it gets more and more like home. I love my parents, they rock. Even though my Dad just tried to kill himself with plywood by standing underneath it while screwing it to the ceiling.

My days are full. I have started running. I never used to be able to run. Yeey for the benefits of pilgrimages! I have got my skirt. The skirt I dreamt of all the way to Santiago. A normal skirt for every day use, that makes me look feminine and slim. Yeey for the benefits of pilgrimages! I need to go cook. In a kitchen with utensils. Yeey for the benefits of being home again...

a pilgrim's heart

I am writing this as I wait for my bocadillo bacon con queso on my third day in Santiago, but I'm still not sure I've arrived. I cannot process the amount of emotions and happenings enfolding inside and before me.

I woke up on the morning of my last day of walking with the feeling there was an angel in the room, that God had fully healed my heart and that I was ready for Santiago. Early, before sunrise, I walked hand in hand with Anna and Sebastiana through a misty, dark forest, each of us carrying our own loves and victories within us.

I only have one thought on our arrival, the one thing it all boils down to. After weeks of walking, laughing, crying, loving, dancing and going nuts with all the people having their life crisises around me, after wanting to run away, or most of all to love but not knowing how to, I knew, as we, the five of us (out of a pilgrim family of nine or more) who have been piercing eachother's hard surfaces, somewhat painfully but resolutely, though mostly involuntarily, walked into the cathedral hand in hand, in a line, some in tears, some of us with smiles, and I knew:

LOVE HAS CONQUERED

Just so intense, so dramatically surreal and yet more real than anyhting else, is the life of a pilgrim.

As I placed my forehead against stone once more, this time the floor of the tomb, it was my time to cry. I suddenly knew deep in my heart that it is the small things that count. The love of dry socks and apples, an extra blanket and a hug. The ability to love these things, the simple love of dry socks, is more powerful than all the darkness in the world.

From here I fly home to Sweden. I fly from Santiago to Frankfurt, Frankfurt to my home town. I leave on the 10th of December and arrive on the 11th. And then I make new plans after Christmas...

santiago de compostella

I arrived on December 5th in time for mass.

growing slowly

The camino gives you what you need. Not what you want, oh no, what you need. And most often what you need is what bugs you the most, itches teh most, hurts the most. The people who push every annoying button of yours and you try to escape them, walk faster than them, slower than them, avoid them, hate them, dirt talk them. But you cannot escape them. And you end up havign to forgive them. And love them.

The man hurting and drinking and carrying wine instead of water in his bottle. The woman who went off anti-depressants and is like a loud, annyoing wound bossing others around. The couples who are desperatly falling in love and triggering every jealous thought a single person could have. The man who is desperatly attractive and has a Not For Me sign all over him.

Living together isn't easy. Loving and forgiving isn't easy. The camino gives you what you need. Not what you want, oh no, but what you need. And in the end, what you do not want, what you try the hardest to avoid, is actually what you most of all do want.

And when it all gets too hard, I do have norweigan Anna, and she sure helps me grow. And laugh.