A day in the life of...

The dim light of my mushroom lamp reveals the shape of my guitar, the slanted whitewashed wooden ceiling, the herbs I’m drying from one of the beams. Bare feet on the cold wooden floor. It’s still dark outside. I’m the first one up of the three of us living in the attic, but downstairs in the kitchen Hanne and Maxi may already be eating breakfast. Cereal with yoghurt and fruit, and a boiled egg. Condensation on the window panes, a greasy heart shape drawn on one of them. The tiny flames of our Advent tea lights on a plate with spruce twigs, orange peels, birch bark and red winter berries. Outside the Swedes make their way to work. Daffy the downstairs poodle starts howling and whining and will not stop for another ten hours. The mornings are times to practice my German and talk about politics or potatoes. Harry will sit silently with us, waiting for his sleep to wear off. Patrick will come downstairs later, and do some animal impressions in the kitchen doorway. One by one, we’ll bustle and balance in the hallway, fishing ours from the mountain of shoes, wrap ourselves up in jackets and scarfs and hats and gloves and go thundering down the stairs headed for school starting at 9:15, a 10 minute walk or a 3 minute bike ride. Benni will only get up at 9:05. Maybe take a shower at 9:10.

There are many great things about living in a full house: there’s always food. When you lose your key or phone or wallet, just say the word and good chance someone will already have found it for you. The empty moments of your life become your most valuable ones, where countless commonplace interactions add up to make the stuff of family love.

And should you decide to tune into it, it is a backdoor into a torrent of fast-paced life lessons, confrontations with self, and a cask for maturing the wine. That suits me well, since the content and the character of our program already invites us into constant self-reflection and personal change. As do my personal relationships, the forest behind our house, and the lack of distractions in the backwater town of Karlskrona. The teachings they hold for me weave them all together. It’s a pressure cooker this MSLS year, forging gems of insight and learning. The only child in me is held up mirrors to her tendency for secrecy, and her dominance. Again and again, in a quick succession of challenges, I am given the opportunity to contract or open up, to assert or listen up, to protect or multiply. When I catch the first reflexes of my quick mind and my ego, the choice and the balance can well up from the depths of my being. Sometimes after days – and sometimes after months – of patience, letting my unconscious work and whittle away at me, while I try to sit still, unflinching, waiting for what will emerge. In the stillness, I engage my unconscious in conversation and we talk my options through. Voices from the heart and the gut talk to my mind, sometimes barely audible, sometimes slamming their fist on the table. The seasons help, as do mental models, to give structure and direction. And images and metaphors help surface the deeper meanings. In ceremony it all aligns, and in those moments the strength and the clarity I feel allow me to sit knowingly within the unknown.

The chats I’ve had, with all of my friends, navigating and negotiating, exploring and boring down into these deeper levels of awareness. Kitchen table conversations, evening strolls in the woods, one on one check-ins and circles with friends and housemates and classmates. It’s intense and sometimes they push me to the brink of spiritual exhaustion. But such is the nature of a year in Karlskrona, and my life feels rich and full and multidimensional. To share it with such wonderful people, to get to know their depths and inner voices, adds such understanding and appreciation to the simple joy on the surface of the social field. To crack jokes with a glowing, knowing glance is so much better than to crack jokes with a guessing, seeking glance.

It’s anyone’s guess in what state I will emerge into the world again when this year is complete. Many of us are going home for Christmas, breaking out of this container of personal transformation to take a breather. But three friends and I will only take it up a notch, traveling north together. We’ll celebrate Christmas with the four of us in a foreign city, before getting on the actual Polar Express to take us far, far away from the world, into the dark of the snowy Nordic midwinter, to a place where the mundane and the mystical live side by side. Jokkmokk, a Saami town just above the polar circle, where we’ll stay with Laila the Saami lady I met in Millemont, Paris last year. We’ll meet her reindeer, don ourselves in thick woolens and skiwear. And if we’re lucky, we’ll get to hail the New Year not underneath the fireworks, but underneath the Northern Lights.

I come home, it’s dark already. Gold key probing for the lock in the black. The frost nips at my face. Thumping up the stairs, the clang of my key in the bowl on the seasonal shelf, and the warm light streaming in from all around. Voices in the living room, cooks in the kitchen. Dinner is being made from the spoils of Hanne’s last dumpster dive expedition. Patti is sitting cross-legged in front of the fireplace, staring at the crackling and poking the sweet smelling birch logs. Harry lies sprawled out on the couch. Maxi beams at me with his unfaltering smile. Benni’s voice and guitar play drift in from his bedroom. Tonight may see us erupt in crazy monkey screeches and deafening cookware concerts at the dinner table, or an impromptu dance party to practice our latest moves after Senap – our house meeting. Or we’ll lounge quietly in the living room, some playing chess, some reading for school. Or the living room will be dark and rims of light will shine from our bedroom doors. Some may go out into the steely cold night again, visiting friends or leeching off their Internet. Or the Mustard House may fill up with visitors, jamming in the living room, eating our food, and draping themselves on our lazy chairs. Or perhaps three of us will stand in the kitchen late at night, talking quietly, listening deeply, as one allows tears to come in the comfort of their housemates’ arms. Soon the others may follow, and in the soft glow of our champagne lamp on the window sill, clear tears will spill in each other’s trusted company, sharing our respective griefs and going to bed having healed a little more, on our minds a new memory that will bring warmth to the years in store. 

The lessons of Autumn/What we see in the mirror

We have a running joke amongst our friends here that everybody is so into the seasons because it’s the only thing that ever changes in this godforsaken little town. They have captivated me though, and quickly became an integral part of the deep, transformative learning process I am engaged in, which encompasses my entire Karlskrona life. It’s an intense, high-pressure container, a dance with all of my lenses of self-reflection and with the greater forces that juggle me, demanding my undivided presence. All my focus is on my personal challenges, my classmates/housemates/friends, and the classes that teach us about paradigm shifts and leadership, the plights of our world and planning strategically for a different future. Everything here is a mirror of everything else, and currently heartbreak is the micro-level but most salient fractal in this learning process. It is myopic, but it does engage my entire being. As such it brings into sharp focus, in a tangible case study, what my being must be undertaking on higher levels too. And I would probably be adrift in it all, were it not for the wisdom of the seasons to guide me, helping me understand where I am, and what is needed.

I was so thrilled when autumn arrived. She came in the first weekend of October, when we were on a retreat with our class in the woods of Mundekulla. The trees changing color, the leaves piling up on the ground, the humid scent of the season. The winds picking up, the forest turning bright yellow and orange and red, the pinecones and acorns on their moss beds. I’ve seen the storm dance through the tall grass by our beach. I’ve seen the sea raging. I’ve picked rosehips and bags full of apples, and inspected many different leaves. I’ve spent dark forest nights sleeping on shores with the geese calling and the heron’s haunting screech. It has all been so breathtakingly beautiful. I welcomed the rain and the cold. The winds howl around the old house at night, sometimes so loud I wake up and lie awake to listen. October coincided with grief for many of us. Some days the air in our houses was just palpable with gloom. But outside our windows, autumn shows us the beauty in letting things go. Heartbreak helps me to easily identify the rungs of the descending ladder. Autumn is the Fall, and she invites us to lean in and keep shedding, shedding, shedding, through the tumultuous agony of loss, along with her.

The days kept shortening, and we began to light the fire in our fireplace at home. It has added a whole new layer to our house, and we are now learning the Swedish art of making the most of the winter season. We spend evenings, real fredagsmys, with the fire crackling, candles and tea, and playing board games or werewolves or sardines. Big house dinners with all the Mustards and guests around the kitchen table, late nights reading or talking in the living room. A house without Internet is paying off in coziness and quality time. I adjusted to the darkness without a fuss, until two days ago. Stepping outside after a day of hard work into a rainy night at 5PM, the darkness felt outright oppressive. I can’t think clearly with so little light around. I often feel like an animal underground, waiting in the humid cold for a dry sunny day to sort everything out. But today we woke up with the first snow, and we walked to school singing Christmas carols in the crisp morning air. Winter has arrived. The color scheme has changed. White of the frost, brown of the dead leaves and naked trees and old grass, here and there some dark evergreen, and the vast blues and grays of the sea and sky. The latter two are becoming more prominent in the scenery of the sparser woods. As I descend down the ladder, venturing deeper and deeper into the vaults of my being, I can feel I'm getting closer to the eye of the needle. Through it, on the other side where the ascending ladder begins, lies the chrysalis of a new future. I can tell it’s here, in winter, somewhere hidden in the snow. This new season, I’m sure, will show me the way to it, if I care to tune in.

To zoom out a bit, here is an excerpt from my recent take home exam. Same thing, but a broader perspective:

"At this point I would like to seize the opportunity to diverge on an implicit assumption underneath all this talk of the sustainability challenge and our suggested approaches, strategic or other, to address it. This entire discourse, like any other, is a discourse between humans, addressing humans only, and leaving out anything non-human as a conscious, equal partner in this challenge. Our necessity to collaborate, however, extends beyond humanity. We are a self-important, self-centered species, and in the mess that we have created (climate change is now beyond doubt accepted to be anthropogenic), we continue to gloss over our most important lesson: we humans are not alone, and we are not separate. As always, this lesson is omnipresent, in the lateral vision of our common perception: always there but out of focus. It is in the inclusion of the three ecological sustainability principles in the FSSD. It is in society’s ‘design errors’ we have identified. Everything outside of us holds up a mirror for us to look inside for the answers, yet somehow we continue to believe it is the ‘outside’ we see through the looking glass. These societal design errors only mirror the design errors in our own mental makeup. We are so entrenched in our belief of separateness that we seize the first opportunity to push anything that is not us out of the equation. We are so entrenched in our belief that we are at the top of the hierarchy of consciousness, that we continue to imagine we must shift the entire course of the planet all on our own, as the only, lonely conscious entities in the dead universe. How blind we are! Society’s necessity to reinvent itself is not a challenge that exists in a lifeless vacuum. This necessity is only there in response to nature’s systems change. Our planet is responding to the rashes on her skin with or without our decision to do something about it ourselves.

Speaking with the words of Chief Orval Looking Horse, chief of the Dakota and Lakota First Nations, “to understand the depth of this message” is to realize the full and literal meaning of the saying ‘the world is our mirror’. The full and literal meaning of 'mother' when we say Mother Earth, and the meaning of the lack of the word 'mother' when we say earth, is that She is as much alive and conscious as we are. Consider this excerpt from an interview with the Vietnamese Zen monk Thich Nath Hanh:

“We have the complex of superiority as human beings. We think we have that kind of intelligence, that kind of consciousness, that other living beings do not have. [But] we know that when we look inside our cells as a human being, we see that the human being is made only of non-human elements. (…) Not only do we have human ancestors, but we also have animal ancestors, and vegetable ancestors, and also mineral ancestors (…) So when I produce a thought, every ancestor in me, collaborate with me in order to produce that thought. When you produce a thought, Mother Earth is producing that thought together with you.” (Thich Nath Hanh, 2016)

So the planet breathes, and perceives, and thinks with us. She is aware of our common plight. And she is acting on it. This ‘highest level’ change is already happening and will only accelerate (Harmann, 1996; IPCC, 2013). As Willis Harmann said: “fundamental change is very likely inevitable – though positive outcomes are not.” The question then becomes what “we will do to weather the transition.” (Harmann, 1996). Our place is not to direct the course of nature’s change; our place is to adjust and align our society with the system in which it is embedded. When we look around us, we can recognize the same alive, conscious collaborators that we are ourselves. We can recognize them not only in our fellow human beings, but in every stakeholder of a sustainable future for our planet: the mineral, the vegetable, the animal, and the very planet herself. It is from this place, realizing that “we are held in the web of life, within flows of energy and intelligence far exceeding our own” (Macy, 1995), that we can start working from a place of synergy, sharing our positive vision of the future with the changing planet, and raise the odds of ‘positive outcomes’."

The life of dreams

Well. What to say. I’ve lived a whole year in this first month away.

Sweden

I’m so glad I spent the first two weeks with my amazing mother, exploring the country to develop a sense of place, and get acquainted with the local trees and birds. Our road trip took us the distance of a crazy 3000 km. From the rolling hills of the countryside coast we zoomed onwards through the endless birch and pine forests, past large inland waters and picturesque lakeside villages. We familiarized ourselves with the typical Falufärg red cottages, loppis signs (garage sales), and roadside ralaros (wilgenroosje/fireweed). We practiced our first Swedish, paid our first kronor, and traced our whole journey on our collection of roadmaps in red marker (a very satisfying pastime). The trip ultimately led us to the Jämtland Triangeln nearby Åre, a three-day trek across three large mountain stations (all outfitted with gorgeous saunas with a mountain view and populated solely by Swedish hiker families). There, finally, we could slow down and properly introduce ourselves to Sweden. We had already entered Samiland at this point, so for three days we walked amongst the reindeer herds. Back in the mountains after so long, we both felt electrical, so alive, so recharged! The crisp mountain air, the quiet grandeur of the scenery, the powerful presence of the snowy giants, and achy muscles at the end of the day, Woeii! Surely this is where people were meant to dwell!

At the end of these first two weeks I step onto the train platform in Karlskrona, the setting of my incipient life. (Karlskrona turns out to be a World Heritage Site, that’s the level of beauty I’m dealing with here on a daily basis.) These first few days only a handful of fellow students are in town, and I mostly keep to myself, running necessary errands. I gingerly cherish these few blank slate days, the silence before the storm. I remember those days from way in the beginning in California: a mind empty enough to take notice of its surroundings. I know that within no time, a new social fabric will start forming around me like a sticky spider web, and my mind will become tenaciously populated with new people and all the intricacies surrounding them.

Spacemaking and timelessness

While soloing my first days here, I do prepare the space for the arrival of this new life and its agents. Since I’m one of the first two Mustards to arrive (our house is called the Mustard House), and since I’m in a sense a ‘house prefect’, being the official tenant on the lease, I’m in the favorable position of having a big influence in setting the first ‘vibe’ in the house. I resolve to be my favorite self here these first days, because with that I create the living environment I feel best and safest in. A great first idea comes to mind: I set up my tent in the living room and camp in it, since we’ve agreed we’ll only divide rooms once everyone is here. Not only is living room camping one of my favorite things, it’s also quirky enough that I’d only do it around people I feel comfortable with. If that tent is the first thing they see when they arrive, I’ll have set a standard that makes me feel great, and will start us off with a wide margin for silly playfulness. Spacemaking y’all.

Sure enough, there I hear the thunder in the distance: the new life roars into being with my housemates and fellow students swarming in on the eve of our first week together. One after the other, we pick them up from the train station with our growing group of housemates, until we are complete: 6 Mustards in total. I am ready, and gladly push off from the safe shore into the unknown sea. I have nothing holding me back this time around and came with nothing but very promising premonitions about the year ahead. The period that follows is difficult to describe. Time fell away in it. I’m only now starting to regain a sense of time as conventionally agreed upon. If you spend every waking moment with new people, and impressions and experiences are packed together so densely with barely space to breathe in between, days mean nothing, weeks mean nothing. It might have been months, years. Time as a reference loses its relevance. It was a period of complete ecstasy, where I seemed to be living the life of my wildest dreams. Swimming in the Baltic sea every day, my pores wide with the impulse of life, campfires on the beach, jam sessions and potluck dinners, a hazy karaoke night, overnight bike trips, camping on a lakeside, the most unbelievable sunsets that set the whole sky ablaze, evenings spent with my new house mates discussing the nature of reality, or sharing our family stories, or brushing our teeth together. It was a total dream. Two moments stand out in this flurry of perfection that deserve mention.

Sunrise and the rings of Saturn

The first was an early morning, our first day of school. I had not been able to sleep that night, and at 5:30 I give up, slip on my morning robe, and step out of the house, barefoot. The neighborhood is still, and the city veiled in early sea fog. I walk to the forest up the hill. Feet on the cold wet morning grass, painfully on the pebbled forest paths. Everywhere spider webs hang heavy with glistening dewy pearls. Birds timidly herald the sun in this time of day that is all theirs. I make my way down the face of a scaly rock hill, all the way to the waterside: a brackish sea arm in the Karlskrona archipelago. Amongst the nature in that fresh dawn, I do ceremony. When I wade into the water, I share it only with a snow-white swan family, and the green murky water people I can sense beneath me. The surrounding wooded islands and inlets are shrouded in fog, and fog covers the rising sun, so that I can look right into it, a ball of light in an opaque wall. On the other side of the sky, still high, sits the large moon, and in between these two heavenly bodies, there is me, afloat in the water. I feel their cosmic size, and my smallness in between them. The water is perfectly still, so that the ripples on the water surface flow away from my body undisturbed, colored yellow, brown, and blue in the morning sun like the rings of Saturn. It was an eternal moment of profound mystical beauty; as if I had swum into the mists of Avalon. Some way to start a school year.

Sunset and the springboard

The second eternal moment came within a week of that first morning. The whole class had come to Långö, one of the islands of Karlskrona city. While our classmates fire the bbq and hang out on the shore, my housemates and I swim out into the sea. The sun is close to setting and has already spread a soft orange glow across water and sky. We swim around the corner of the island to a cliff, facing west, its granite wall turned to gold in the low sunlight. We clamber up the cliff, to a long springboard jutting out a good 8 meters above the water. The first of us jumps off, and I think to myself: ‘No way dudio, I’m staying right here.’ The second one jumps, I begin to itch. The third one jumps and I’ve made up my mind: I’m doing this. I inch onto the board, the setting sun is straight ahead, but I stare down. Vertigo grips me. My new friends behind me cheer me on, but I’m nailed to my place, shivering in the cold breeze. For a good 5 minutes (but what is time, it feels like forever) I stand there, trying to breathe through fear. I want to live! Be free! Brave enough to live the life I want! But I can’t move. My supporters and me have a laughing fit about it, but meanwhile a huge suspense has built up, that has gained enormous symbolic meaning for me. Everyone behind me is gripped by it too. The sun is creeping closer and closer to the horizon, it’s a total movie scene. A movie that can only end one way, because that’s the movie I want to be in, and it’s in my hands. But I’m still not there. Then, I hear a surging sound behind me. My new soul friends have begun breathing into my back, making big energy waves of courage and support. Since being here, I’ve had many throwbacks to my year in California, but the parallel is inescapable this time. When I left California, my friends had compiled a book for me filled with pictures and drawings and notes and letters. A physical manifestion of the purest love. I read it on the plane back to Europe. As I was turning my back on all of my beloved, golden state life, and heading into the unknown, one note from a friend read: “We are the wind at your back.” It became the mantra that tided me over that first year back in the Netherlands, where I fed off of their love and support that had filled up my reservoirs. And now here I stand, and my new friends, in another new life, are literally the wind at my back. This kind of magic surpasses fear by light years. I jump.

Frames of reference and alchemy

They call it the honeymoon phase. I burnt up my whole serotonin supply within days, breaking through some of my system’s early warning signals, until my body finally felt forced to pull the emergency brake and I collapse, sick and exhausted, but so content. On that Monday (in linear time a week into the school year), I take my queasy, stuffy body on an evening stroll in our neighborhood woods. In that quiet moment, walking in a pitch dark forest lit by Narnia street lanterns, I feel such deep agency over my life. In this new land, with new people, new everything, I feel so distant from old ‘usuals’. I feel no attachment to previous frames of reference, ideas about who I used or didn’t use to be. In these last weeks I have already begun redefining myself, and this current version of me, and what I presently fill my days with, seems to be all that matters. In a stroke of inspiration, I call on my Existence, who, back in California, had been an active ally of mine in co-creating my life. We hadn’t talked in a while, and during that stroll I invite him back to the drawing table, to make this life of mine what we jointly envision for it.  

Distance from old frames of reference... Many of my classmates feel that way these days. Whether it’s the nature of the people in our group, or the high expectations and anticipation, or by social design on part of our amazing teaching staff (very skilled facilitators and process designers), we have become a group of alchemists, making gold. But if you want to make gold, your beaker can’t leak. People had barely let their parents know they had arrived safely. People didn’t want anybody to come visit just yet. These first, formative weeks feel precious and private. We’ve embarked on a learning journey together that is stretching our brains to new lengths (I feel hyper much of the time as I notice my brain work, work, work, forging new neural pathways all over the place). But it goes well beyond brain stuff. The journey has set all our senses asponge, and is opening the gates of our hearts. It’s full body, full being learning. We learn about complexity and abundance. And we experience it everywhere in our own, brand new lives. We tune into each other’s energy levels as we learn to host circles. We learn to navigate the murky waters of communication styles and team formation. We learn to sail the narrow strait between power and love. We learn to share our dreams and harvest each other’s thoughts. We learn about the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development and about sacred circle dances. When we go out camping together, we’ll have a round of appreciations around the campfire. We look out at the night sky and we learn to weave our narratives into the space-time fabric. We learn to pull the strands of the web of life like the strings of an instrument that sings the song of the universe. We learn to regrow the social mycelium that our ancestors tended to but has since fallen into disrepair. We learn to look inward to see ourselves mirrored in society, and how to take our steps towards healing it, and leading it forward. The future is rising.

Headed north

We count our days, fixating our sense of time. In that metric, I will be out of this country in three days. A more truthful account of my time, however, is that I’ve been living in and out of the Netherlands for a while longer already. I began disentangling myself when I found not a room, but a whole house, to be filled with five more fellow students. By now, I’ve skyped and met with thirteen of them, all actors in this future chapter in life. Since then, I shed the reluctance I felt for leaving, and began to eagerly monitor the passing of time: then fast, then slow, then almost up.

I’ll be moving to the peninsula of Karlskrona, a fourteenth century naval town on the south coast of Sweden (N=30.000), to start a master dapperly entitled – wait for it –  ‘Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability’. I still don’t know exactly what to expect, and the title gives me little to go on. So oddly enough when I tell people what I will study, I begin by tearing down the name. “‘Sustainability’ and ‘leadership’,” I’ll say, “both words that mean so much they mean nothing.” In reality, this self-deprecation arises from a discomfort with the leadership part, and me hedging for the criticism I hear in my own head. For years I’ve thought all leadership programs were complicit in the cult of the ego, all-pervading and stinking up our Western world. “But the lack of leadership, of people in positions where they could be making a difference, but aren’t, is the greatest challenge we face in our transition to a healthier world,” says the MSLS program. Given that I also see the sustainability transition as our most pressing collective task, I couldn’t agree more (except a sudden mass-awakening on the planetary scale would help, but I suppose we would still need pioneers to work up to a tipping point for that). I know that really I just need to face some demons in order to climb to a fuller version of myself. Pride and autonomy and vision are strengths of mine, but I scorn their excessive praise, and praise modesty instead, to check myself. I suppose that this love hate relationship to leadership will get plenty of attention in the coming year.

That’s good. But besides that, the role I envision for myself within the sustainability transition, or any positive transition, is not necessarily one of ‘the leader’. As much as we need true leaders, we need people that support them. And it’s this role, the role of facilitator, that I have engrossed myself in recently. The adventure began in California, where I became intrigued with the interaction between physical and social space. I noticed that the different layouts of my co-operative’s three houses contributed to the rise of three ‘families’ of housemates, who related very differently internally. I noticed how strongly I could influence the atmosphere, the nature of relating amongst people, by how I set the stage for the many parties I hosted. An inkling and a calling softly announced themselves to me. I called my discovery ‘space making’, and bracketed it for later. Fast forward a year, and I’m interning with JAM Visual Thinking, a company that designs, facilitates, and visualizes change management processes. Their need for curating their facilitation knowledge, and my natural gravitation towards exactly that, met in stunning synchronicity. The collaboration that ensued allowed me to immerse myself in their and my own know-how of group facilitation. It formed the perfect prelude to the MSLS program, which will for me be all about enriching my intuitive knack for ‘making spaces’ that invite our better selves, with deeper theoretical, personal, and experiential knowledge. How beautifully the Red Road unfolds.

All this is very good. It pulls strongly. In fact everything I read and heard about this program resonated so deeply, and everything from writing the application, to getting admitted, to finding housing has gone so smoothly it’s clear to me now that this program is the perfect fit I’ve been waiting for. You know it when it’s true. Just as with my watershed year in California, I feel the familiar old feeling of the swelling wave approaching. I can hear it now, thundering closer, heralding a very powerful, rich year ahead. Am I READY for that head-on living!

And all this in elf country, where the gnomes and wood spirits are still real… I look forward to moving to a country where the people still know the magic of their land, same as in California (oh yes, the golden state’s residue is still all over in my body and soul). A country where picking berries and mushrooms is a common family pastime, where all major holidays revolve around the seasons, and where the children look for the tomte in the barns. I look forward to making new acquaintances in the trees and animals there. Same as in California where the eucalyptuses and cork oaks and blue jays were the first to welcome me; and same as in the Netherlands where I only fully landed again, not through the people, but through the dunes and jackdaws and the magpies and the heather… I need nature first, to beckon me in and introduce themselves, and only then the people. And nature, in Sweden, is abundant so I’ve heard. I’ve been comforting myself for months now, every day when I traverse the chaos and the fumes of Amsterdam’s city center, gorgeous though it may be, that soon, very soon, I’ll be breathing clear, sea-scented air for a year. In Sweden, where the hushed woods stretch all the 1.500 km up to Abisko’s ‘last wilderness of Europe’, and bear and wolf and lynx and elk still roam. What else should we know hides out in these ancient forests? I’m not really joking when I say elf country. Imagination, that mysterious force, once banned Avalon and our pre-Christian times into the mists when we lost it, but may yet have kept some things alive in remote wildernesses where our fancy runs rampant. We, confused and silly humans, are creators of truth whether we use our imaginative or rational faculties. Tomte, sylven, fossegrimen, who’s to say whatever survived our dwindling imaginative powers in these barren, stripped down times…? I’ll let you know when I see one.