Today, on the last Saturday of August, I set down my gathering basket for a moment to rest. It is time to look back with it upon the path we have travelled together and sigh: here it is now, one whole growing season. I pause in gratitude to contemplate all that has risen from the earth, met me along the path, passed through my hands and been carried home as invaluable gifts of nourishment, medicine and food for the winter.
The basket’s full abundance, all that it has gathered, is impossible to show. Only a part of its contents can be lifted onto the palm as a visible harvest. There is much that remains unseen: thoughts that have slowly grown clear, sentences written over and over again, words that have flown away, questions allowed to rest and seek their answers slowly, in peace.
The wind plays through the trees outside my window, rustling birches and scattering yellow leaves like golden rain. It is a strong wind, telling of change, relinquishment, the ending of summer. On the morning shore, the atmosphere was wistfully grey. The glow of August is fading, and in everything I feel the cooler touch of autumn: revealing and true. Restlessness, a longing to take wing somewhere far away, sounds in the calling of the swans lingering on the water.
The palm is the first basket.
In spring, it held a delicate birch bud, fresh and fragrant. Now it holds the first fallen yellow leaf, leathery and waxen. I raise it to the light and see the whole birch tree. I recognise the same transformation, from spring’s awakening to this day. The arcs of our journeys are illuminated. As the leaves of the birches turn yellow, next spring’s leaf shoots and the beginnings of its catkins are already complete inside their protective buds. Trust, then, the luminous butterfly leaves: they are whispering already.
The palm opens to receive, curves to shelter and closes for a moment around what is still fragile. Yet the same hand that gathers and protects must, in time, open again. Otherwise, the seed cannot take flight.
The palm is the first basket.
The palm, like the gathering basket, breathes:
receives into its shelter, and releases.
The Wild Path Begins to Weave
Before I step onto Villipolku, the Wild Path, I pause to listen.
There is a quiet place where nothing has yet taken form.
An empty basket. A blank page. The breath just before the first step.
For years, I have had a name for it:
Multi-worlded Presence.
It is not a concept I can explain.
It is the source to which I return, again and again.
Throughout this summer, only one gentle whisper:
Let the Wild Path weave your basket…
I do not ask what I should write.
I open the door and set out to wander.
When I look back upon the growing season that has carried me here, the beginning of its arc cannot be found in a single date or a square on the calendar. It is found in the first green of spring.
In the birch bud that parted and opened into a translucent butterfly. In the nettle shoot that rose from the dark earth, filled with potent strength. In the silver-grey bud of the rowan, the bright tenderness of the spruce tip and the fireweed that knew, even as it emerged, that it was reaching towards the high light of late summer and its own purple-red flowering.
These wise companions did not arrive all at once. Each had its own moment, its own way of becoming visible. I walked beside their growth, listening, asking, stepping slowly, waiting for each living, wondrous gift of wild green. I wandered in relationship, within the weave of my plant companions. Only for a moment did I imagine that I was the one gathering. Gradually, I understood that the Wild Path had all along been weaving a basket around me, bringing stories, whispering tales, revealing enchanting side paths and, at times, casting a gentle forest blanket over me. And so the Stories of the Wild Path began to emerge.
The Wild Path is not a route drawn on a map. It has no signs and no destination cleared in advance. It comes into being through gentle listening to what calls us to take the next step – and, at times, to what asks us to remain still for a long while. It may disappear into the tall grass, circle far from familiar places or lead into dense forest where progress is slow and arduous. Not everything about it can be revealed. If it is explained completely, it ceases to be wild.
Creative work, too, needs such a path. In the end, all we see of a book are its covers and the printed pages between them, the tip of the iceberg. We do not see all the depths in which the book has been writing its writer: the pauses, quiet observations, tangled threads, unravelled weavings and long periods of trusting those moments when nothing appears to be happening.
Throughout spring and summer, I have been walking precisely such a path. I have been holding the questions, letting them reveal their essence. Letting them hold me, and sending me for long walks to gather guidance, freely and without hurry.
The answers did not come all at once. The Wild Path brought them gradually into the basket: one word from here, another from beneath a stone, a flashing image from over there, from the black feathers of a raven. So much was gathered almost imperceptibly: the delicate scent of twinflower, dancing mists over the lake, the dive of a black-throated loon, the trace of a childhood memory and the vertigo of a new insight. Some discoveries the Wild Path asked me to leave untouched in their deepest hiding places.
Not everything encountered is meant to be gathered,
and not everything gathered is meant to be shown.
The Summer Nest
At the heart of all this growth has been a nest, a sheltered space where something has been allowed to take form before receiving its name. My journey through spring and summer has also been a process of birth: the reshaping of the very heart of my work.
The Wild Path has been my midwife.
It has not hurried the birth, nor allowed me to pull what was unfinished into the light too soon. Its wildness has also held a fierce protectiveness. It has led me away from the visible path, closed off my connections with the outside world for a while and asked me to listen more closely. The sheltering shadow it protected has been a softly breathing nest, a place where new forms of expression could unfold in peace.
I held hospitable space for writing. I wrote. I drafted. I allowed words and stories to come to me in their own way, in their own time – as the beings of the forest do: by appearing. I did not hunt them.
Now the Stories of the Wild Path may continue to ripen on the palm, in the basket, in their nest – until the time comes.
Finnish Nature Day
Today, 29 August 2026, is Finnish Nature Day. This essay, The Wild Path’s Gathering Basket, is a small gesture of gratitude towards this particular place on Earth, its forests and waters – towards the living community that has woven me into its fabric and allowed me to feel at home among my more-than-human companions. Through my encounters with them, my work, too, has been renewed.
The earth has carried me even when I have not known where I was going. The forest has given me a new mind and a new language, but even more, it has taught me a way of working: growth takes place in many layers, mostly hidden from view. Roots weave even when we can neither see nor hear them. The forest path calls but offers no finished map of where it is taking the wanderer. Getting lost belongs to not-knowing, to the willingness to cross a threshold and walk along the edge, towards the unknown and beyond.
And so my gratitude today is not directed only towards the visible gifts of summer. I also give thanks for what remains unfinished, for all that lingered and for what remained unpublished. I give thanks for the bends where the original plan changed. I give thanks for the sheltering shadow that protected what was fragile, and for the earth that received all that had to fall from my hands, to become soil, to decay into rotting wood and surrender its former shape as nourishment for new cycles.
The Circle of Ancient Fires
The last Saturday of August is a celebration known by many names in Finland: Muinaistulien yö, the Night of Ancient Fires; Elotulien ilta, the Evening of Harvest Fires; venetsialaiset, the Venetian Festival; and the closing of the summer cottage season.
Of these traditions, the Ancient Fires are the way of bidding farewell to summer that feels closest to me. I grew up near the Turku archipelago, amid the scent of Baltic Sea winds, and later lived on the island of Bornholm. The fires along the shores therefore speak within me both to a deep memory and to this present moment, calling me into the circle of Baltic fires from here, far away in the heart of Central Finland.
The Ancient Fires are lit along the shores today at precisely 9.30 p.m. Finnish time, joining the Baltic coasts through torches, bonfires, lanterns and campfires into one circle of light. They shine across the water towards other shores and, for a moment, join separate places within the same circle. This year, however, I do not light my fire beside the water, although lanterns, festive lights and communal fires are also kindled along the shores of the surrounding lakes.
I carry my basket of gratitude into the deepening evening, into the dark forest. The basket in which I bear my gifts for the forest is emptied and placed upon a stone. At precisely 9.30 p.m., I light a candle in its heart, in gratitude for how it has carried the abundance of the forest’s gifts through many cycles of the moon. The warm radiance shining through the woven splints of the traditional basket illuminates the side of the boulder and a small rowan tree beside it.
My fire flickers in the silence of the forest, its flame carrying a small message into the circle of all the Harvest Fires now sending their light and gratitude across the Baltic shores: thank you, summer. Welcome, autumn.
In the quietness of my forest ceremony to honour the Ancient Fires, I give thanks to the Wild Path, which guided, wove, protected and knew when it was time to remain hidden. I give thanks to the earth that carried every step, and to the summer that gave growth time to unfold – to bud and flower, to set seed and ripen berries – through its long, generous arc.
And in the gentle glow of my gathering basket, I understood: the Wild Path has always been with me, from my very first steps. The call of the Wild Path took me out into the world. The call of the Wild Path brought me home again, beneath the North Star. I can always trust in it, as I trust in flow, as I trust in Multi-worlded Presence. When I protect the Wild Path, it protects me.
The Open Spiral
I return home and set down my gathering basket by the door to wait. I begin to write the final lines of this essay.
When I close my eyes, I see my summer wanderings vividly as a spiral basket of inner growth. At its centre is the light of newborn green, followed by the vivid abundance of the blossoming world – and now the golden touches of approaching autumn have been added. I have travelled in a widening spiral through the landscape, month by month opening wider circles for my wanderings, while my basket has grown more abundant each day. The entire spectrum of growth has become part of me, nourishing and enlivening every aspect of my being: the visible and the unseen.
Now I am weaving the final round. I do not finish it as a tightly bound rim. Instead, I allow it to open in many directions into a radiant wheel: grass panicles, ears of wheat, drifting willowherb down and nettle seedheads all remain visible, evoking an opening towards the world. Each ray points towards the future, filled with seeds ready to depart and take flight, to find new ground in which to grow.
Let the rim of my basket, then, remain generously open,
a Wild Sun Basket, born from the spiral of its own growth,
opening its coil, letting its rays
point towards many worlds.
Farewell to summer, and to an era. The wind grows still.
As I write these final sentences, the moon rises into the sky:
a honeyed circle of light,
ripe, round and almost full.
*
By morning, the world has changed. The soft, damp warmth of last night is gone. The morning dawns cold, almost piercingly so. The sky is entirely overcast, and soon the rain begins. It feels as though summer has truly said its farewells and, through the fires of the night, received its release.
The rain completes and cleanses. Somewhere, it falls upon the embers of the night.
Whenever I look at my basket, I will remember the warm radiance it cast yesterday, when it became a fire lantern. The flame of the night has gone out, but the light that shone through the woven splints remains within it. Although the sun does not reveal itself this morning, it still lives in the basket. Everything the basket has carried throughout the growing season was born of the sun’s light and power, in a shared dance with the fertile earth.
I take the basket into my arms like a vessel of the fertile earth.
I give thanks to the sun. I give thanks to the earth. I give thanks for all that has been gathered.
Now the Wild Path’s gathering basket is complete.
–
Written on Finnish Nature Day, 29 August 2026, Julajuj (11) KAWOQ in Cholq’ij.
Completed and published on 30 August, day of Kablajuj (12) AJPU in Cholq’ij.
Both days are finalizing days of Jun (1) TOJ Trecena, complete on Oxlajuj (13) IMOX.