Julie\'s Nordic Island

Playful and powerful

The hillsides were decorated like a laced veil. The tiniest of flowers had come out to play under the trees in white and blue. I looked at them more closely and changed my mind. This wasn’t just a frolic. Each one was stalwart and true, a giant on the small piece of ground that it occupied, despite the towering trees overhead. Everything about the spring was like this: playful at a distance and startling powerful in its every part.

It was still quiet in the park, which was on the cusp of being filled with visitors. Ellie the dog and I were queens of the empty pathways. She massaged her sides against the old stone of the palace and subsequently against the stylized hedges that had been intended as an imitation of the gardens at Versailles. I’d never thought of the King’s palace as a dog spa, but to Ellie it was plain as day.

It was one of those Sundays in Stockholm when people get out of their seats and go neighbor-watching. As I gardened in the front yard, I realized Ellie knew quite a few more of the neighbors than I did. One after the other peered over the front gate to greet her, summarily ignoring her owner. To tempt some of these people to greet me too, I hung out my “honey for sale, 50 kr:-” sign and organized a few jars from last year’s harvest on a table behind the gate with an empty jar for money. A few came and purchased, but no one wanted to talk to me. The little black furry number with the tail that wagged automatic friendship had outclassed me in cuteness.

Urged on by the new research concerning the undeniable link between sitting and shortened life span, I dug, hacked and hauled until my body ached. How many Swedes wait for the spring to get fit in the garden and then wreck their bodies? I used to wonder how people could be so foolish. Now I know. The winter is long, and encourages our tendency to huddle in warm corners. As soon as the ground frost as yielded, we’re digging spades into it at insane angles without bending our knees. Our doctors shake their heads and wonder how silly people can be. Yet, we all do it, including our doctors, just because the spring in this part of the world is so irresistable.

A friend of mine has to leave Stockholm in June. How could any employer be so inconsiderate? Leaving Sweden in June is blasphemy, against nature, twisted. There is no where else that I have lived (and that is quite a few places) where the thought of packing up in the spring and early summer hurts. It isn’t just that the warmth and light returns, but among the tiniest of flowers rising from the once frozen forest floor, one’s heart sings and everything is possible.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores, including major Swedish online bookstores such as bokia.se and adlibris.se. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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Playing in color

Ellie pricked her ears as the embers rose from the heap of ashes that had been the Valborg or Walpurgis fire. On this sunny May morning, we’d passed the last of the iron nights and could fly with wings open into summer. The fire seemed to have cleared away the old season of cold browns and grays, and opened up for the olive green of the early summer. The water ran from the King’s fountains to meet the thirst of this sunny, warm morning when the chill winds had been stilled and the bumble bees had started to fly in the berry bushes. Fire had met water and everything was in balance. This very old tradition of Valborg or Walpurgis night was to me all about that: old and new, fire and water, the chill and the sun. It was a truly northern European habit and something we’d been doing in these parts long before men had started to construct the idea of a god that was over nature.

I scanned the olive green hill. Families had poured down over it on the night before to see out the winter. The sound of the local choir, which everyone said sung flat, blended with the honking of the geese, which seemed to be the only ones truly listening. I listened. Strangely, a human choir that sings flat blends perfectly with honking geese. These sounds had been beautiful to listen to without really seeing where they were coming from. As we approached the fire, Ellie stood still. In the three and a half months of her short life, she’d never seen anything so mighty. The arms of the giant fire groped for the sky, like winter longing for a way out. Families and friends watched and greeted one another, the Red Cross shook the coins in the collection cans, and children chased one another, daring the fire. A new member of the community gave a speech: something obscure about spring and history that few listened to but that lent the confidence of tradition to the night. As the fireworks went off, Ellie and I hid under a wagon. One forgets that fireworks must seem like Armageddon to a dog.

Now on this peaceful and blissfully quiet morning, the pansies had been laid out in a sea of color in the very same wagon to be purchased by park visitors. The colors were mesmerizing and one wished to play in them forever. Today we’d purchase some pansies: orange, white, purple, yellow, and more color. I wondered whether Ellie could see these colors the way that I could. If not, I was sure she could smell them.

We headed for the fountains. It was the last treat of this morning after Walpurgis before heading home. I scooped up the water from the fountains so that Ellie could lap it up out of my palm. She liked this and wiped her raspy tongue across my cheek in thanks. Tourists climbed off the steamboat from Stockholm, cameras preceeding them. Would they notice it was the morning after Walpurgis, the night when winter had gone to embers and the spring had risen, young and vibrant?

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores, including major Swedish online bookstores such as bokia.se and adlibris.se. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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The March snow tried desperately to cover up the opening lake. Yet, the birds that perched on the ice’s rim knew that it was all in vain. The openings were too large and the lake was here to stay for good, at least until next winter. In the canal running under the bridge from the open lake, the boats were frozen still in the chilly water. Hulda, once the boat of a well-known Turkish immigrant artist who had lived in this small space with his young family for some years, had once been moored there. Now in place of it there was a lesser boat called Biscaya. It was covered, clearly deserted for the winter unlike Hulda, which had been live all year. The old boat house near the waterfront was still well-equipped, evidence of a past when people had ventured to live with the elements and experience the real rather than the virtual world. I had met one of the artist’s grandchildren, who had also lived on this boat. She was still young, but strangely free of the compulsion to keep one eye on her smart phone and Facebook page.

Ellie and I continued our morning walk past the empty football field. None of the neighborhood children played in it. It had long been deserted for televisions and play stations. Now Ellie raced about in the middle of the field, catching a whiff of something that made her crazy. All nine weeks of her bolted mindlessly around this place where children didn’t play. Eventually, my little black speed devil returned to sit at my feet, waiting eagerly to see whether I had any more of those delicious liver biscuits in my pocket. It was because of Ellie that I was out and about in the neighborhood again, observing and reflecting. Without her, the compulsion to return to the Internet could be all too great. I wondered whether she knew what an important role she played. My dogs were my window on the world.

On the weekend, I found myself with my teenage daughter in the calmness of the Swedish emergency ward. Her case wasn’t life threatening, so we watched and waited while all of the more urgent cases were handled before us. My daughter is a tall 13-year-old and it seemed a little odd for us to be waiting, surrounded by dribbling babies and curious toddlers, but in Sweden you don’t graduate to the adult emergency ward until age 15. 

A smiling English-speaking mother entered with her little son with wild hair. As she talked into the air (I suppose into the microphone of her smart phone), she tried to smooth back her son’s unruly locks. Tired of watching his mother speak to what seemed to him to be no one, the child freed itself and went to stare at the fish tank at the entrance of the waiting room. One of the fish pecked at the glass upon which the child had pressed its face and established direct eye contact. The child was fascinated. In order to indicate that she was aware of her little son, the mother, now checking her mails on her smart phone, absent-mindedly said, “Fish – isn’t that great – it’s a fish!” Her comment seemed strangely out of wack with her little son who had long since made direct eye contact with the fish. But she was in another world, trying to pretend that she was in his.  I imagined that in the years to come this mother, like many well meaning mothers, themselves lost in technology, would battle with tearing her young son away from smart phones, iPads and other inventions we don’t yet know about that engage us in the virtual world.  Yet, where would she find the moral authority? Since he had been young, she had preferred emails to fish in a live tank.

This week’s research finding that our electronic gimmicks make us more selfish and less social was for me borne out in this waiting room. I haven’t found the answer as to how to solve this problem, as our gimmicks don’t seem to be reducing in their number or the power they seem to have over us. All I can say is that a walk around the block with Ellie is one hundred times more interesting than checking my emails. I will do what I can to let my children in on this marvelous secret.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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The skies had rained on our mountain snow and turned it to ice. Just outside the door of my mountain cabin, I slipped my bare foot out of my house shoes to test the hardness of the snow. It was like rock. Who would be skiing on this today? A glance at the slopes behind our cabin revealed icebergs under the looming rain clouds. There was nothing to do but return inside, make a hot cup of something and look forward to returning to the spring down south in Drottningholm.

While sitting and staring at the icebergs over a steaming cup, my thoughts turned to the owners of this place. They must wonder about people who still consider global warming ‘just a theory.’ Ski resort owners are like farmers: they are entirely dependent on the weather for their sustenance. Of course, all of us are dependent on the weather for our sustenance; most of us just haven’t worked out quite to what extent yet. Most of the time, we experience only small indicators of the planet’s fragile health in this wealthy part of the world – I remember the mini-crisis that was unleashed when the local ICA supermarket said there was a general shortage of milk and we wouldn’t have delivery for another day – but these don’t have much of an impact on how most of us behave. Maybe it is just an accumulation of these small inconveniences that will get us to see the big picture; the iceberg outside the window. Just to put things into perspective, when atomic energy expert Hans Blix was asked whether he worried about Iran’s atomic energy program, he replied that he was more worried about climate change.

In this frame of mind, my husband’s suggestion that we take a drive somewhere, had me thinking about snow-shoeing it instead. After a little short persuasion I was in the front passenger seat and we were heading off to somewhere or no where. It didn’t take long before a sign off the road for “Waffles with Whipped Cream” caught the family’s attention. We parked and walked a few hundred meters to pretend we were earning our waffles. The owners of the waffle place had made reaching them a treasure hunt. The saliva accumulated as we followed a small winding path through a forest, passing various waffle signs that kept our hopes up about the impending delight.

Eventually, we found ourselves at the entrance to a tiny mountain village with one-storey huts that had housed reindeer herders over centuries. The järsgårdar (slanted fences) broke the snow like necklaces strung over the undulating hill. To walk through it was like leaving our tainted world for a pristine moment out of time. Children played with dogs at the center of the ring of huts, men sat in reindeer skins, sharpening their knives in the midday sun, and the women saw to the waffle hut, which housed one of the few modern conveniences in this village: a waffle iron. While I knew that this nostalgia about the unpolluted past was misguided and I was happy to be alive now (not then), the innocent beauty of the reindeer village had to be appreciated.

As I sipped my hot chocolate, snug in a reindeer skin in the waffle hut, I wondered how long this could go on. The reindeer culture of the North was also threatened by climate change. Outside, I heard the snow scooters speeding off over the hill. Without being there, I could smell the pungent exhaust. Clearly, the waffle iron was not the only modern convenience around here. Quietly, I hoped that we’d teach our children how to play with the dogs in the village center rather than encourage the fascination with scooters. Maybe this was all just nostalgia and nonsense, but there is nothing wrong with hoping.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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A meditation on spring

The bench against the ochre wall basks in the sun. Watching it is a meditation on the spring. Finally, it is freed from the snow pillows that have covered it, and its planks and iron frame have the chance to dry out in readiness for many visitors. At present, it is still mostly alone, save the snow drops whispering the message of the new season from the otherwise bare flower bed.

The rest of the family yearns north this Spring Break, for the mountains and the snow. I have different longings: for releasing the seeds from their small pouches, for freeing the pelargoniums from the cellar and for removing the collapsed brown remnants of last year’s garden to make way for this year’s. Driving north seems to me like traveling in a time machine. Suddenly it is the way it was a month or so ago, just hillier. I know that when I get there I will discover something new, but my nature resists until that time.

It hasn’t gone amiss on anyone that the focus of this past week in Sweden has been birth and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of certain names. Shouldn’t she have been called Hedvig Ulrika Eleonora or something more grounded in Swedish history than “Estelle” or, even trickier, her apparent nickname, “Stella?” My take on this is that it is easy to become thought-entrenched in a tiny moment of history (whatever seems strange now is always going to be strange and therefore wrong). Most of the things that we remember as innovative or great have been happenings that, in their time, seemed to many completely absurd.

Just a few days ago, my grandmother recalled what exploring the interior of a Zeppelin was like. She was 6 years old at the time and remembers it clearly, as with many other memories that suddenly pop up with startling clarity in old age. She remembers that it was fascinating, but that one of the adults around her thought it unhealthy that humans should be floating around in the air. People belonged on the ground, with their feet in the grass.

Estelle is no where near as a great a happening as the nascence of air travel, but I think the fury of debate surrounding her name reflects the same psychology as that around the Zeppelin: It can’t be good, because it’s never been like this.

Intimations of spring and the coming of Estelle have created a little bridge from this winter’s loss to the possibility that new things might be born. Sometimes it can be hard to let the new in, even if it is positive, because the old, even if it is broken or unhappy, is an indelible part of who we are. Each time we have to let some old part of us go, even if it is sadness and dismay, there is a mourning just because it’s been a part of who we are or have become. Yesterday a little puppy placed herself in my way and forced an opening up to the idea that there could be a new canine member of the family who is not white but black, and who will be equally loved. She will be “Ellie” after Estelle, who, by her very existence, broke old patterns and made way for the new.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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Vitruvian man resurfaces in Stockholm

Yesterday at the kitchen table my son recounted what global warming is. He is thirteen and in that age where the mind reaches out thirstily for knowledge, experiences and impressions. Environmental Sustainability is a subject studied at his school. It occurred to me that when I was the same age back in 1980 there was just plain biology, chemistry, physics and social sciences. No one thought to look at issues/problems that linked these various subject matter together.

Since last week when I talked about the consciousness of one, I’ve been focusing on spotting signs that there is a growing awareness of the interrelationships in our world. My theory is that the increase and spread of this awareness or consciousness will facilitate solving problems that today seem insurmountable.

In general, the impression I’ve got from looking around this past week is that people are much more prepared to think across disciplines than before: Of course music facilitates architecture, and of course bankers need lessons from artists. These are arguments I’ve heard during the past couple of weeks, which seem to be premised on the idea that we need to reach out of the narrow parameters of our own disciplines in order to stimulate our creativity. Personally, I believe that we can stimulate so much more by doing this, but creativity seems to be the number one desirable thing in an age when we face problems that require a wholesale reworking of the way that we live.

In this wandering between disciplines, we are perhaps reworking the human ideal once again. Renaissance man – that unquenchably curious and feverishly imaginative being that Leonardo da Vinci idealized in his unforgettable sketch of “the Vitruvian Man” – is more suited to the needs of our times than the ideal of the Industrial Revolution, where people were supposed to be productive units operating in differentiated zones. As with all stereotypes, the reality is neither nor and always somewhere on a spectrum in between two extremes. My feeling, however, is that our ideal is shifting away from where it’s been during the past two hundred years or so to something else, something better equipped for meeting the challenges of today. 

Last week a friend of mine working at the Stockholm Resilience Center expressed some frustration when she thought I imagined that she sat around with her colleagues evolving technological solutions. “It’s mostly about human behavior, mental models, belief systems, processes of learning and how to handle uncertainties!” she exclaimed. In other words, yes, the technology, but so much more.

I’ve sometimes wondered whether this perception I have of a shift toward seeing greater interrelationships is the consequence of living in a post-industrial society, where we have the luxury to think of “toying” with other disciplines than the ones we work in. If that is the case, it’s a valuable contribution Sweden can make in the world. Working in an interdisciplinary way means stepping out of one’s comfort zone, and it is when we step out of our comfort zones that rapid learning happens.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Order it now from amazon.com, amazon.co.uk , Author House, authorhouse.co.uk and many other online bookstores. Learn more about Julie’s other books and activities at www.julielindahl.com.

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