Changing winds and the punctured beaker

The winds have changed; a new season is underway. We do still live under a perpetual blanket of grey, the slumbering effects of which became apparent when we received three days of sunshine. It made us feel like underground creatures emerging from a cave, bewildered, to bask in the sun with squinting eyes. The sea is still frozen, and our winter boots are still crunching snow on our walks to school. Even so, the birds have begun to sing, lifting me from my ponderings, and talk of the future is now in the air.

‘After MSLS’ was a topic of no interest and of some taboo before winter break. But we’ve come through the bend of the year’s bottom, and everything is different now. In my thoughts and dreams, and in my conversations, images of possible futures have begun to float. Scattered and formless at first, ideas are now beginning to crystallize. It feels ever so different from facing the end of my three years at University College, or ‘the black line on the horizon’ in California. Here in MSLS it’s always been about the future and the wider world. MSLS is a social island, but it’s not insular. Everyone has come to gain skills and knowledge, to change a bit, all in preparation to go back out there better equipped to make a contribution. And a warm network of alumni, with fondness in their hearts for the program that has done so much for them, is waiting for us at the finish line. Looking to the future and its potential is exciting this time. Daunting, sure, but not depressing.

Until then, life here continues to be intense. We have begun work on our thesis, in teams of three. After practicing for months with increasingly longer and more demanding group projects, this is the crown jewel. We all knew the drill when we began: sit down and start the process of the coming months with a ‘governance meeting’: a radically honest round about our work styles, our personality flaws and virtues, our values, hot buttons, dreams and personal learning objectives. We began creating timelines and shared mental models. We scheduled time for work, for tactical meetings, for check-ins and feedback moments, and for celebration. We have been conditioned well.

Thesis will dominate our lives until we graduate, and it’s reflected in the shifted social landscape: people have mostly found their social niche and daily routines. By nature of large groups, and by design of the program, our class has disbanded a bit. Though all of us want to make an effort to counter this dispersion, it’s a challenge to do so under so much work pressure. It’s the ever-elusive balance between focused and lateral vision. I know I struggle with it. I am fully immersed in my own intense personal journey, which is emotionally exhausting – though bless its many everlasting gifts. So I’ve got my blinders on, feeling I don't have enough energy and attention left to engage with everyone in our class, let alone visitors. Even though being open and warm and welcoming is what I aspire to above anything.

That is why poking a hole in my MSLS journey to come to the Netherlands for a long weekend was probably a good idea. It was a decision I gave some thought, because I wasn’t planning on breaking out at all this year. I’m attached to the image of the alchemist who can’t let his beaker leak, if he is to make gold. The many moments I’ve felt trapped and emotionally overtaxed only fueled my grit. Perseverance and will power are traits of mine I identify with strongly. It would surely, in some subtle way, change the nature of my journey, to step out and reflect from a distance during the journey, rather than only at the end. I’m very happy I went. It normalized things somewhat to be around old familiar faces and remember how much love there is for me, stored in people in other places of the world. It also made me realize upon my return just how tense my baseline state is here. The workload is very demanding, and so is the closeness of the community. We literally live on top of each other, it’s sometimes hard to breathe. The emotional havoc it wreaks means that every day is a dance back to alignment. The latest buzzword here is ‘personal practice’ – what do you do to keep sane, to stay grounded? – because there is such an acute need for one.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. To run up against the limits of physical and emotional resources, to grapple with time poverty, to feel the tightening stomach when going in for another round of critical feedback, from a group project or from a housemate. But really, there is abundance. There is inspiration and stimulation every day. Beauty and grace in our surroundings, and in our wonderful friendships. We do have time. In fact we have dedicated all our time to be fully here for this year’s bounty, falling in our laps and thrown in our faces. We just need to go slow, one step at a time, drumming for today. Towards a dawning vision of the future.

Expedition Jokkmokk

This journey had been a long time coming for me. I had met Laila Spik, Sami wise woman, a year ago in Millemont, Paris. The Sami are the last unbroken indigenous tradition of Europe, spread across the north of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. They are a nomadic people, herding reindeer across the Arctic mountains since time immemorial. She had invited me to visit her there, in the winter town of Jokkmokk, just above the Polar Circle. I didn’t know what to expect, but the calling to the north was unambiguously strong. Since moving to Sweden in the summer, I had been mentally preparing for it.

And so while most of our classmates went home over the holidays to take a break from things, me and my close friends and (adoptive) housemates Brendan, Benni, and Hanne traveled in the other direction, digging yet deeper into our transformational MSLS year. Before going, we had shared our personal significance and intentions for the journey. And so, clad in our many thermal and woolen layers, we also got to bring our inner layers on the trip. Our four-headed expedition crew was one of loving openness and resilience.

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Brendan and I arrived a day early. After traveling through the night, we stepped off the real-life Polar Express into the deserted darkness, light snow coming down in complete silence. In an instant, we felt the slowing down of time. It wouldn’t speed up again until back in the south. Without a second thought, we stepped into the Arctic rhythm, where the days felt like forever, because they were being carved so deep into us. Getting up when we woke up, napping when tired, eating when hungry. Day and nighttime had lost their conventional meaning anyway. The four hours of daylight were just enough for a walk in the hills of the pine forest, playing and ploughing through the deep powder snow, before being enveloped again by darkness and spending the rest of our waking hours, often till 4 in the morning, talking over unending cups of tea at the kitchen table.

That kitchen table was the beating heart of our journey. With unbelievable hospitality and generosity, Laila welcomed us into her life without any reservations. During the many many hours we spent with her, from breakfast until deep into the night, not once did I discern even a hint of impatience with us. That sentiment was not even in her book of options. She set the tone for how we lived together that week, in her tiny little house filled with treasures. During naptime in the 2PM dusk on our first day, I had kept the bedside light on just to take it all in. The pictures and paintings on the walls. The sculptures and ancient tools and stacks of books covering every surface. We barely had space to roll out our sleeping bags, and knocked things over left and right, but the household the five of us created together was characterized by love and joy and care for each other. So far away from our homes during Christmas and New Year’s, we became family. Our affection for Laila was like for a grandmother, and we were home with her.

She spoke to us nonstop for a week. For hours and hours on end we listened, eagerly drinking in the nourishment of wisdom and knowledge. And if we weren’t listening, we were all journaling ferociously, capturing her lessons. Laila was fully present every waking minute she spent with us, sharing her stories and answering our questions. She spoke in the name of her family, and we met her father and mother, their spirit still so wholly present and alive through her. She told extensively of the history of her people, and we traversed the mountains with the reindeer in the Arctic summer, through her. And through her, we learnt also about the more recent history of the Sami, reminiscent of that of any oppressed indigenous people. Forced Christianization, boarding schools, hospitals and parking lots constructed on top of ancient burial sites. Family names changed, Sami music – the joik – forbidden. Ridiculed for their clothing, their food, their language. The tragic end of the Sami shaman tradition in the 17^th century. And the Sami’s sustained pride in their surviving culture, despite it all. She showed us the artifacts that filled her house: heirlooms from every century, dating back a 1000 years. Old smoking pipes and wedding garments, smooth birch knot bowls and Sami knives with delicately carved reindeer antler sheaths. And she knew the stories that accompanied each of these objects, safeguarding the soul in them. She shared her wisdom of how to live one’s life, her extensive knowledge of plant medicine, and how to prepare the most incredible meals from the forest.

Every night was a feast, with cheese courses and rich veggie dishes from us, complemented by her with everything from salted reindeer meat to smoked grouse, wild pig and horse hair lichen soup, fish eggs from the mountains, bark flour flat breads and grilled cheese, powdered nettle, birch sugar and angelica syrup, cloudberries and roasted lingonberry leaf and pine needle tea. Have you ever eaten something that lived to be 500 years? We ate her moss soup, and it was one of the most delicious soups I ever tasted. The king of Sweden thought so too. She served it to him three times.

To witness Laila's deep connection to her family, her people, and her land, made a profound impression on us. Through her, we all felt the presence of our own lineage stirring in us, and the desire to connect with our own ancestry and legacies, wanting to be known. Stories of our grandparents, great aunts, and parents drifted to the surface. At the heart of my experience of our time there was how much Laila brought my own grandmother back to me. The parallels were uncanny. A hundred similarities followed each other day after day. One of Laila’s jumpers, the brass duck head on her kitchen table, her trouble with the DVD player, all reminded me of my grandmother. Her scent was similar to my grandmother’s. I smelled my grandmother’s breakfast by her dishwasher on our first morning there. The life lessons and the worldview Laila was given by her father, are exactly how my mother and grandmother raised me. She lives with the forest the same way that my grandmother taught me to live with her garden. Utterly, I am my grandmother’s and my mother's continuation. And through them I connect back into the human family. Being there with Laila, I was remembering who I am.

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So rich and full were those days. I long back to the sensory richness: the flavor of pine needle tea and smoked reindeer meat. The scent of the morning frost and our woolen jumpers. The sight of the snow covered pine branches, the night sky over the frozen lake that we visited on our nightly ‘aurora checks’, snow magically sparkling in the dark. The touch of my feet sinking into the crunchy snow and the softness of reindeer fur. Like from a dream I can recall the graceful silent dances of the Northern Lights, emerging suddenly as a thin band of color above the city rim, or as a sharp, vertical blade of a green flare, quivering on one edge before swaying into pink, lilac, white swells, with animal and human figures galloping in the coursing waves of light. The deep nourishment of Laila’s stories, the example of her life, and the delicious food every night. I miss the slow pace, the simple, unplanned days, and the companionship of our expedition crew. I haven’t felt homesick all this time for the Netherlands, but now I feel homesick for Jokkmokk.

The words an elder gave us in Millemont have echoed in me for days: “Walk slowly the first four days after ceremony,” she said, “or else your feelings may get all mixed up.” I’m feeling the consequences of the involuntarily rushed transition back into the MSLS grind. Submitting an assignment within 20 hours after getting off a 22 hour train ride. Straight back to classes every day. All our projects starting up again, our days booked full by meetings. With stubbornness I’m managing to keep some space free for stepping back into the Jokkmokk energy and savoring it some more while it settles in my soul. But there’s no time to walk slowly. I’ve felt flushed by anger, frustration, and sadness. The band of travelers is dispersing into our school lives again, where we have to share each other with our other housemates, friends, and classmates.

In the true fractal nature of my year here, coming back from Jokkmokk into MSLS is a precursor of what I can expect when emerging from MSLS into the wider world again. As much as I love and learn profoundly from my MSLS life, I feel disconnected from it now, wanting to hold on to the deeper and more condensed magic of Jokkmokk. I will treasure this week in the Arctic Circle like a nugget of gold, embedded within the broader MSLS journey. And I will need much more than the four days of walking slowly to process all that I have gained from our stay with Laila. It resounds throughout my depths and has stirred things into motion. For months and years to come I will be feeding off this journey. And the ripples it has cast in my water, who knows what they may give rise to down the line.

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’."