Julie\'s Nordic Island

Think of 10 ways to describe what you see

“I’m off to march in the protest this morning, Mamma,” my daughter said. Sweden’s right wing political party, discredited after senior members were filmed threatening to beat immigrants with a metal pipe, celebrates 25 years today. In response, thousands of people throughout Sweden are organizing themselves to march, amongst them my 14-year-old daughter and her friends. “Maybe I could come along?” I asked wishfully. “That would be weird, Mamma,” my daughter insisted, “I’m going with my friends.” I didn’t want to point out to my daughter that discrimination includes age discrimination, but I let it go. The dog needed to go out, and, heck, everyone is a teenager once.

So, it was that Ellie the dog and I set out for a protest in the park.  It wasn’t easy to know how we were going to express our solidarity with the movement against racism in all its forms, but we marched on nevertheless in the faith that we would find something. On Dog Island, Ellie sped like a rocket to meet the other frolicking canines. It is quite a miracle that they all manage together, but they do for the most part, giving one another the slightest little warning every now and again not to overdo it. There were all sorts from the handbag-sized chihuahua that shivered in the snow to the oversized American Staffordshire with the black spot over one eye that made him look like Captain Hook. Ellie quickly sorted out the ones who knew how best to play, and they chased one another like mad hatters until there was nothing to do but collapse with exhaustion in the snow. It didn’t seem like anyone was going to get too upset with anyone else. They were all too exhausted and, besides, they’d learned to hang out with one another by playing. It occurred to me that play is an excellent antidote to fear and suspicion, and that therefore we had successfully managed to deliver the first part of our protest.

A father pushed his toddler frenetically through the park in a covered jogging pram. One had the impression he’d come to Sweden from a warmer country. Through the transparent plastic sheet pulled over the forward-facing pram one saw the smiling face of a child peaking out of winter insulation that barely allowed it to move. One could react to this scene critically: What did this man think he was doing with his child? Surely it needed movement and fresh air. Child abuse! Another way was to laugh and consider that daddy had perhaps overdone the winter protection a bit today. Perhaps somewhere in the receptacles of his memory were the blinding sandstorms of his native home? Best to protect one’s child’s eyes. Acts of love are rarely logical. As he pushed the cumbersome jogging pram up the hill, the other youngsters sped down it wide-eyed in sleds. One had to laugh and feel for this well-meaning daddy. He’d work it all out in time. How silly it was to pass judgement on him. It occurred to me that our protest had taken another step forward with humor and the empathetic light that it bestows upon any situation. True humor requires that we laugh at our own perceptions as well as at the objects of them.

It was one of those days when all looked bare; pared down to its very minimum in the grey with the leafless branches. It wasn’t one of those days when I could find richness everywhere by just looking. When those days come, fanatasy knows no bounds. Yet, today was a day when fantasy was most needed and hardest to invoke. I looked down the path with the long line of groomed trees on either side. The designer of this path had managed to create the optical illusion of a new, lighter world at the path’s end. If one looked down it, one simply wanted to go there to that light opening at the long path’s end. What I would find there I did not know; it was simply the promise of discovering something new that attracted. Curiosity and fantasy about the many possibilities are qualities that summarily put out the fires of fanaticism and intolerance.

Even if Ellie and I don’t march with the many today, we have marched with them in spirit by playing, laughing and letting our fantasy run wild. The good news is that these are things that are within the reach of every human being.

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Learn more about Julie Lindahl’s writing and other projects at www.julielindahl.com. Learn more about her non-profit for storytelling, Stories for Society, and its new initiative, Beyond Tolerance.

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"Hope"/Image by Silke Millan

The park was utterly quiet this grey early morning. Ellie the dog pricked her ears and turned her head abruptly, to the left and then to the right, looking for a sound. In the snow, which was softening and hardening at the same time with rising temperatures and accelerating wind, lay a child’s light blue ski helmet. I picked it up and shook out the snow that had collected inside. Ellie was jealous. Hadn’t she spotted this interesting find first?

I tried to hang the helmet on the gnarled trunk of an old tree, but it fell down into the snow again. It didn’t feel right to leave it lying there – felt something like leaving a lost child behind – so I took it along with me and decided to find a nearby park bench for it, so that it might eventually be retrieved by its owner. As I placed the helmet on the bench, I thought I could hear the echoes of the children that had played in sleds on the hill behind. In the silence, I could hear the echoes of their laughter; shrieks of terror and joy as they threw themselves down the steep drop. There was also the weeping from a red face at having stumbled and landed nose-down in the snow; then the sound of lips smacking at the good flavors of hot chocolate and clementines. It was an innocent world of raw emotion that was spontaneous and uncontrived. Today this world was just a ghost in the echoes of the young voices that had been.

Whenever the children suffer and their voices are silenced, our world becomes a poor beggar. We have nothing and the future seems hopeless. When the children are echoes, our world is silenced.

As I leave the park, a Chinese tourist snaps a picture of us. “Beautiful,” he says in broken English looking at Ellie. That which is young and full of joy is beautiful in any culture and in any language. Who could disagree?

The morning becomes an experience in staccato as the palace guards march up the hill. I see the staccato, but don’t hear it. The silence is overwhelming today. The young men and women of the royal guard, many of them just barely emerged from childhood, are themselves now bearers of rifles.  It is just tradition, people say. Time for new traditions, I say, to give this beggar world new hope.

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In memory of all of the children whose voices are silenced in the world every day.

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The morning sun shone through the wide spaces between the bare branches onto the silhouette of a dog breaking the frost-encrusted ground. The frost yielded, and the grass turned to green again where Ellie had rolled on it; that little bit of body heat freeing it from its stiff winter encasement. The leaves were like stiff wafers in great mounds all around Dog Island; the only place in the park where no one rakes the leaves. In fact, Dog Island is a small oasis amid the formality of the Royal Park, where the usual etiquette does not apply. Here, dogs run free, the leaves pile up, and the trees tower above, unmanaged and unpruned.

A frightening looking animal charges through the gates and stands with ears pricked, ready to pounce on Ellie’s morning frost frolick. What looks like potential calamity almost always ends up as a lightning-speed chase through the maze of trees, and then a refreshing sip at the moat separating us from life dictated by humans. Here on Dog Island, the animals organize themselves, and they seem to do it very well, just not the way we’d do things. Another animal bounds in. It decides it is going to be dominant, and a little feigned cowering takes place among those gathered. Suddenly, it gets left behind. No one is interested. King for thirty seconds.

The truth is that for years I said I would never come to this place. Either it was too dangerous, too muddy, too disorderly, or too something-else. Everything that Dog Island represented seemed to be not me. In fact, it was so not me, that if I crossed the bridge over that moat, I might be in danger of becoming someone else. One day, however, Ellie decided that it was for her. She sat with ears pricked as I rested on an orderly park bench, and whined as she watched dogs of all shapes and sizes in a wild chase in the distance. Like a mother preaching to her child about the evils of candy (and forgetting how much she adored sweets as a child), I told Ellie to hush up; Dog Island was not good for her. Yet (also like a mother of a child), eventually I was forced to bend, and so we crossed the bridge over the moat together. “Just for five minutes in the early morning while no one else is around,” I said, strangely whispering so that no one would hear. Her raven black ears were pricked and her brown eyes focused, and like any excited child, she wasn’t listening to mother at all.

Within two minutes, a cross between a giant poodle and a German shepherd (can you imagine it?) came bounding in, and Ellie was off. As my five-minute plan collapsed somewhere on the hill, which the dogs ran incessantly up and down, I began to wonder about my objections to this place. There wasn’t really anything wrong with it. In fact, it was charming with the ducks paddling around in the last of the open water in the moat, oddly unafraid of the canines wrestling on the land above. Then it occurred to me that newness can be frightening, particularly as it means that we have to start questioning our old selves.

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Order Rose in the Sand, Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning account of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Learn more about her non-profit for story-telling and the new initiative, Beyond Tolerance, at www.storiesforsociety.com.

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The clocks had been set back an hour and I had awoken to a morning where there seemed at last to be time. The finely tuned machinery of a school morning had been switched off for the coming week with the autumn break here.

Out on the lake in front of the palace, steam rose in flames like gentle spirits, come to bring the winter. I’d been dreading it for quite some time, but now that winter was here, it was unthreatening, soft and beautiful in a familiar sort of way. The leaves crunched under my boot soles like encrusted jewels, the park floor feeling like a treasure trove. Perhaps it was because a Scandinavian winter looked like jewelry on this day, that it was so appealing. The leaves that had not yet fallen – and there were still quite a few – were various shades of gold and the frost was like diamonds on the grass.

To Ellie the dog, who is not yet one year old, the experience was new. She sniffed at the frost and immediately determined that this was something to roll in. Better than mud, I thought. A blackbird watched her from a distance and thought it rather odd that anyone would want to wet down their feathers like that in winter time.

The guards on duty prepared to inspect the grounds, and Ellie cringed at the sight of their rifles. How would she know what a rifle is? It occurred to me, that somewhere in her genetic memory rifles were dangerous. Noticing her fear, one of the guards thoughtfully hid his rifle behind his back. She immediately rushed to him and made friends.

During these mornings of walking with Ellie through the palace grounds, I have often thought that the world would have achieved something if suddenly the guards and the rifles were gone; somehow, they were superfluous and didn’t make sense any more. I was once a student of war studies and my educated mind says it is all just dreaming. Yet winter mornings, like all of the very real transformations in nature, keep my fantasy alive.

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Order Rose in the Sand, Julie Lindahl’s prize-winning account of a decade lived on a Swedish island. Learn more about her non-profit for story-telling at www.storiesforsociety.com.

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Where is mother?

There is a desperate peeping sound coming from inside the berry bushes. I pretend that it is coming from somewhere else and continue picking the luscious berries that stain my hands with their rich juice. Yet, the pitch heightens and comes ever closer so that I cannot deny there is a little soul in torment in the bush. I look into the heavy branches. It is difficult to see the source of the crying through the many green leaves and the generous strings of red berries blocking my view. A good place for a nest, but now it seems deserted, except for this one little crying soul that cannot find its way.

It hops onto my garden slipper, fighting fear by taking a chance. Like most young birds, it is tiny, grey-white attempting to spread its short wing span, but still unable to control the movement and finding it harder than it looks. “All around they are flying – why can’t I?” it wonders. Who hasn’t felt like that? I sympathize with the little bird. It jerks its head this way and that, hopping onto my other slipper, tired of feeling alone, winded from the shrieking for help and fatigued by the magnitude of the challenge. How will it all end?

I dare not touch the little bird and stand still, not moving my feet lest I scare it off or, even worse, tread on it. I’ve taken in wild animals before. Taking it with me is unlikely to result in its survival. And so we wait for the call from above. What is next? Then it comes: the deeper, more controlled call of experience from the mountain ash tree. Mother shows her presence by winging her way from one branch to another, calling out her location all of the time.

I look at my slippers. The tiny bird has hopped off and is standing next to me, darting its head back and forth, looking for the source of comfort. Time for me to leave and let them find their way to one another. My bowls are full of berries in any case. Greed serves no purpose. I step away slowly, but take a bit of the grass underfoot with me. The little bird tips over and, by instinct, spreads its wings. “There – you can do it!” is my thought. The little bird flaps and flaps, lifting slighty off the ground, but not quite mastering the laws of aerodynamics as yet. It will soon, it’s obvious. Time and practice solve most things.

All of the happenings around me in my island wilderness are a mirror of life. Things can get very desperate and lonely. We shriek and fall, either because of the inexperience of youth or the fragility of age. Life is frightfully hard. Yet in the moment of falling, most of us learn to spread our wings in some way. The promise of love and eventually love itself is what keeps us going, keeps us trying. Life is a tyrant and life is a wonder. In this way, it will never be resolved.

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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.

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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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