Deepgrowth
Today I am feeling both sorrow and joy. I'm feeling sorrow because my partner and I gave back the apartment keys to the housing company from which we rented our first home in Copenhagen. We lived there from the Autumn of 2023 and until June 2024. We always knew that this home was temporary, but I developed connection with it. Our home was a small studio apartment. It was a safe space after I resigned from my academic position in Finland. It was a space where my partner and I were figuring out how to practise minimalism together, how to live together. He proposed to me in that home. I wrote my first editorial for Environmental Values there. I believe that my fellow humans reading the editorial would be able to find the exact spot where this apartment is located on the map. Among other things, in the editorial I described what I saw out of our window. In that apartment my partner and I wrote one of our works together. Today this work is out in Ecological Economics, and for this reason I'm feeling joy. The article is called Deepgrowth: Self-transformation towards harmonious being. In the article, we say that for genuine sustainability transformations to happen, deep, spiritual growth is necessary. This growth is both empowered and constrained by social structures, and we dive into the nature of those social structures.
In the picture above is a magical grapevine growing in a garden in Frederiksberg. When I moved to Denmark from Finland, one of the first things I noticed were fig trees and grapevines. Denmark, usually seen as a cold country, felt very warm and southern to me because I met these beautiful plants.
