Stories
My mind can't generate images. This condition is called aphantasia. I can't imagine simple things in my mind like colours or shapes or simple objects, not to mention situations or fellow humans. I can't imagine my cat, my brother or my partner, and since I don't keep any photos, those beings become something abstract, like ideas. Even the photos I took for this autoethnography are there to communicate emotions or show something concrete to my fellow humans so they can relate better to what I'm writing. Some of these photos I keep for my lectures, but I don't keep pictures of humans.
Because I've never been able to generate images in my mind, stories have been very important to me. This is how my mind processes memories, situations, and entertains itself. Not all memories are stories; most memories are akin to plain powerpoint presentations, just bullet points with some details, usually very few. It looks like this: I went there, approximately at that time, with person x, we did this, I felt so and so, overall it was so and so.
Stories are more elaborate. There are more details and usually something that communicates important insights. A significant story for me was the one my brother and I (verbally) co-authored when we were very young. I don't remember our parents reading or telling us stories when we were young, so we were telling them to each other, and nature was telling us stories too. Most of our childhood, apart from the first few years of our lives in a large city where we were born, we spent in an isolated, rural area with beautiful nature. There were nature's stories everywhere, mostly related to life cycles and other rhythms of nature.
The story my brother and I co-authored was based in the worlds we created, far away from the Earth, even though I believe those worlds were directly inspired by the diverse and magical landscapes we saw around us in the north-western and the south-western parts of the country and in between those areas. My world was a very small town surrounded by large expanses of nature. The town was populated by humans, and nature by the children of snow, forest, rivers, mountains, and so on. My brother and I would co-create stories based in those settings for many years. When we grew up and went our separate paths, we stopped and never discussed it ever again. At times I wonder what would happen to those characters and whether those stories had the same significance to my brother as they did to me. While they were mostly entertaining, some themes played out much later in my life, such as a constant struggle between needing other humans and an overwhelming desire to be separate from everyone. Other themes (e.g., power) I could understand better only when I began doing research.
More recently I fell in love with a story of a fellow human I've never met. Unfortunately I can't tell it but it's had a great impact on me. It made me think about humans being able to make extremely difficult but infinitely beautiful decisions in pursuit of higher, universal, timeless values despite society's norms and expectations (often based on appalling, harmful ideologies) and likely despite the doubts the individual probably had. It made me question my own life and my own decisions. Perhaps different humans would interpret this story differently. To me, it's a powerful story of a strong individual. Somehow I feel it's changed me forever as a person.
At times I think about my whole life as a (short) story. A while ago I was sketching some stories for an autoethnographic text for a book, to link the unfolding of my life with my current ecological and spiritual practice and worldview. This worldview and corresponding practices are not a result of watching some documentary or sitting down one day and deciding at once to change my life, to love nature, etc. The roots of this nature-based, deeply ecological worldview seem to stem from nature-based experiences and living in and with nature for many years, especially early in my life.
When I think about it, my life has played out to a large extent identically to the life of one of the characters my brother and I had in our story. Ice was both the mother and the father of that creature. It lived with the ice and didn't want to leave it. Another character made it manifest its presence in the world, and since then it couldn't go back. The creature went on many adventures in different places and became a herbalist. It was an HSP (this is something I realised much later in my life) and had beautiful interactions with nature everywhere, but made bad decisions in other spheres of its life. It wore the same white dress for many years and never had any belongings. It never had its own home either.
In the picture above is herbal tea, made from Finnish herbs here in Finland.