Something StirringI. TROMSØ
Day 1, April 4
I arrive in transition. I arrive from the air.
I wonder how it is that I landed somewhere like this. I wonder how I became so lucky?
Snow falls outside my window. There is a looming mountain just beyond the trees. The sky is a white-ish grey matching almost perfectly with the white snow and ice that covers the earth’s floor. The only other noticeable color is brown–the thin, small, short trees with their delicate branches making ever so slight movements with the wind.
This Land stirs something deep inside of me. A feeling I’m not sure how to name or if there is a name. An impenetrable grief mixed with awe. Awe for the drama of the landscape, awe in the ability of life to survive here, awe in the beauty so deeply, keenly felt in body and soul.
How is it that life has led me here?
Somehow, somewhere along my life’s path, I was called by this place.
An instinctual p u l l to the edges of the Earth. To the freezing cold places where snow and ice bury the long-lost secrets of the world alive. Led by my heart’s desire to know the world and myself, I feel the wisdom buried in these mountains and glaciers.
And somehow, miraculously, I feel a kinship.
The past several years of my life have been full of uncertainty and fear.
Not just the sickness felt around the world.
Also, the never-ending grief of my mother’s death, the car accident that is erased from my consciousness and alive in my body, the brain injuries that eat away at my every semblance of assurance.
And through it all, those I love most have been by my side.
Yet now, here, I find myself on this grand adventure without any of my loved ones.
I’m so scared and so ready.
So excited and so anxious.
So doubtful and so sure.
Life is full of paradoxes and unanswered questions.
I want answers.
I want certainty.
Yet life is teaching me that it has its own way.
I must trust it.
Embrace it.
Day 2, April 5
My heart hurts when I think of all the pain and loss that dwells just below the surface.
The permafrost is melting.
The glaciers are melting.
Snow and ice are melting.
Life here is melting.
With it, perhaps, there is wisdom to be revealed.
Wisdom to be listened to.
Wisdom to learn from.
There is great terror, horror, and sorrow in this part of the world. The Land speaks of it.
Yet it also speaks of its strength, its power, and its will to survive.
Full of paradox, this Place. A reflection of all life on Earth?
This Place holds within it a power I am not used to.
The ice contains and preserves millions of years of history— organisms, matter, life that has never been broken down fully.
This Land wants to hold on—
this Land doesn’t forget.
It knows what we are doing to it.
It will remember our transgressions.
CONTINUE TO PART II FJORDS