The wind is blowing. It is sharp and feels like a cut on my face. The boys and the dogs are walking further away towards the ice and I am talking in a mobile-phone with my cousin. He will be off to India in a couple of days. We are laughing about the cold that he is soon to leave behind. The boys and I are enjoying our Saturday night by the frozen sea. It is nearly dark, only a thin strip of purple is fading away in the horizon.

My boys don’t want to walk on the ice tonight. Oh no, they say. It would be typical mum, they say. She would suggest, let’s take a short cut and oops, we would fall in the ice and have to swim back home, and she would just say, don’t be foolish boys, it’s not that cold, just keep moving on. No, not even Jesus would walk on this ice. So we turn back and follow the track of a motor sledge.

Finally we are back at our car and know that it will not take long before we see some lights and signs of others like us, fellows of the same kind. Sometimes deep in the forest where trees are silently reaching towards the sky and the cold is breathing heavily around, I get a feeling of being endlessly far away from anything connected with organized human life. Once when we were on our way back along a narrow forest road there was a huge owl who stared at us with its wide deep eyes and we kind of apologized for being so late in its territory. There are moments when I feel like an intruder in nature and other times equally as part of it as any creature in the world.

I try to imagine, how it would feel to live without a forest. There are so many people in the world who never go into woods. They don’t even think about it. They never have a taste of a forest in their mouth and still they are completely happy. My family belongs to the forest. It calls us and we always answer that calling. We go there in daylight and when it is dark. We love it in all seasons. It gives us food and it gives us peace and when we are restless, we say, let’s take a walk in a forest. And then it is alright again. Pain goes away and anxiety disappears and a path feels so good under our feet and we breathe deep breaths of fir trees and it feels like the breeze of another world.

Working as an artist and academic is like walking on water and living in a forest. A great deal of the work is about trusting that you can walk on water against all reason and facts of the world. When looking for something new, whether it is a research question or a piece of art, you are like a child in a forest: there are hundreds of paths that you could choose, sometimes you get lost and suddenly it gets dark and you just have to follow your intuition in order to find the way again. Trees around you reach high up and it is easy to lose the orientation.

Universities of present times are no playgrounds, no gardens of pleasure, even if all the evidence shows that you need to have a playful mind in order to be innovative and creative. When you talk to colleagues everyone seems to agree that if you want to do any real thinking or creative work, you have to go out from the campus. There is no space for thinking in a contemporary university. There is no “outside, no forest, no green belt” in a university. Or could there still be another space available?

Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1989) was a historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago. He wrote among other things about the human need to get into another place and in former times that need was taken care by religious rituals. Today in our secularized and multicultural society we do not have a common ground for such rituals, but a need to get to another world is still there. In my home university in Lapland I see tall pine trees and a lake behind the trees through my window. I can go and embrace the spirit of nature, or just to hug a tree, if I want to. But not everyone has the privilege of such a view and a forest at your door step.

I think that art can offer us a way to another place. If we only could offer an access to art practice in an open workshop during a working day, our well-being would go up like a rocket. A short moment of doing something creative out of the box, breaking the routines, would open that other world to us and take us for a walk on the wild side. We should not be afraid of looking idle or having fun at work, when we all know that our brains need those timeless times when there are no expectations of productivity and measurable results.