Once upon a time I went to Svalbard. I had to see the northern lights. My children were small. I left them with their father and took a flight, large and noisy, and then another, small and rickety to Longyearbyen, arriving late, in the dark, getting into the car of a man who only once he’d shut the door and driven off into the icy white did I wonder if he was a taxi driver or just some random Norwegian loitering for women on their own. Interruption: as I finished that sentence a spider lowered itself from the ceiling, landed clumsily on my dressing gown and panic scuttled into the folds of duvet as I panic threw my lap top off my legs and shooed and scuttled in my own clumsy way, away in the other direction. What is going on today. I feel low. I’m thinking of Svalbard and why I went there and what I want today that I do not have. I went to feel something greater than connection to every day failures, to be placed before wonder, to shut up my complaining. On the first night I walked off into the dark to get away from the hotel glare and tipped my head into the night and felt the grand emptiness, the deep velvet ghost of that place so vast and silent. The hotel receptionist told me later that polar bears are out there, I was a fool, I could have been eaten. But the romance didn’t leave me, the North Pole, a nothing like the nowhere land of life beyond this, and when the mind cannot see where land ends and sky begins it expands. The world seed bank is there, a life craft from every plant on earth in case of apocalypse. There, four hundred nationalities work side by side on that archipelago linked by crystals that are melting. I rode a skidoo across the frozen sea, waves stopped in their roaring, and saw the sailboat frozen in ice where a renegade Dane spends winter. Our heavily padded guide said, if you fall, don’t move, you can get lost here. It was impossible to tell if the trail was one foot wide or a thousand. I heard stories of abandoned Russian towns and imagined brutal concrete and the echo of footsteps, a lone grandmother hunched in headscarf, a carrier bag, a face at a window without glass. I ate reindeer steaks. I didn’t see the northern lights. I was sad and disappointed and vowed to go back. I want to lie on snow wrapped in goose feather down and witness the wonder. I want to understand what lights them up as I understand what lights me, the little wants and big wishes that on some days don’t come no matter how far I go, what distance I travel. I am feeling low.
Discussion about this post
No posts
When you’re on it’s like watching little crystals forming.
Your style is fascinating and splendid, light and shade in multiples like a bee floating on the screen. They're not linear, your words. Remarkable.