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A peculiar execution

Sunday, October 23rd, 2011

What thoughts are being born amidst the trees?

Golden layers fall from the trunk like a ball gown. Their pattern brings tears to the eyes of any artist or designer who has observed, been inspired and tried to replicate. Some come close, like insects dancing toward the light. Yet, the sweet tragedy of all great art, and indeed the quality that draws us to it, is the longing to portray a vision or a feeling that we’ve internalized and, at best, always just coming close.

Autumn in the North, with its overbearing beauty and dramatic happenings, is full of this sweet tragedy for me. During sunny, crisp mornings in the park with Lucy the dog the desire to describe what I see flows forth in words that I just cannot keep up with. They pass through my thoughts and seem to fly right back out into the golden waterfalls of leaves, and wash away into the gutters next to the sunlit paths. At the same time, being able to retain just a small portion of this inspiration, which I believe I do, makes all of the difference to me. Just a tiny droplet of it can shape my day, my thoughts, my attitude, and the way that I relate to other people. This is no small matter.

Autumn’s sweet tragedy began to turn sour when I noticed in the Sunday paper that there is a planned execution in Stockholm on Monday morning. At some time tomorrow, which is likely being kept a secret for fear of the Robin Hoods of nature conservation hijacking the event, an oak that is several hundred years old, and that preceded all of the modern structures that stand around it, will be felled. Symbolically, the base of the oak is now entombed under the cement of the pavement in front of the Swedish public television station’s building.

Apparently it’s got a fungal disease and is a risk to passersby. We have to be realistic – it’s just a tree, some say. Yet, if one thinks about how many artists, thinkers and others this tree has inspired to new heights – how many thoughts this tree has impacted over time - one begins to appreciate the magnitude of what is about to happen. This sort of tree has not only been our witness, it has been a creator of history and culture over many hundreds of years.

It seems ironic that in this International Year of Forests in which Sweden is celebrating trees as both a part of our outer and inner worlds, the old oak which has seen us through so much has to go. If this was an elderly person, we’d do everything to learn whatever we could from it before he or she passed away. If it was a famous artist, a movie star or other celebrity, we’d be honoring it at galas. A tree is not a person, but there is a good reason why trees occupy a special place in the cultural life of this part of the world. They’ve shaped the way that we think. Observing a very old tree is more than just nostalgia or nature appreciation, it’s living history.

As I pass down the linden alley, I smile upon the youngsters. I’m older than many of these trees. It’s cheerful to be able to enjoy their soft and slender youth. Yet, in the gnarled forms and deep grooves of an old tree is the inspirational and intellectual heritage of a people. Perhaps, for these very special trees we’ve felt forced to fell, a ceremony of remembrance should be organized. Undoubtedly, this would be the sign of a society with greater self-insight than the one that we live in today.

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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. 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.

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Tags: culture, execution, heritage, trees
Posted in Autumn, Conservation, Flora, Outdoor Activity, Park, Season, Walking, nature | 4 comments »

What are we thinking?

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

The delicate flowers of spring

Lucy the dog and I have gone off the beaten path. We tread through the soft green wisps that have cropped up everywhere on the forest floor like a silk carpet. The lilac, yellow and white flowers that flourish in the shade of the trees in May tickle my ankles to catch my attention. We can marvel at the big peonies and roses of the summer, but these delicate flowers of spring are more graceful and more moving because of their determination to rise up despite all of the odds: the iron nights of spring, the mud of April and May, and people with their dogs who long to trample upon the greenery as soon as it emerges.

Lucy digs furiously at the base of a tree where obviously some poor unsuspecting creature has made its home. While I fully expect that someday something angry is going to bite her nose off, on this occasion I let her take her fate into her own hands – or should I say paws? Amid the delicate flowers and the blades of young grass, my eye strikes a large-sized coffee cup from Pressbyrån (the local kiosk), which someone obviously decided they were done with. A little further on, an empty plastic water bottle lies forelorn on the ground with some used white tissues scattered here and there.

I try to reconstruct the story: A woman walking through the park on a sunny May day sipping a cappuccino receives a call from her fiancée who says he has decided to break off their engagement. She drops her cup on the ground in shock and begins to weep, unconsciously throwing her tissues onto the ground, one after the other. In order to calm herself down, she takes out the plastic water bottle from her hand bag, sits on the bench next to the statue and sips water, unable to organize her thoughts and emotions.

I like to construct these types of stories around garbage I see scattered on the ground in public areas, since I want to believe that my fellow person cares but has simply experienced a momentary lapse of responsibility. I want to believe that there are good reasons as to why people leave garbage scattered amid the delicate flowers. In my heart of hearts I am always hoping.

During the summers I sometimes walk around my island with a black garbage bag picking up the debris that visiting sailboats have left at our shores. I remember sitting on a rock with a black garbage bag that was somewhere between full to brimming, and thinking about what this says about developments in our society. Can people be blamed for feeling that the land isn’t theirs, and that the forests and wild shores aren’t really a part of their reality? People live mostly in big cities which create a considerable degree of separation from the earth and its cycles. We have divided the land between us so that we don’t feel a collective responsibility for it. Here in Scandinavia this attitude is somewhat mitigated by customary laws allowing common access to the land and the seas, but signs of lack of common responsibility are nevertheless everywhere to be seen.

I pick up the debris on the ground so that the forest floor is once again a place where people can dream. Our systems have no doubt helped more of us to survive, but they have also weakened our will to take own responsibility. How we encourage that attitude is probably the greatest challenge to cleaning up our planet.

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My new book, Rose in the Sand, a memoir of a decade lived in the Swedish wilderness, will be out shortly. Watch out for it at www.julielindahl.com and join me at Facebook and Twitter. Learn more about my non-profit, Stories for Society, which brings story-telling as a tool for learning and communication into schools. Enjoy my e-magazine at www.nordicwellbeing.com.

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Tags: clean planet, environment, garbage, spring
Posted in AllemannsrÃ¤tt, Conservation, New Thinking, Season, Self-reliance, Spring, nature, sustainability | 7 comments »

Taking a breather for the planet

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Stockholm in November?

Sunday came and went and you, my beloved readers, probably noticed that Höstlov (autumn break for schools) had sabotaged my usual Sunday blog entry. The truth is that by the time Höstlov comes along, we’ve all been waiting for it for some weeks. As Wonderful November approaches in Sweden one feels like a person holding his/her breath underwater. When will that respite come? When will we have the time to light our candles and huddle under the soft fleece in an easy chair with a favorite book and Mahler awakening our senses from the stereo? On Sunday morning that moment had come. My husband and the children were wrapped under their warm covers still fast asleep – even Lucy the dog needed some extra shut-eye, and my moment in the arm chair arrived. Do forgive me for this little blip. Here I am: better late than never!

“Aren’t we going to Thailand or London?” the children asked. “All of our friends are taking an extra week off and going for holidays SOMEWHERE!” Just as I learned that Stockholm was not somewhere, I was carefully calculating what we would be doing on each day in this beautiful city that the working year leaves us so little time to enjoy. In particular, I had been watching the sun symbol in the weather section of the newspaper moving from Tuesday to Wednesday to Thursday…Is there is a conspiracy going on between the government and the weather service to keep our spirits up? The sun will come, just not today.

When it rains there is always the cinema. We navigated the traffic – a relatively new phenomenon in Sweden – to see the film “Oceans“. It is a documentary sponsored by the wealthy of the world (and Disney) about the high seas and what goes on deep under the surface. I have done some scuba diving in my time and mostly when I watch such underwater documentaries, I can imagine how the film might have been shot. In this case, I just could not imagine how the filmmakers managed. There were images of the sea at its most violent and frightening, with building-high waves crashing up against one another like titans. There was an image of a diver filming a sperm whale as it ‘played’. An inadvertant whip of any of its fins could easily have sent the diver to Valhalla. There were the strange creatures that stay clear away from human life at the very bottom of the sea; creatures that look more like they come from Star Wars than from our planet.

For a little over an hour we dwelt in a world that was not ours but at the same time very much ours. In the film a whaling boat hauls a shark out of the water, mercilessly cuts off its fins for making that terrible luxury - shark fin soup – and throws the live shark which no longer has any possibility to move itself through the water into the depths. I never thought I would feel sorry for a shark but for the first time I realized how helpless these creatures can be when man is heartless. The garbage flowed freely around the seals who could barely see through coastal water filled with gritty garbage. The contrast to the happy creatures that can live in the pristine waters on either pole of the earth was palpable.

We need films like this to remember. Just a couple of days before I had been in the supermarket in a rush to get home and put something quick yet special on the table for Friday’s dinner. As the editor of The Nordic Wellbeing Cookbook, I know that I should skip those big, juicy shrimps that come from farms which destroy entire coastal ecosystems. Yet there were crowds, I was tired and I could not find the sustainable Atlantic shrimp or think of anything else in my exhaustion after the long week. I was glad to meet a friend at the cash register to remind me that even if those shrimps were big and juicy, we should skip them for the sake of all of the beauty on land and in the sea. Sounds simple and it is simple. Yet, it is so easy to give in to the complexity of exhaustion, crowds, lack of time and waning creativity which follows.

Thank goodness for Höstlov. It’s time to take stock and remind onesself that with just a little extra breath and a moment’s reflection those majestic creatures in the sea can continue to make this planet the universal miracle that it is.

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

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Tags: earth, environment, Oceans, Stockholm, sustainability
Posted in Autumn, Conservation, Food and Health, Season, nature, sustainability | 1 comment »

The conversion of a speed tyrant

Friday, April 23rd, 2010

Have you come to your senses yet?

As I’ve been walking around under a cloud of volcanic ash wondering, like many, when aircraft are going to restore that reliable sense of speed we have got used to in our lives, my dog Lucy has been concerned with developments on the ground. As the earth softens and emits the many smells of the life within it, Lucy is in sensory heaven. It has been a long, dull winter without the aromas of the earth and only endless amounts of white snow that, to her chagrin, leaves her fur sparkling clean. For a dog, not walking around with something ill-smelling in its fur is the height of unattractiveness.

So far I have managed to stick to my new regimen of a long early morning walk in Drottningholm Park. It is a wonderful new habit but I fear that Lucy and I have objectives that are at odds. While I am seeking to break into a sweat, burn energy and tone muscles by keeping up a goose-step pace strictly between 6.30 and 7.30 am (when I have to be home to ensure that the children get breakfast before I start work) Lucy is in a timeless search for the smell of all smells. Like a connoisseur, she slows down at each tree to appreciate the many great smells that a tree bears: the smell of birds, squirrels, deer chewing at the lichen on the bark and of course canine buddies who have previously baptized the tree. Like a speed tyrant, I drag her forward and reprimand her for inattention to our schedule.

On one of the back paths we run into Crown Princess Victoria looking athletic in black followed by two noisy lifeguards. “Hej”, she comments gently to Lucy who naturally captures the spotlight with her timeless sense of joy. Then it occurs to me that not even a rushed crown princess who most likely has no desire to greet more beings during her precious early morning hours can resist being drawn in by that affectionate space that a dog creates. Even if dogs physically live in our harried world, spiritually they preserve that original authenticity of joy in the moment that just then seems to have no limits.

Lucy is all done with her pal the Crown Princess and has now found a snail to focus her attentions upon. The snail is crossing the road at a pace which is painful to observe. There isn’t a great deal of traffic here but all it takes is the occasional vehicle to send the snail to purgatory. My urge is to lift up the poor little critter and move it to safety on the other side of the road, but something tells me that we should let nature take its course. Lucy and I watch the snail with ears pricked until finally its trail has left a shiny line across the road. We look up and find that a vehicle has been waiting for us to be done with snail hour.

Although she can be annoying I cherish my dog. How else would I learn to appreciate the delicate progress of a snail?

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For anyone contemplating purchasing a furry friend check Svenska Kennelklubben. If you are interested in a Lucy check Golden Retrieverklubben.

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Tags: Crown Princess Victoria, dogs, Drottningholm, golden retriever, parks, royals, speed, time, Walking
Posted in Animals and Health, Fauna, Landscape, New Thinking, Park, Season, Slow, Spring, Walking, nature | 2 comments »

The Shifting of Swedish Space

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010

Space, the final frontier...

The birds are chirping and the snow on the ground is knee-deep. The light has a softness in it that belongs more to the future than it does to the now when the earth is still hard and the branches bare. These contrasts make the month of February an interesting and surprising time to be in Sweden and not at all the monotone freeze that this country has a reputation for being in until midsummer when the tourists begin to arrive.

Among the other contrasts that I notice this February are those that I see in the landscape of this country of supposedly charming rust-red houses trimmed with ‘carpenter’s delight’. A Sunday walk with my husband on the ice reveals a new and juxtaposing picture of architecture in Sweden and with this a shift in values taking place within a whole society. “This place is starting to look like America,” my husband comments as he notices the large waterfront houses that have shot up in no time. My husband is old enough to remember Sweden in the 1950s so there is the possibility that he could be exaggerating. On the other hand, during the fourteen years that I have had the opportunity to observe Swedish coastlines from the ice, things have clearly changed.

The going gets tough as we hit a patch where the snow is so deep that it has insulated a layer of water between itself and the 40 cm-thick ice. We are forced to stop and look. On the shore just up in front of us we behold three houses that tell a story of the rapid transformation of a cultural landscape that is happening without almost anyone commenting. To the right, at the bottom of a low hill nestled among the trees is a tiny house that looks like a DIY sports cabin. It was obviously built to provide a simple base from which to enjoy the beautiful natural environment. To the left of this cabin is a slightly larger cabin with terrace and a small kitchen with running water. This place was also clearly built with life in the outdoors in mind. Even further to the left, perched up on the hill, is a great, grey house with no carpenter’s delight and a double garage. It’s long row of front-facing windows demonstrates that it is clearly built for enjoying the outdoors from the indoors. Before us we have the story of late twentieth century and early twenty-first century Sweden. There is a shift happening from outdoors to indoors and from nature to convenience.

Sense tells me that it is important to resist a glorification of the past. In mid-winter indoor sanitary facilities are a great blessing. I know what it is like to weather a Swedish winter without running water (we’ll leave that story for my memoir of island life which is coming out later this year or another blog entry!). On the other hand, there is something about the rapid emergence of these big and rather unoriginal houses in a very short period of historical time that is disturbing. How do we actually create more space for ourselves in modern society? Bigger houses mean greater use of energy, more cleaning and less time in the greatest space we’ve got: nature.

There is of course another trend and one I have reported about at my e-magazine. That is, the rapidly increasing popularity of hermit huts and tree houses. People with the resources are today prepared to pay a premium for the opportunity to live in a designer ‘box’ for a night because it gives them an opportunity to taste a form of freedom that is available on a path that society is slowly relinquishing.

Two days later my husband and I walked past a recreation of Lådan, a 20 m square functional-style house built during the early 1940s, by the famous Swedish architect Ralph Erskine and his wife. We peered into the windows of this house which has become a charming historical relic in our area. The double bed hung from the ceiling and could be lowered to the floor by a well-designed pulley. One of our friends remembers that the Erskines “hung their infant daughter in a small hammock outside” on the terrace when they had guests who came to visit them during the summers. Today most people cannot imagine choosing such a life – even if only for the summers. Yet we glorify structures created by people who have made a determined effort to enjoy ’space’ in other ways by showing off their homes as examples of fine architecture. I am quite certain that the new instant giants along the coasts of Sweden’s inner islands will never be revered in this way.

Obviously, we are confused about what it is that truly gives us a feeling of space and freedom in our society. There is a gap between what we want and the choices we make. The next time you are out walking, skating or skiing on the ice observe and think about it, and please do get back to me. I’m still trying to work out the most lagom (meaning just about right in Swedish) solution for meeting my need for space.

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For links to places and designers working with hermit hut and tree house projects in Sweden visit http://www.nordicwellbeing.com/web/design/more_design/Hermitic_Design.php.

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Tags: architecture, hermit huts, ice, space, Walking
Posted in Design & Health, New Thinking, Outdoor Activity, Physical Activity and Health, Skating, Space, Uncategorized, Walking, Winter, nature | No 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.

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

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

Playing eco-golf

Monday, September 14th, 2009

The Swedish Golf Experience/by Corden & Oberto

Golf anyone? Despite Annika Sörenstam it just doesn’t strike me as a very Swedish thing to do. Two to four hours of energy expenditure without any tangible result goes against the grain. There are walls to paint, bulbs to be planted for next spring, boats to be cleaned and lifted out of the water, and the harvest to be dried or pickled to last us through the winter. Or maybe I’ve missed something and golf has become very Swedish. Is this just my Lutheran island mentality that cannot quite comprehend how one can make time for such frivolity?

Despite my not-so-short list of reservations, including the fact that I hadn’t hit a golf ball in over twenty years and the feeling that all of the pesticide required to keep greens a luscious green don’t fit in with my planetary vision, I did accept an invitation this past August to join a golf tournament based on the knowledge that the proceeds went to a most worthy charity (check Linas Livsglädjefond). It must have been the first time since the birth of my twins that I spent four hours – in fact more – doing something that would not result in my task-list getting shorter. Being a modern working mother isn’t a golfing sort of lifestyle.

I admit it. I had a wonderful time and was struck by a few things. Despite my very lovely golf swing, I mis-hit most balls which flew flippantly and frequently into what seemed to be a golf-ball-devouring species of grass. When a golf cart suddenly appeared, courtesy of the tournament organizers, I realized I’d been spending too much time enjoying this long, silvery looking grass which I thought would fit perfectly in a wildlife reserve. One could almost imagine the lions crouching in it. I became so engaged with this long grass, that it is no small miracle I finished the tournament with a mini bottle of champagne and a free session with the pro.

My curiosity aroused, I asked my friend Gene (http://www.swedishgolfonline.com/), who has an irrepressible love of Swedish golf courses, what was with the grass. Gene rapidly explained that most likely I was experiencing Swedish eco-golf. This deliberate effort to make golf clubs modern, in the sense that they in themselves become a service of nature, encouraging natural diversity rather than simply wiping it out, is something that researchers at the Stockholm Resilience Center have been leading the way on. The golf clubs of America and Europe have even chosen Stockholm as the venue for their 2009 conference addressing how golf can become an environmentally and socially responsible sport. I heaved a sigh of relief: I could now call my game eco-golf rather than just plain lousy golf.

I’m beginning to feel so good about my adventure out into the wild grasses of Swedish golf courses that I might just start including them on my list of ’islands of wellbeing’. Isn’t life full of surprises?

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Posted in Autumn, Conservation, Uncategorized, nature | No comments »

What’s in a Rose?

Tuesday, June 30th, 2009

Why do you love this?

I’ve returned from the blazing heat of Oslo to my breezy Swedish summer island and, with this, to my rose garden. Everywhere I look there is a new petal unfolding with its very own color and aroma. I know that I am not alone in my lusty passion for roses. My mother calls me from Germany and proclaims with exaltation that she has just been out in the rose gardens of Baden-Baden. “Wonderful, wunderbar…” In fact, I don’t think it would be wrong to say that most people find roses irresistible. Isn’t this mysterious? They aren’t chocolate (i.e. not quick energy) and we don’t need them for our survival.

Determined to get to the bottom of our common human fascination with roses, I spend the first few minutes of each summer morning with my nose in a rose. Outside my laundry room I take in the mesmerizing aroma of a pink rose with a French name that I can never quite remember. The precious buds of this rose are the stuff that our perfume bottles are filled with. Is our attraction to roses simply about creating an attraction to each other? Does our fascination with roses just boil down to hormones?

Around the corner, I immerse my senses in the light, soapy aroma of Graham Thomas. Graham is a yellow rose with a voluptuous bloom. It’s brightness reminds me of the sun which we see comparatively little of here in the cold, dark North. Is our fascination for roses a dimension of that feeling that we are witnessing a miracle? Can there really be life of so rich a quality after the barren winter?

For me, roses are a reminder that almost anything is possible if you set your mind to it. A decade ago, I arrived on this sandy, rocky island with a grand vision of a rose garden and no clue as to how to create one. With each plant nursery that I visited, I received the depressing advice of the experts to be realistic and go for the ugly hardy types or no roses at all. Sometimes it can be helpful to be stubborn. Drawing on the invaluable advice of an experienced Danish rose expert, I dropped some slightly rotten herring (strömming or Baltic herring) into the bottom of the deep hole that I dug for each new rose in my garden. Years later I am thankful for being stubborn and for the advice about the diverse uses of rotten herring.

The next time that you see a rose give a thought as to why it fascinates you. Taking a step back from your immediate perceptions, and considering them even for a moment, can expand your ’space’ immeasurably.

And this?

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Want to learn more about roses? Visit Rose Week (13-19 July) and the Rose Festival (18 July) at Wij Gardens in none other than the new Swedish Mecca, Ockelbo!

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Tags: gardens, Ockelbo, rose, Summer, Wij Gardens
Posted in Flora, Island, Landscape, Outdoor Activity, Summer, gardening, nature | No comments »

More than a Song

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Swedish musicians at the annual Midsummer Festival in Munsö

During the past years we’ve become increasingly aware of the way that music, theater and art can set free our dopamin and oxytocin so that we de-stress and recover faster. “Our what?”, you might ask. Yes, well, in the same way that viagra has taken its comfortable place in our vocabulary, these marvelous calming biological substances that we can produce all ourselves, given the right conditions, are moving in to stay. In Sweden and elsewhere in the world significant research is underway to decipher what actually happens to us when we, for instance, listen to Sibelius or view a Carl Larsson painting. Since 2005, the Swedish government has promoted various initiatives, including research, concerning the linkage between culture and health.

As you know, I am a devotee of Nordic Wellbeing which in itself is a cultural approach to health. This weekend, however, I was reminded of the dopamin/oxytocin deluge that happens when two cultures meet in peace and in a mutual celebration of their music, dance and local dress. Sitting on the grass at Ekebyhov Palace in between my son’s final trombone concert and my daughter’s final violin performance for the year (we have a lot of good hormones in our home but perhaps less quiet), I was delighted to find that Stockholm’s Culture School had been invited to do some special ‘foreign’ performances.

When first I came to this municipality near Stockholm 13 years ago, there were two shelves reserved at the local ICA for ‘odd’ ingredients such as curry. When my children started at their little ‘Bullerby‘ day care out on Munsö, I noted that there was one human being in the vicinity with a slightly darker shade of skin. When my Columbian cleaning lady’s car was set on fire by a bunch of bored skinheads, I was reminded of the extent to which the segregation of cultures is a bad thing for everyone.

Up on the stage at Ekebyhov on Sunday we listened to young and old playing music from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, and watched two Indian girls dancing to a Bollywood theme song. At the very end of these breath-taking performances, a stout West African in local dress beckoned all of us sedentary Caucasians to rise and lift our arms into the air. “Come on Sweden!”, he shouted with that irresistable African rhythm in his voice, “let’s do this together!” There was nothing that could touch this crowd as he moved us along with his great sense of beat. The dopamin and oxytocin flowed forth.

To speak in plain English about what actually happens when cultural traditions meet in this way, we come back to the theme of this blog. Everyone gains mental space from the feeling that there is a new freedom to move in previously untried cultural spaces. And time – doesn’t it just evaporate among friends?

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Tags: culture, dopamin, health, oxytocin
Posted in Culture and Health, Fauna, Landscape, New Thinking, Outdoor Activity, Season, relaxation | No comments »

Twittering for Real

Sunday, May 24th, 2009

A sunny afternoon in Drottningholm Park

It’s the place where twittering isn’t 140 characters including spaces. It’s a place where your brain is allowed to be in a mode of spontaneous rather than directed consciousness (leading to exhaustion and stress). It is a place where noticing the fine detail is a path to gaining a broader perspective, and where things are not at odds as they often seem to be wherever we look these days. There is flow which is the key to all authentically fulfilling experiences. The amazing thing is that it is usually free and you can go there at any time. Where is this and why aren’t people there more?

As you already know from my previous blog entries, I am a big fan of the park. What you might not know is that this 2009 marks 100 years since Sweden’s (and Europe’s!) first national parks were established and that today, 24 May, is the high point of this celebration. In honor of this happening, Naturens år 2009 has been established, a site filled with superb greenery, inspiration and events that all of you, my fellow tree huggers, will adore. Visit also The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation for more.

What is it that we should be celebrating? Parks, whether city parks or great national wilderness parks, have become places where nature and its most avid offspring, humans, are learning to co-exist and even help one another along the way. In this sense, the park is a greenhouse of hope and optimism for the future of our planet.