325

 Ringblommor

These are seeds of beautiful ringblommor. They are some of my most favourite flowers. I've been growing them whenever I had a chance since I was a child. I use the flowers to make tea, but they can also be used in salads. 

Here in Denmark I don't have a garden so I decided to plant them in clay pots. 

During the winter, the two house plants that I had died. Later, a fellow human gave another house plant to me, and it died too. The large window in my home faces the north, so there is no direct sunlight. None of the plants that I had are native to this area either. I decided not to invite another house plant into my life but rather try and grow ringblommor and perhaps herbs too. Something I can eat as well as nurture and live with. 

324

 Seeing my own book online for the first time 

Today I saw my own book online for the first time. It will be out later this year. I'm feeling joy because I've been nurturing the idea of writing my own book since I started working on my PhD thesis in 2016. I didn't want to turn my PhD thesis into a book though, as I felt that my thoughts had to mature. I wanted to grow more as a person, experience more, live through more, to see myself as a whole individual rather than separately as a social scientist, a consumer, a partner, a friend, etc. I wanted to reflect more on the link between degrowth and business that I was focusing on. I felt that over the years I've been liberating myself from unhelpful and at times even toxic academic conventions. I now feel free to weave together my research and my lived experiences. I feel free to write in a simple way. The book constellates all my thoughts, ideas, reflections and reservations about degrowth, business, humanism, consumption, and my own life in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden. 

I've been writing this book during the most difficult time of my life. I even thought about postponing writing this book until the most difficult time was over. But then I decided to write exactly at that time, when I felt many human emotions, such as fear, insecurity, vulnerability, anxiety, and hope very strongly. 

I resigned from my position in Finland in Autumn 2023 as an act of activism, of opposing harassment in academia. Partly it was also because I wanted to write the Danish part of this book in Denmark. It was so important for me to live in the same country where I was doing my research, where the businesses I spoke to were based. I wanted to experience the same social (political, cultural etc.) and natural structures they were experiencing. It turned out that the Finnish university could not accommodate my needs and the needs of this project. So I accepted the invitation from Roskilde university in Denmark which became my academic home for the time being.

While I'm experiencing joy, I am also sure that this book is not everything to me. I realised a while ago that my main career is not that of an academic. It is that of a human being. It is a path of deep spiritual growth. I work on something when I feel that there is a possibility to grow as a human being, as a soul, and take part in others' growth and change in culture. 

This book is very personal and raw. It's written in the same way I would be writing this autoethnography or an email to a friend. It relies in many ways on this autoethnography.

And finally I want to say something about the cover. Originally I was hoping to use one of my own images that I took for this autoethnography. The publisher's preference was that I chose an image from their licensing partner. In this, they gave me a lot of freedom. I didn't want the cover to stand out, to catch attention. I wanted it to communicate peacefulness, gentleness, intricacy. I wanted beautiful lichen to be on the cover. A lichen, though it looks like a plant, is a relationship. I spent much time with lichen in the Nordics, and it's one of the most magical beings that I've encountered in my life. The one on the cover looks like Cladonia.