Culture and Health - Julie\'s Nordic Island - Blogs

Archive for the ‘Culture and Health’ Category

Timeless in summer

Saturday, June 16th, 2012

Ellie the dog and I trundled down the path with the contributions to the evening “knytis” at the beautiful mansion on the hill overlooking Lake Mälar. For those of you who do not know it, a “knytis” is a lovely Swedish term for a potluck dinner which translates more directly as “a little knot.” It was tricky balancing the basil and orange salad with Ellie’s need to explore the high grass, but after some time I managed to convince her that the dirt path leading through our magical settlement originating in the 18th century could be OK.

The soft summer breeze caught my wide, sailor-style white cotton trousers and called my attention to the fact that I was dressed like Lauren Bacall on a casual summer evening with her artist friends in the 1940s. It is funny the way that a piece of clothing can transport one’s thoughts through time and personalities. The small gatherings of friends in their magical gardens here and there upped the feeling of living in another time. I was beginning to think that people’s schedules didn’t allow for this sort of thing any more, but here they were, and my faith in the transformational powers of humanity was restored, once again.

As we arrived at my artist friends’ beautiful home on the hill, we noticed the party was gathered in the clearing to the right of the house. Here, we entered into a mood that was distinctly 1970s. People reminisced about revolutionary urges and the rejection of convention. I had been a young child in those days and admitted that my memory of that time was my third grade teacher, who sported a gigantic afro and beard (one saw very little of his face) and started our classroom days with Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” having smoked a joint or two. I find that the spirit of that time is coming back to us again, as young people awaken to the mess that the older generation has left behind on this planet. One young man told me he was going to spend a month in the forest this summer, living close to the earth, with thousands of others who are choosing to do the same thing.

The “knytis” was a wonderful success. A long table was heavily laden with all of the dishes and delicacies one could possibly desire. No one had co-ordinated their contributions. The buffet seemed a perfect example of the strange and unique order that can emerge spontaneously out of total chaos. Since most appeared to be vegetarians, Ellie enjoyed the meatballs.

As the sun moved westward, the group shifted towards the gazebo overlooking Lake Mälar. Ellie and I wandered down to the waterfront and found a woman meditating naked on the dock. A few minutes later, when we had hurried back up the hill, so as not to interrupt pure thoughts, we heard the most beautiful, seeking cry come from this very same woman. She hurled out her arresting voice across the surface of the lake and sang to the sun. No one moved. My thoughts were cast back into a primal time, when man’s needs had been basic and song was uncluttered. Perhaps we were in the Stone Age or further back somewhere on the timeline of all life.

I wandered home, the sensuous feeling of no time all over me. The garden parties had gone inside and all that was left was the sounds of the night. As we approached Midsummer, the birds seemed never to stop singing, as true darkness never came. I stood in the garden and listened one more time before closing the door for the night. The world was full of the most extraordinary things.

————————————————————————

Living in Sweden? Take advantage of the special offer available on Julie’s books just now by visiting www.julielindahl.com. If you live elsewhere, visit the site to learn about where you can purchase her newest award-winning book, “Rose in the Sand” about a decade lived on a Swedish island.

Report abuse »

Tags: garden party, knytis, Summer, time
Posted in Beauty, Culture and Health, Festivals, Island, Landscape, New Thinking, Season, Summer | 4 comments »

After the rain

Tuesday, June 5th, 2012

early summer after the rain

Click! Click! Click! Once again, Ellie the dog and I have been immortalized in a Chinese photo album. The Eastern visitors in the park find us to be an object of fascination. I am uncertain as to why. Perhaps it is the sight of a defenseless woman having the guts (or the stupidity) to walk a fearsome black canine. While the Chinese tourists photograph Ellie, they indicate clearly that they’d prefer not to greet her.

Cultural attitudes towards animals run strong. A friend of mine from Paraguay reminds me of why I’ve never warmed up to cats. Growing up in developing countries with a lot of rabid strays around – deserted scavengers that hiss and scratch to survive – hasn’t cultivated a warm and loving instinct towards our feline friends.

“Whä di Chinaaa Palace?” asks one of the Chinese tourists while taking a snap of us. Bewildered as to why someone from China might have come all this way to see a Swedish King’s imitation Chinese leisure house, I point to the hill behind the long row of fountains. The tourist and his fellow travellers turn immediately and shuffle rapidly in that direction. I think of shouting out that it will be open for a few more hours (it’s only 9 in the morning), but sense that this piece of information may be in vain. The gaggle of tourists is already snapping its cameras half way up the hill to the China Palace.

It’s been a week of worries in the rain. Precipitation and cold as we pass into June is enough to send most of us in Sweden to the psychiatrist. The Euro crisis, the neo-Nazis in Hamburg, bisphenols in our packaged food and even global warming (although it hasn’t seemed evident during the past week) begin to seem like walls closing in on us.

Then the sky begins to break up and this morning the sun shoots through the linden alleys at the Palace. The lilac, which has been drenched in rain and now the goodness of the sun, lives up in its own sensuous perfume. The rhododendrons strike me as the underside of a ballerina’s tutu. In fact, it is not hard to understand why flowers are associated with women: their various shapes mirror the shape of clothing we have worn over time. Everywhere there are blossoms spilling over the fences and into places that are supposedly out-of-bounds. The early summer pushes out limitations and breaks them down. Everything is possible, solvable, doable.

The transformation of my week by the drying up of the rain and the return of the sun’s rays on the early summer blossoms is a reminder of how little we need to change our perception of things. Whole realities can be transformed by small adjustments. Sometimes our inbuilt volatility can be frightening: on one day the world can be black, and on the next it can be white. On the whole, though, I take our capacity to rapidly change the way we see things as hopeful. The greatest of all dangers lies, after all, in stagnancy and intransigence.

The Chinese tourists are done exploring King Adolf Frederik’s Chinese Pavilion, a small “birthday gift” to his wife Ulrika Lovisa. Each of them has got at least a hundred snaps of it. While I am quite sure that Ellie and I will quickly be deleted from the collection that gets shared with relatives back home in China, perhaps just one more look at the image of the friendly black dog will be enough to shift some attitudes. It only takes the memory of a little wag of the tail to move mountains.

——————————————–

Report abuse »

Tags: attitudes, China, Chinese, Island, lilac, pre-summer, tourists, Transformation
Posted in Culture and Health, Flora, Landscape, New Thinking, Outdoor Activity, Park, Season, Summer, Tourism, Transformation, Walking, nature | 17 comments »

A Swede in Africa

Friday, November 4th, 2011

“Is it cold outside today?” my daughter asked. It seemed on odd question, taking into account that outside the glass door to the terrace we were in deepest Africa. Inside, the air conditioning guarded our European sweat pores so that life retained the illusion of being temperate and dry. Outside today the storm clouds had gathered. To the naked Swedish eye, the scene did not have the look of warmth. Clouds and wind meant a chill, and so my daughter looked into her suitcase and scrambled around for a cotton sweater with a hood.

”It’s alright, it’s very warm out,” I promised, knowing from years of living and working in the tropics that what she really needed was a T-shirt and a wide-brimmed hat. I’m ”Swedish” but my life’s journey to becoming so has had me in more than a few places where people know that there is no point in working at midday. Yet, my daughter (and her twin brother) are born and bred where wind and rain means a chill, and it was thus I realized I had on my hands two Swedes in Africa.

”I feel like I am in an advertisement,” my son proclaimed, as he sat sipping out of a coconut I had ordered him for breakfast. I knew that he had in mind the Maria Montazami travel adverts, which have prompted many Swedes who can afford it scrambling to book a trip South. On reflection, he had a fair point. To a Swede it just didn’t seem real that life could be so effortless: the coconuts dropped off the trees everywhere, one hacked them open and there was breakfast; the airy breakfast room was a stretch of beach with a collection of chairs and tables covered by a thick canvas. There were no boots at the door; no scarves, hats and gloves to take into account before stepping out again.

Behind the hotel, away from the immaculate stretch of beach, were some less natural looking child entertainments. To me, they had the rusty look of installations that didn’t work most of the time, but the children insisted on having a look. Gathered around the entrance to the go-cart track and, next door, at the entrance to the water park, were gatherings of young African men responsible for these installations. They chatted and laughed casually with the ease and rhythm of an African dance, as they sat in a circle, the thought of urgency far away in the stressed reality of people from Europe. Although I had already anticipated their answers, I asked the men whether the go-cart track would be open today. ”Welcome back, madame,” they said, ”it is not good because of the rain – maybe in a few days when it is dry.” At first the children wondered why these men didn’t just call the repair people, but then their Swedish sense of environmental responsibility kicked in, and they concluded that it was very good that the men decided to wait and let the sun take care of the problem naturally instead.

We returned to the beach and saw the fishing boats heading out to sea for the evening. The men in rags seemed accustomed as their tiny open boats rose up high on the waves and then fell. Some of them had hoisted a hand-made sail in the hope that the force of the wind would speed them along to prime fishing areas before their competitors got there. In the morning each of these men would walk down the beach with one or two fish in hand, and one wondered whether this was the source of their livelihood for the day. My husband, who is a Swede like his children, commented that although he always enjoyed the people and scenery of Africa (where he had worked many times), he found it difficult to see the terrible inequalities. For this reason, he could not imagine living here. I had been raised in many places characterized by such inequalities, but I realized that living in Sweden had made me more conscious of how unjust life was for so many. It struck me that living in a country where a politician cannot even get away with the tax payer covering the cost of a toblerone, has definitely reshaped the way I see things. Maybe I too have become a Swede in Africa.

—————————————————————–

Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning new book, “Rose in the Sand,” a memoir of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Other books by Julie Lindahl available are: Letters from the Island (listen also to Julie’s podcasts from this site) and On My Swedish Island: Discovering the Secrets of Scandinavian Well-being.

Julie Lindahl is chairperson at Stories for Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to learning and communication through storytelling.

Report abuse »

Tags: Africa, holidays, Swedish
Posted in Culture and Health, Tourism | 4 comments »

A most interesting tree

Saturday, October 8th, 2011

Why are you here?

Sometimes the week can begin to seem rather gnarled. Time passes and one wonders: Where did I get to this week – what did I actually achieve? I look at my to-do list and see that about half of it is checked off. There are some to-dos that are beginning to look like old knots in trees and then there are those new shoots that have suddenly sprung up in the most unexpected places and mischievously redirected the energy needed to grow.

That question, “Have you achieved what you wanted to – have you succeeded?” is puzzling at week’s end. For whom? At what level? At the level of my to-do list, my bank account, my family, my community, or the country I live in? How about the planet and humanity? Thinking about these questions can either bring great clarity and perspective, or it can bring up that difficult question of “why am I here?”

This biggest and most difficult of questions was one surrounding us at a conference I attended yesterday run by the government of Sweden concerning how to bring about greater integration in this country. The only problem is that no one who ran the conference saw this question, which felt something like a very colorful and remarkable bird chirping up in the branches with no one noticing it because they all had their eyes on the ground. After this summer’s tragedy in Norway, which highlighted the need for more innovative thinking about this challenge in the Nordics in general, it seemed that this conference had a more urgent mission than it might otherwise have had. Unfortunately, it collapsed into the specific research interests of a handful of academics who, although working with the best of intentions, led us all straight for the minutiae, which had been studied a thousand times, and in this way completely lost track of the big question.

As an immigrant trying to become a part of this society, there is one big question that has hovered over me through the 15 years I’ve been here: How can I contribute in a way that suits my interests as well as the needs of people who live here (thus in some way addressing the big question of why I am here)? Finding that intersection can be extremely difficult if other people are not acclimatized to the question. Of course, everyone wants to find that intersection – it is the very thing that fulfils our human need to belong, a need which is critical to our psychological and physical health.

In order to fulfil this need, some years ago I marched into my children’s school and offered my services in reading English language stories to a few of their classes. It seemed to me that an English Literature graduate who was a published author could actually do something useful in a community where English language was required in schools but where it wasn’t a strength of the teachers. At first, there was puzzlement at my readiness to do this and I felt as though I was having to force my way through the classroom door. Eventually, however, I had calls and comments from delighted parents. In this way, eventually I got to know the vast majority of parents and teachers in the school, and thereby most people in my surrounding community. Although my past experiences were a world away from those living in this community, I felt that we had found a meeting point in our interests and that at some level I belonged.

One can, of course, argue that I am an immigrant who is educated, who was able to work as a volunteer and who looks Swedish. All of these things help. However, I don’t believe that any of these factors actually assures that one will feel a sense of belonging. That is a combination of personal will and people in the established community who are open to new ideas of how we can move forward together. Encouraging and facilitating both of these is the way to create a new and valuable sense of belonging. It requires a great deal of creativity – something which Sweden is apparently now number one in the world at, according to Canadian researcher Richard Florida’s new study.

This morning when I walked out into the park with Lucy the dog, I took a good hard look at some of my favorite trees there. I’d seen my week as a bit of a gnarled tree and it seemed a little unfair to all of these great beauties in the park. They were complex with the grooves in their trunks winding in unexpected directions; they had parts that seemed to have grown into them and evidence of the way they had interacted with their environment, creating greater uniqueness and adding special value to the park; some had hideouts in their trunks where animals could find shelter. It seemed to me that these most beautiful and unique of all trees were the way that we wanted our lives and our communities to be. Perhaps ten minutes’ meditation on the image of a most interesting tree would be a good way to start the next conference on integration.

———————————————————————————

Julie Lindahl is chairperson at Stories for Society, a non-profit organization dedicated to learning and communication through storytelling.

Report abuse »

Tags: Belonging, Integration, trees
Posted in Belonging, Culture and Health, Landscape, New Thinking, Nordic Countries other than Sweden, Norway, Park | 6 comments »

Let men be men

Sunday, November 7th, 2010

Being a man

This was one of those Sunday mornings that defied all of the cliches about November mornings in Sweden. As I walked down the hill with Lucy the dog, the bright sun stroked my eyelids like a therapist massaging tired muscles. The last yellow leaves that still hung on the branches were like golden jewelry on a woman dressed in strict gray. As we passed one tree which still had relatively many leaves, they detatched and began to fall to the ground in great hoards. Lucy and I watched, mesmerized at the way that great robust trees undress rather than dress as winter approaches. The deer and moose had fled the farmland behind the palace grounds where they normally grazed during the warmer season. Now they were desperately hiding behind the conifers in the forest, away from the sights of men who are free to hunt them in the November sun.

The outdoors can be a harsh place to be during this season, but today sitting inside drying out next to a heater was simply all wrong. As I walked in the front door with Lucy I could already hear my son and his friend playing their latest TV game snuggled up in bed. I caught a glance at the two of them through the slit between the door and the doorway. The spoils of the night were many. There were sweet wrappers all over the floor. Somewhere in the corner the inner tinsel of an empty bag of chips reflected in the sunlight that struggled to enter the room from behind the closed curtains. Kids have to be allowed to be kids, I told myself, but how much do these guys really benefit from this sort of experience? From my previous blog entries you already know that I am one of those horrid mothers that never purchases sweets or chips – not even on a Friday. I also give my kids a lot of ’stick’ about sitting in front of screens for too long. Sometimes I wonder whether their friends think that I am from the Stone Age or another planet. They look at me like that occasionally.

Most of all, I wonder what all of the passive sitting and staring, and consumption of vast quantities of sugar and salt does to boys who are otherwise naturally exploding with energy. What do they do with their instinctive need to burn it off? Basically, I’ve been giving some thought to maleness. Being a woman I accept that I will never really have any first-hand insight into the matter. At the same time (and rather ironically) I find myself in the position of having to help the young males who ‘hang out’ in my home to get out and be males.

The subject has also been on my mind since last week I took my son to the Skateboard Park at Fryshuset, a head-turning place which is currently the largest youth center in the world. As we entered the first of two big halls filled with ramps for doing tricks that definitely should be reserved for young males, I plugged my ears. No one seemed to be bothered by the noise of at least fifty skateboards hitting up against ramps and walls. It struck me that in this culture which I wasn’t at all used to, a special social agreement governed. Everyone pursued their own energy and physical limits to the max but no one confronted anyone else with it. There was an own sense of peace and order which was nothing short of miraculous in a place where the energy level could have given rise to pure aggression at any moment.

The young men who ran the check-in counter treated the boys who paid their entry fees seriously. Accompanying mothers who attempted to speak on their sons’ behalf were respectfully ignored. Passing that check-in counter was a ritual in responsibility for any boy. They could just as well have put up a sign saying, “here we are males who agree to exercise our full energies AND be good to one another.” There were a few girls here and there, but not many. Essentially, this was a male place.

On my night desk I have a book written by the founder of Fryshuset, a man called Anders Carlberg. After the day at the Skateboard Park, it didn’t surprise me that in this book (“Generationsklyftan hotar demokratin”, Hjalmarson & Högberg, 2002) he wrote, among other things, about maleness and the need to create opportunities for channeling this energy in our society. I take the liberty of translating a line that is beginning to make increasing sense to me: “So that boys can develop to become responsible, grown men they need to be allowed to develop positive male traits.” I thought of the boys at the schools I’d been working in. Yes, we would solve a lot of problems by giving this subject a bit more thought.

This Sunday ended as gracefully as it began. As the afternoon sun began to move towards the horizon I set out for a run. The grumpy elderly man who barely ever talks to anyone on his daily walk through the park shouted out as I ran past him: “Faster, faster, I say!” I grinned and waved. Even old men have a strong and entirely healthy need to be male.

————————————————————-

Learn more about my writing and other projects at www.julielindahl.com. Join me at Facebook and/or Twitter.

Report abuse »

Tags: boys, Fryshuset, men, skateboarding
Posted in Autumn, Culture and Health, Season, children | 8 comments »

Telling our own stories

Monday, May 24th, 2010

What story will she tell?

A successful Swedish musician was recently quoted as saying, ” listen to what they say in (television program) Idol and do the reverse! That is my recipe for success.” This comment felt like a sprinkling of cool water in a desert of programs being broadcast by the main Swedish television channels which portray merciless competition as something to be desired. In a society with a reputation for leaving no one behind and which prizes the “lagom” (ordinary), I find this rash of inhumane programs to be puzzling, to say the least. Do some influential people working in Swedish television have a pent-up longing for an unjust society?

While the American side of me says that there is nothing wrong with a bit of healthy competition and ambitious goals, I’m getting tired of watching people being put down for show. The Romans did it in the Colosseum by throwing slaves and Christians to starving wild animals, but I thought that we had got past those bad old days. In some ways, we have a more complicated problem on our hands now than ever in the past since wherever we turn, wherever we look, this sad old story is being retold a hundred times by our screens and billboards.

Since the time that people have been able to communicate with one another in an intelligent way, story-telling has been our means for creating culture. One story passed down to the next generation is the starting point of that generation’s values and perceptions. In the past ordinary people - grandmothers and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers - passed on the stories of families and of the land. Today a comparatively small number of people who believe that we want to watch others being reduced tell us a great many of the stories that shape our values, in particular those of our children. We have greater possibilities to tell our stories and to shape the way that we want our society to be than ever before but the vast majority today are assimilators rather than story-tellers.

Incensed by this situation and the ever-lengthening cues for children needing psychiatric help, I began a project this spring with a few other like-minded women to help children recapture the art of story-telling in Swedish schools. Within a few weeks, I found myself in a classroom with sixteen 11-year-olds telling a story about what it means to help another person feel that they are good enough. This is a tricky subject at best, particularly with all of the Colosseum-style television programs that these children are aware of. Soon we found ourselves in a fantasy world of dwarfs and talking suns which revolved around one true story: if you give a person the chance to show you who they are on their own terms they will usually exceed all of your expectations.

As the children wound their tales it struck me that through this collective effort to recapture an ancient art and make it new we could begin as a society to express the world that we want to live in. It’s the reverse of Idol and I do believe that it is a recipe for the sort of success that most of us would like to be a part of.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————

If you are an individual or organization that would like to see this project expand and flourish or simply would like more information, please contact me at info@julielindahl.com.

Report abuse »

Tags: children, Idol, stories, Swedish television
Posted in Culture and Health, New Thinking, Story-telling, children | 2 comments »

The Snow Community

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

Heaven or hell?

Being snowed in can lead to a great deal of learning about the human condition. “It’s beautiful but I’ve had enough,” is the usual sentiment expressed by forlorn commuters upon finding that the subway stations are closed. We long for beauty but forget that it can be inconvenient and even require us to think again about how to do things. Even if the status quo gets us into a rut, it works and it’s the devil we know. Bring back the slush and the grey – at least it is functional!

Being snowed in can also show up humanity at its most resourceful. Early on a Sunday morning I drove my son to badminton so that my little cherub wouldn’t have to weather even five minutes of the chilly air. “Mamma – can’t you drive in there?” he pleaded with bassett hound eyes staring at the narrow road that constituted the last few meters to the sports hall entrance. With my son now deposited, I realized that I would have to back out of this narrow path flanked by great snow mountains on either side. Within less than a minute my Spanish-made front-wheel-drive vehicle had crashed into one of them and there I was a sitting duck in the beautiful winter.

Living closer to civilization these days has made me less responsible for my own fate. I hop into vehicles without gloves, a hat or even a snow shovel, expecting to move from one warm indoor environment to another with total efficiency. As I was kicking hopelessly at the snow caressing my back tire, a diminutive elderly woman with bright eyes stopped to look. “You’re not going to get very far that way,” she commented with the voice of experience. Her heavy Dalarna accent suggested that she’d been in a snow pile-up or two. “Come with me – my house is nearby and we can get you a snow shovel and – good lord, my dear, don’t you wear gloves?”

Following a twenty minute walk in which I learned that she and her husband were retired funeral entrepreneurs, diabetics and grandparents to three lovely grandchildren, we reached her home. I had met all of her neighbors whose dogs she walked from time to time in order to create interest during her daily walks. It is hard to look a funeral entrepreneur in the eye and not feel like potential business, but her husband was very kind and presented me with a wide selection of old gloves. The elderly lady insisted on walking back to my stranded vehicle with me and picked up “Cookie”, one of the local dogs, along the way.

I set about digging and Cookie barked. Another dog had turned up to observe with its owner, a robust middle-aged woman, who thought that she had a better snow shovel than I did. Five minutes later the two of us were shoveling, Cookie and “Meatball” were playing in the snow together, and the diminutive elderly woman had become our cheerleading squad. “Come on, ladies, you can do this without the men,” she cheered as though we were digging for all womankind. At that moment her kind husband pulled up in his car intending to haul us out with a chain attached to his trusty Volvo. Unlike his wife, I welcomed ‘mankind’ into our little snow community and hoped that his practical solution was better than ours.

With three women pushing at the boot of the car, our hero the funeral entrepreneur managed to drive my fragile Spanish car out of the snow heap. We jumped for joy, hugged one another and praised our trusty shovels. Without knowing one another’s names, we were friends – friends in the extraordinary community of humankind that snow and inconvenience creates.

Report abuse »

Tags: Community, snow, snowed-in
Posted in Community, Season, Uncategorized, Winter | 4 comments »

Path of Freedom

Saturday, December 5th, 2009

skogen The snowberries dot the bare bushes like jewels on an elderly dame. Even without their leaves the bare branches look regal in the midday sunlight that illuminates the crown of frost on aged nature. The leaves crunch like ice wafers under our feet – my feet and Lucy’s paws, to be more precise. Lucy gallops ahead of me, energized by the stainless steel rays of the winter sun on this impeccable midday in Drottningholm Park.

We veer off the groomed paths where the gravel has been raked into patterns. In a minute Lucy’s white underside is suddenly muddy brown as we enter Naturstigen, a small loop into the forest behind the palace where we can get a little dose of Nordic wilderness. Of course, it isn’t wilderness at all; it just gives that impression. In fact, as we walk along the narrow path through the forest, we come across a series of information stations, equally spaced along the length of the path, where white plaques give us a historical narrative.

A Bronze Age (1700-500 B.C.) boat lies on display under a simple roof out here in the middle of nothing but forest. Further, we learn, this boat would have floated well above our heads at the time when it was used because this area was the lake bottom at that time. We move on and find a large stone slab with straight, wide grooves in a Y-form. There is no question that someone used this repeatedly over time – as it turns out, during the Iron Age (1300-500 B.C.) to sharpen tools. Next to it another stone with its center sunken and smoothly hollowed out, is what archeologists guess was a sacrificial stone dating back even further in time. All of this information is related for sighted and non-sighted people (in Braille) on the plaques, just to ensure that everyone gets the story.

Almost anywhere else I’ve been in the industrialized world, such artifacts are in museums, in glass cases or at least roped off. If you’re lucky, you might find an English translation, but forget Braille. Here, they are directly accessible and possible to view (even if you cannot see) in environments that mirror the reality of the surroundings that they might have been used in. I can relate many other similar experiences of this astounding free access to history in nature in Sweden, yet it never ceases to amaze me each time that I experience it.

In a country today known for being rule- and queue-oriented, the continued freedom of access to historical gems in nature such as Naturstigen is a very great achievement by a modern society. I often hear Sweden being criticized for being a bit too law-and-order focused. If you look under the surface, however, you will find a fierce love of freedom of access and a delightful unbridled spirit.

Lucy hops over the ankle-high wooden rails lining our pathway to check out the smells under the trees. She’s a loyal creature, but it is her irreverence I adore. Hey, she is Swedish, when all is said and done.

____________________________________________________________

For more on walks in this blessed corner of the earth just outside of Stockholm visit Ekerö Kommun

Report abuse »

Posted in AllemannsrÃ¤tt, Culture and Health, Landscape, New Thinking, Openness, Park, Season, Winter, nature | No comments »

Thanksgiving is Lagom

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

Pumpkins on a Swedish doorstep

There are many American holiday ideas that Swedes are more than ready to give a whirl. Very often, however, most of it really is just ‘giving it a whirl’. My children have already dropped Halloween, claiming that they are too old for it and that it isn’t really that popular. Through the years, I’ve noticed that biggest of American holidays, Thanksgiving, cropping up here and there. However, when I saw Thanksgiving on the web site of Riksföreningsverigekontakt, an organization devoted to the preservation of Swedish language and culture wherever it exists in the world, I began to wonder whether something serious was happening.

I motored over to my local ICA to check whether the cornmeal, canned mashed pumpkin and frozen turkeys had made their way onto the shelves and freezers. All I could find were sweet potatoes, which don’t quite add up to Thanksgiving dinner. Then at home that evening on the radio that keeps me company in the kitchen, I thought that P2 was broadcasting something that they called ‘music of thanks’. There it was again. Thanksgiving was gatecrashing our pre-Christmas experience of bare trees and darkness.

I am an American (amongst other things) but wasn’t raised with Thanksgiving dinners because my German mother preferred goose on the 24th of December. Late November was just too early for all that fuss. Throughout the years, I have been invited to Thanksgiving dinners in various parts of the world by kind persons who thought that I would miss it. In fact, they introduced me to it and my conclusion is that we need Thanksgiving much more than we do our religious holidays.

The whole world, including Sweden, needs to smoke peace pipes, lay down its arms and show thanks and appreciation for the riches that the earth has delivered. It needs to show more of the humility that comes hand in hand with giving thanks, because that is one of the qualities that will save us. We need Thanksgiving now, everywhere, more than we ever have.

Today The American Club of Sweden humbly organized a Thanksgiving dinner for the homeless at Stadsmission in the heart of Stockholm. I bought some of those sweet potatoes from ICA and rustled together a few pies which I dropped off at the event. Thanksgiving is on my calendar to stay one way or another. It is a lagom (just right) idea, in the best sense of that favorite Swedish term.

Report abuse »

Tags: humility, lagom, peace, pumpkin, sweet potato, Thanksgiving, turkey
Posted in Culture and Health, Festivals, Season, Winter | 7 comments »

Crossing the Barriers

Monday, November 16th, 2009

A Viking happy to muddle through in Swinglish

Language isn’t generally given it’s due credit as an essential dimension of personal wellbeing. After 5 days in Paris, however, I’ve been reminded that our capacity to communicate with one another easily and thereby to get past the stereotypes of one another’s cultures, is absolutely critical to how we feel about where we are.

I’ve got a bit of French buried in there somewhere after studying it for a term and I did start life in a Latin language (Portuguese). Still, I found it difficult to enjoy some of France’s greatest national monuments, arguably some of the world’s greatest, without any English translations available to read. I stood in front of the Mona Lisa only being able to offer her a smile back but unable to learn more on the spot about what makes this small, dark portrait so famous. At the world’s richest collection of items from the French Revolution, a young ’student of history supervising the museum visitors shook her head at the number of times it had been necessary to repeat that, “yes, those are the clothes worn by Marie Antoinettes’ children during their imprisonment”. It isn’t the sort of thing you want to have to say fifty times a day.

During my visit, there were displays of modesty, such as this one and very many expressions of frustration at the inability to cross linguistic borders. A woman working in the post office nearly had cardiac arrest over my inability to understand how much it cost to send a postcard to Sweden. A waitress looked like she had bitten into a dry baguette when I was unable to understand that the restaurant had run out of croissants. I ended the day feeling like Rowan Atkinson, who in his irresistible sketch of the devil, welcomes the French (and the Germans) to hell.

Sure, I should take responsibility for the fact that I cannot speak French and learn it. At the same time I seem to recall that even on the remote island of Adelsö near my summer island, the signs include English language explanations of the Viking remains. The peoples of the North have a streak of practicality in their culture which says that you can’t make visitors work that hard. Sweden is a small country and perhaps this is another explanation for the fact that you can manage in any of its cities in English language without learning a speck of Swedish. This fact has its downside because it means that there are people who can live in Sweden for years without getting past ‘kanelbullar’ (cinnamon rolls). One can argue that The Local just made this trick easier, but on balance I think it is an admirable project devoted to crossing linguistic and, with this, cultural barriers.

They say that there is no place like home. For me that is on my Swedish island(s) where I can cross in and out of English and Swedish at will without having to think too much about it. In many ways, Sweden has been at the forefront of the ongoing project to be a modern society. When it comes to language, values such as linguistic modesty and a willingness to meet visitors halfway are ones that I believe will in the future count heavily for determining whether people experience that society as a desirable one to be in.

Report abuse »

Tags: English, France, French, Language, Sweden, tourism, wellbeing
Posted in Culture and Health, Language, New Thinking, Openness, Tourism | No comments »