Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
In Durham, I met someone from Finland in a gym class we’d had together, and on her last week in North Carolina, over vodkas, I announced that one day I would make it to Finland for a visit to see her.
Six years later, I was in a postcard-perfect picture of serenity in rural northern Finland, a place called Kärsämäki which literally translates to “pig snout hill.” Imagine how uncool that sounded when I visited the chic city of Oulu to hang out at an arts festival there. But it was cool to go, in all honesty, as it was something I’d found and been invited to, and felt validating as it was affiliated with official European Union arts organizations.
There are pros and cons to these things, but in those days, I simply went along with it thinking, ‘Oh, this will be like Governor’s School.’ (No.) But the point, for me, was experiencing something new, and, importantly, far from everyone I knew, alone in a setting that was unfamiliar. Finland, the last country on my bucket list (for that moment, anyway), had checked all these boxes, and in that sense it was like that time I got to spend a transformative summer as a teen in Laurinburg at ‘East.’
This time the residency was twelve weeks, so I got to see the shifts in participants at the end of June and July. People would come and go, just as summer flowers bloomed and fell. Dried or pressed flowers from summer, I learned, are carefully kept, to remind people through the dark months of most of the year that brighter days are ahead.
But I want to talk about serendipity and chance encounters; how to make space for that starts with understanding the value of some openness in a plan. Most of the artists arrived with suitcases full of things they’d need to carry out a plan, but after a day finding out exactly how remote this place really was, they changed course. Weather, opportunities, chance encounters, surprises, broken suitcase wheels, or a lack (or an abundance) of resources meant flowing with a different idea. Some people want to stay with their Plan A, though, and you’d see lots of stress if you’d pass them on the front porch or in the common room or in the kitchen. I tried sidestepping them as often as I could, but I didn’t always manage to slip by, unnoticed. ‘Where were you, Dipika? We thought you’d still be at the party?’
‘Sauna.’
‘Sauna?’
‘Sauna.’
In Finland, people are not verbose, so I learned to adapt, and adjust. I cycled around at times and would occasionally stop to see the wonderful librarian in that town. Once I asked her an important question. ‘At our Midsummer party, there was a fight. People were drinking and then there was… well, people were fist fighting, and, the next day, everyone walked around as if nothing happened. At all. Is this normal?’
‘Yes.’ She told me to look up the comic ‘Finnish Nightmares.’
Plan A, Plan J, Plan X-234. Veers are what took me to Finland in the first place, and now, here I am, still in Southeast Asia on account of a wider turn away from North Carolina, home, but only for short stops now and the last one was a decade ago.
Speaking of which, that summer in Finland, I met my friend from the gym ‘Happy Juhannus.’
‘Happy Midsummer. I cannot believe that you are here.’
We rode bicycles around the path I used to cut every evening at wildly long hours of sunset. We traded casual, succinct thoughts on art and the meshed edges of cultures, as we had experienced one another’s, we could lightly converse on this, and we had a lot of things to say to one another. For me, I’d held romantic notions about being so far… north, and there for a time, in good company, I felt relaxed and fully at ease. I curated some things, like flowers and made photocopies of them, put them together into PDFs and sent them to people who wanted to know more about what I was up to. Scenes from nature, of course, mostly, ‘Slow Moment’ held my best drawings and photos of the shadows and birch trees, rivers and bouquets people changed out in the kitchen, along with scenes I found curious of the ‘white night’.
Things are so fun sometimes when you let yourself be swept along in the current of potentiality. To find serendipity, it takes letting go.
John O’Donohue, author of Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, writes, ‘Your soul knows the geography of your destiny. Your soul alone has the map of your future, therefore you can trust this indirect, oblique side of yourself. If you do, it will take you where you need to go, but more important it will teach you a kindness of rhythm in your journey.’
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
