A soul landscape

A near car collision at a tricky intersection is the start to a long-arranged meeting with Valdur Mikita. He didn’t seem to mind. Parked the Yaris, and he drove us into a forest in his SUV while I told him of tracking down a rare copy of an earlier book of his, Theorem (2011).

“That b/s,” he said and laughed. I had hopes of gaining the autograph of one of Estonia’s best-known thinkers and writers on the flyleaf, and felt I had to ditch the idea. The thing cost me 30 euros in a secondhand bookshop in Tartu, so I will gradually work my way through it, even though the author has sounded a word of caution.

He said The Linguistic Forest (2013) is probably his best-known of around 15 titles, one that I have drawn on a lot in blogposts. In a few words: the Estonian natural environment and language are closely intertwined, and the summer house is where Estonians practise Finno-Ugrian culture, as if living inside an ancient myth.  

We arrive at a beautiful collection of 150-year-old mostly restored farm buildings, the cladding in weathered timber: a house, barn, sauna, summer kitchen, woodshed, and a well. In a lawn stand several apple trees, and within a circle of stones a fire pit.

Valdur doesn’t bother with paper or kindling; he applies fire starters to a carefully arranged pile of pine splits, and says the wood is a bit wet from recent heavy rain. After 10 minutes a bright blaze is underway.

His book of essays in three languages, Forestonia (2019), has the Estonian title of mine metsa, or go into the forest, so that is what we do. Here is where he gets his inspiration for his writing.

He speaks of a soul landscape – hingemaastik - for him, this is the forests of southern Estonia, where he says traces of ancient Estonian culture remain and are still lived. Northern Estonians are a sea people, and quite different from the south.

During the walk we chat, try the fresh tips of spruce needles – a bit chewy but refreshing - and I learn that Estonia’s forests are full of bears these days, as well as wolves and lynxes, but not to worry – they never come near human beings. Well, there was one time: a man who stumbled across a bear and her cubs. Didn’t end well, but he did survive, and that’s the only incident he can think of.

After a 2.5-kilometre circuit through pine and spruce forest, early chanterelles appearing along the path, we return to a fire and embers, to grill sausages, with rye bread and chopped cucumbers and onions, and a beer. A wood pigeon calls in a tree.

It is tough conversation for me, almost all of it in Estonian, and we veer in all directions over 4-and-a-half hours. Valdur is working on a new book, exploring the potential of the vana aju or “ancient brain” to tap into a deeper positive connection between nature conservation, and human wellbeing.

He tells me he has a publisher’s deadline to meet in 10 days’ time, and suddenly I appreciate his kindness in agreeing to meet me. We clean up, listen to a litter of bat pups chirping behind the weatherboards of the barn, and it is time to leave. I try one more question, relating to synaesthesia, the ability a few people have in taking in stimuli via a different sense to the normal one. Typical examples are seeing music as colours, or assigning colours to different aromas or fragrances.

Valdur says he has had something like it, a feeling when climbing to the top of a tall spruce on a windy day of being at one with the tree. This is a form of mirror synaesthesia, experiencing a feeling of touch or movement when the contact occurs somewhere else. He has used synaesthesia as a way of writing about the wordless and soundless language of nature that human beings can sense and understand if minds are open.

As I write these lines under a picnic shelter roof, a cold wind ripples the waters of the lake by my campsite, the tips of rushes along the shore wave gently, songbirds chatter in the trees, and the rain begins to fall. Time for an early dinner, and then the sun comes out again. I try to light a fire but the paper shopping bag is no good. Dry birch bark will light, I remember, and I scrounge some from a nearly empty woodshed, and soon flames leap up.

Words come to me: tule ääres istun mina / õhus lendvad sädemed / öösel keegi mind ei sega / kõik on vaik ja vagusi – "by the fireside I sit, sparks fly in the air, at night no one disturbs me, all is quiet and still". Valdur said to me earlier this was a song of the forest brothers, the metsavennad, who hid from the Soviets during the war. The forest and the boglands were their home for a time, a landscape for the soul, then and now.