I grew up by a river. And there was a hydro-electric power plant near our home. And every Spring they opened the flood gates at the power plant, simply because after all the snow melting there was more water in the river than the plant could run through. We often went to watch the show, the raw forces of nature in play - massive sheets of ice slowly drifting down the river, gathering speed as they came closer to the free-running rapids, and eventually the turbulence of the flow sending the ice sheets somersaulting, breaking in mid-air, collapsing to glimmering blocks, as the water rushed down the 7 meters dive. I remember standing downstream next to the rapids, the sound of running water being so loud that it kind of a felt like bubble, so that the rest of the world was somewhere far in the distance, and the only thing present inside the bubble was the audiovisual display of the water. It was constant motion, flow, dance - no pattern never occurred twice, every splash of water was unique, and sometimes a ray of sunlight made the air sparkle in colors of a rainbow.

I often recognize how this untamed force of free-running water has stayed in my mind, as a central symbol of life, the raw "ability to make things happen", the sense of "moving, dancing, being alive". As a teenager I loved reading, and I had a more or less vague dream of becoming a writer myself. I'm not sure but I think somewhere in my archives there still are those old notebooks, filled with fables and symbolical short stories with philosophical and spiritual metaphors. I remember that sense of a burning flame in my soul, which asked to be expressed, and I was looking for ways, the skills and the methods to express that inner world. I kept on experimenting with various forms of expression, also poetry and aphorisms, for they felt more true to the world I wanted to express. Or, in other words; I kind of a felt a desire to express the difference between "bottled water" and the "raw untamed force of the water in running rapids" - and the more I reflected upon it, the more deeply I realized that any attempt to "bottle" the experience is going to ruin the essence. So, maybe, instead of using words trying to define a theory explaining the essence of running water, maybe just use words as gestures and signposts, inviting the reader to dwell at that spot downstream, witnessing the flow of water?

The unexpressed in my soul felt a little bit like pressure building up, and I needed to find a way to let some of the pressure out. To actually express some of the inner world, instead of just thinking about ways of expression. So, bringing in some of my own money I got a small selection of my poetry printed in a booklet. Oh, it felt great to finally see some of the reflections of my soul having a tangible physical expression out in the world! Friends, relatives and neighbours wanted to buy their copies of the booklet. And one of the closest neigbhours was a musician, having clarinet as his main instrument. He suggested I sign their copy of the booklet, and I improvised a few lines of poetry for them, hand-written on the first page of the booklet. Holding the booklet, the musician approved and said "this is so different compared to what we musicians do - every concert we play is like a fragile flower which blossoms for a moment and is then gone forever. But a book has some permanent presence in it, it will stay." That struck me deep, and it felt like some of the ice sheets of my inner thoughts somersaulting, dancing, shattering but also breaking free and releasing themselves into the sheer power of rapidly flowing water.

Suddenly I realized that the pressure inside me was gone - to some extent I had fulfilled the desire to express. Holding a physical copy of my poetry booklet started increasingly feel like a question, instead of an answer to unfulfilled desire. I grew more and more aware of the weight of "permanent presence", and I had to dive deeper into asking myself if I'm just trying to bottle the water of rapids, and then selling it to people by saying "hey, look - this water is from a rapids, it is running water which makes it essentially different from anything standing still". Or, also - when making something permanent, it comes with questions "is this just unnecessary clutter adding to the weight of the world, what is the reason of making this piece of creation permanent, or would the essence of the creation be better expressed in some non-permanent form?"

(And, yes - I have a feeling that most of the above story I have told before, in some older blog post perhaps. Maybe, maybe not. But that, on the other hand, is something I've made inner peace with - so many processes in life are cyclical, the motion of life comes in spheres and spirals, and a straight line of progression is a rare temporal phenomenon in the dance of life, growth, ebb and flow. So be my writings, sometimes revisiting the old stories, constantly reflecting on the same untold mysteries, not settling down for a final definite version of any single story, but having faith in some previously unseen aspects revealing themselves every time an old story gets retold)

Those questions have followed me, and it grew especially strong at the time of writing my BA thesis for the department of Philosophy. I remember browsing the bookshelf containing all the published texts of the students who had studied before me. There they were, collecting dust. What, exactly, is the point of printing a text which ends up being unread? Isn't that just mere dead mass which hinders the free flow of thoughts, the bottle which tames the essence of the untamed? Well, but I wrote the thesis just to get finished with my studies, and I haven't read it since. Or, actually, I'm pretty sure I don't even have a copy any more. As, at that time, what mattered more for me was the inner though process, the way studying philosophy has helped myself to clarify my own mind, so there wasn't that much I wanted to express to the world.

In my young adulthood I liked photography. That was the time before digital photography, and I especially liked dia slides, so that the family album could be projected on a silver screen. That I still have - an archive of dia slides of life in 1993 - 2001. But then, as I collapsed deeper into the darkness of depression I somehow lost interest in photography. Or, to be more precise; I just lost interest, as that might be one of the central themes of depression; losing that inner flow of untamed raw energy of life, so that soul feels just hollow, still-standing dusty archive of abandoned dreams. Slowly, slowly I have been finding my way to recover from depression, and for the past years I haven't suffered from the classical symptoms. But something has changed, or then this is still a long-lasting after-effect, I'm not sure; but, as I long for my inner flow of life energy gaining pace and re-finding the true power, I feel a heightened need to stay away from bottles, to steer clear from the idea of bottling and archiving. Or, like dropping all excess weight to make it easier to travel on the path of recovery. And inside I feel that permanence is weight, and my soul longs for the fresh breeze of wind which comes and goes. (And, I've been increasingly tempted to quit facebook, and I was thinking if I should download all of my data from facebook - but in a way it would feel more fresh and alive to just let all the pictures, texts and storied to vanish into the void of outer cyber space. The idea of maintaining a digital archive of my posts somehow feels like an unnecessary burden to carry. But I haven't yet made a decision)

Hehe, that was kind of an introduction to the actual blog post. For I also recognize that theme affecting the way I feel about updating the blog; writing a text easily feels a bit like weight pressing me down - as soon as the text is published, it won't flow any more, but it will just stay there in the archives of the internet. And it makes me ask "so, what are those permanent traces I feel like leaving there to stay", and then I just feel that "I want to live, and I want to feel my life flowing". But, yes I know that is not all of it - and even if a text is going to sit still, I don't have to; I can just publish a text and keep going onwards with my own life?

Well, but this blog post is about my slash-and-burn experiment to grow heirloom variety rye. Ancient Savo simulation has values to compute crop harvest yield, and the basic formula is simple; "for 100g seeds sown, you get X times 100g of harvest" - naturally, the value of X is modified by soil fertility, the weather, the temperature and other such factors. But, what was the base-line average yield for 1200CE slash-and-burn rye? The Finnish pagans of that era didn't keep records (and I can relate to that!), so there are no written documents. But once the area fell under the rule of King of Sweden, they introduced bureaucracy; the king needed taxes to fund all the warfare, so they needed to have some kind of book-keeping to track what the peasants are doing and how much taxes they have paid. Money was not commonly used, so the peasants often paid their taxes in furs, dried fish and cereals. Or, if they couldn't pay in good, they could pay by working for the Crown. These records give some interesting insight of the relative values of various goods in the Medieval Sweden. (It is those records we have used as a basis when designing barter prices for goods in UnReal World). Using the earliest sources I could find I estimated that for 1200CE an average yield for slash-and-burn rye would've been 15 times the sown amount. (Some time around 17th century the local rye variety evolved, and on a good year they could get a harvest 100 times the sown amount. But that is later in the history, so stuff for a possible future sequel game of Ancient Savo).

I also wanted to test it myself. But even with this clear goal in my mind, I found it difficult to make detailed notes, and I failed to maintain a neatly organized archive of photographs. On the rational level of my brain I think it would've been good to document everything; the time spent for different stages of the process, the exact dates, the weather, and so on. Well, but all of that has been work which my soul doesn't feel quite ready for - in my current stage of recovery from severe chronic depression I still feel that to get things done I can just sacrifice some aspects of documenting the process, and letting the actual work be like the flow of water which comes and goes without leaving a permanent weight of immobile mass. So, here is the summary of what I remember, and the measurements I managed to make;

Summer 2023 : I prepared a small plot of soil, first gathering dry timber there, and then burning it all. After burning I sowed 100g of heirloom rye. (It just says "heirloom variety, so I don't know for sure if this is the kind which could theoretically speaking provide a 100 times harvest, or if this is genetically more close to the ancient varieties with more modest yields. But then, I also think that my lack of generations of experience passed down to me compensates for it - my unskilled use of high-yield variety is probably about the same as the very skilled ancestors sowing their medium-yield variety?)

I think wild birds ate some of the seeds, and my technique for casting the seeds was not so good, for there were spots with no seeds, and stripes of seeds packed too densely close to each other. But I decided to leave it be like that, just to see what the outcome will be. The seeds sprouted well.

Summer 2024: Pretty soon after the snow was gone I noticed the rye re-growing. So, last summer the seeds grew a network of roots which wintered, growing greenery early on. Heirloom rye tolerates occasional freezing temperatures, so the unstable weather of Finnish Spring was not a problem. By the end of June the rye had already grown as tall as I am. Once the crops seemed ripe I used a sickle to harvest. I took the rye into the sauna, and heated it mildly for two days, to make the rye thoroughly dry. Because the amount was not so big, I decided to manually separate the heads from the straw. I stored the heads in a canvas bag. And then it took me months, I was busy with coding and somehow didn't find time nor energy to process the rye heads.

Early 2025: Slowly it starts to feel that my mind is recovering from the exhausting which I developed during the years of coding Ancient Savo. And I felt like threshing. So I took small portions of the rye heads and placed them in another, smaller bag of canvas. I beat the bag with a wooden club, then poured the contents into a bucket. It was a windy day, so I kept pouring from one bucket to another, so that wind took away most of the chaff. I also tried a sieve, until eventually remembering that gently shaking them on a tilted a wide container will make the light chaff to float on the top, while the heavier seeds fall downwards on the tilted surface. Repeating the process enough times I got the chaff away, leaving just the seeds. Time to measure; there were 1330g of seeds. So, not exactly the yield multiplier 15 of Ancient Savo simulation, but 13.3 - close enough to make me feel that I got the numbers about realistic.

After cleaning the harvest I felt that maybe I wouldn't hurt to dry it a little bit more to make sure it will keep fine for storage. It was already a while since I had cooked on the stove, so I thought it is not too hot any more. I placed a small piece of metal mesh on top of the stove, and on the mesh I placed the bowl with seeds. Hoping that the warm dry air above the stove will help the seeds to let go of any extra moisture if any left. After a few hours I checked, and found that the seeds were a lot warmer than I had thought they'd be. So I was unsure if the temperature rose too high to damage the seeds. To make sure I sow a tiny amount of them, and was relieved to see they sprouted just fine. So I poured the remaining seeds into a container and sealed it. I still don't know if I'll do anything special with the seeds - maybe I can just grow a small slash-and-burn patch every second year, not to produce food but to slowly develop my skills, and to maintain my seed variety.