Swedish Spring Orchestra - ENGLISH

"Here I stand and feel the winter trickle out of me [...] Soon I'll be so light I'll be able to fly." -Ronja Robber's Daughter

Spring is sneaking up a little timidly. And yet it surprises us with the sudden shift it brings to nature. How often have we seen a winter end and a spring come, and yet it is a miracle every time when life returns all around us. Just as if not only all the plant and animal creatures had been wintering, but as if you yourself were awakening from a twilight state and suddenly remembering all the fullness of life. Only vaguely did one still know how the air was filled with the singing of birds and the buzzing of insects. Forgotten was how a conifer forest smells when the sun dries its soft earth. You feel like a newborn when suddenly warmth embraces your naked skin again as soon as you step outside the door. But all this is now gradually returning. And only a few springs have we experienced as intensely as this one. While the birds have been calling spring with their cheerful songs for some time now, the plant world is only slowly awakening. But from day to day we see more green sprouting. With every walk around the house, or into the forest, there is something new to discover. Yesterday, only a few bushes dared to show their budding green. Today, a closer look reveals a little green on almost every bush. The elder, on the other hand, is already bursting with spring vitality and behind the house is a field of wood anemones. Supposedly, this winter was particularly long, even for Sweden. It wasn't until Easter that we had the first days with temperatures above 10°C here. And so, instead of colourful eggs, Elouan was allowed to find yellow flowers by the wayside on our Easter Sunday walk. Full of enthusiasm, he stopped at every flower head and called out: "Hu'a'ich! Hu'a'ich!" (coltsfoot). These flowers, the cheerful chirping of the titmice, the steady call of the pigeons, circling buzzards, a pair of swans on the house lake as well as a few lemon butterflies, were the first heralds of spring. The majority of the plants, on the other hand, have only been blinking themselves out of sleep for two or three days. Since then, nature has been in a constant state of transition. The day before yesterday was the first time that the air was filled with the multiple humming of bumblebees. It took us a while to locate them; the tallest willow on the property surprised us with its flowering crown covered in swarming, flower-hungry insects. The silence of winter has since completely disappeared; buzzing, chirping and the croaking of the frogs are found in the symphony of the spring orchestra. Yes, even the night is no longer silent. Sometimes it is the calls of the owls that make the darkness come alive, sometimes a badger creeping through the garden. But these hours are already counted. A third of the year's wheel has turned. At midsummer, the sun no longer wants to set, so it is already trying to compensate its few moments in winter. At present, the entire horizon is still brightly lit even after 10 o'clock in the evening. Only around midnight is it pitch black.

For Elouan, who recently turned two, change is certainly normality. In his world, everything changes all the time anyway and every day there is something to discover that is strange and miraculous for him. Nevertheless, his joy of spring is clearly visible when he runs around laughing and being naked in the meadow and performs funny dances. In general, he is going through a phase where he is once again "waking up" to many things (though we probably say that all the time). As if it were a matter of course, he takes a saw in his hand and saws one piece of wood after the other (but never all the way through so far). He can already cut carrots into slices very well. When lunch is served, he carries his chair to the veranda all by himself. Even though he usually demands one of us adults as a play partner, there are more and more of these moments when he simply sits down on the mattress of his own accord, picks up a book and reads aloud the letters he can already name. Or he flips through the nature guide and lists every single animal and plant. When he then comes across one of the trees growing here in the forest, he excitedly points out of the window in the direction where one of these trees is growing. But not only can he identify the trees here by now, he can even name some birds (pigeon, nuthatch, raven, goshawk, tree hawk, tawny owl, woodpecker, duck, the tit bird, as well as the mouse buzzard). Outside, in the spring awakening, he observes and names with wide eyes ants, frogs, slow worms, butterflies, spiders and more, which he could only discover a few weeks earlier in the nature guide. And instead of snow crystals, it is now the gentle ripples on the surface of the water that glitter at us all in the magic of light.

Yesterday I took my first dip in the lake. Just a week before, it was frozen over. Accordingly, the water was icy and my dive short. All the more it refreshed, invigorated and awakened my soul! The news has reached every single cell of my body: The time has really come! Winter is over!

But it is not only birds, frogs and insects that break the silence of winter. While the first lawn mowers rattle in Germany's front gardens, here it is the giant hoovers that disturb the idyll of the forest. We call the harvesters giant hoovers because they sound exactly like hoovers. Only more monstrous. While in Germany we are somehow used to lawn mowers and hedge trimmers roaring through the neighbourhood, it is somehow absurd in the isolated forest location here that on some days harvesters are at work in all directions to trim the spring forest. You suddenly realise that the forest around here is not wilderness, but at best partly savaged forest. It is particularly frightening when you suddenly find a beloved piece of forest, in whose ponds frogs were spawning just a short time ago, completely devastated. The heavy chains of these monsters have left deep furrows in the forest floor. Dying stumps rise forlornly into the air, while trunks lie rutted by the wayside. Ants still swarm around in panic even days after the destruction, searching for the cause of their damaged nest. It makes us sad and angry how carelessly nature is treated here. As if trees were mere commodities to be harvested, as if all the creatures living around them, in them, on them and under them were worthless or even non-existent. It is even more sad to realise that a part of us, despite our sadness and anger, is also quite numb to this destruction of nature. Harvesters, clear-cutting, monocultural forestry and the like are almost part of Sweden (and Norway) for us. And when the wind was unfavourable, we were listening to the rattling and clattering of the huge sawmill all winter long. Every day, countless trucks come in and out of there to unload entire forests, or to pick them up again, sawn up and packed in plastic. As the traffic of lorries through this timber factory is increasing, the tranquil country road, which leads past idyllic lakes and through mossy forests, is now being widened. Kilometres of trees are currently being felled and uprooted for this purpose. Like heaps of corpses, the fat tree roots lie stacked on top of each other at the roadside. Involuntarily, we were reminded of black and white photographs from concentration camps. Today it is unimaginable that people in Europe regarded other people as so worthless that they were "disposed of" at short notice. The comparison may seem a bit drastic to some. But I believe that the understanding of some human life at that time was similar to that which those involved in such forest destruction feel today towards the living trees.

As sad as the reality is today, it has also improved a lot in the last decades. And even if many things may not seem so, on the whole everything is changing for the better. The awareness of mankind is growing and one day our grandchildren, perhaps just our great-grandchildren, will be shocked by photos of uprooted trees and deforested areas and will be surprised at how little appreciation, respect and love people once had for other living beings. Even if it seems impossible at this point in time that forests are being fully felled and entire ecosystems destroyed for money, it is clear to us: we are going in a different direction. It strengthens us all the more to turn our vision into reality one day: To live on a land, yes, to live with a land and to regard this land as sacred. We want to live in friendship with the beings living there and see ourselves as a part of the community of nature. And when we cut down a tree because we need firewood or timber, we want to do it in acknowledgement and gratitude. We want to honour the tree, because it gives life and is life, and as a part of the great balance. But this is still a vision for the future. Even though we have already planted much of our vision as seeds in the core of our being and some of it is already bearing its fruit outwards, it still seems far away for us to call a land our home. So much still seems to be missing; the place, the money, other people. But even if sometimes a huge impatience arises in us, we can remain mostly relaxed and trust that as long as we stay on our path, everything will eventually fall into place. A strong tree with deep roots grows slowly.

While the birds begin to build their nests, we are in the process of dissolving ours. Because the warm temperatures lure us out into the world, into the vastness of the Swedish forests! We look back on 8 months of settled life. At the beginning, the colourfulness of the Swedish autumn, with all its abundance of mushrooms and berries. Then a somewhat exhausting time of constant rain and the onset of cold. How pleasant it was when the temperatures finally dropped into the deep, dry minus degrees. What magic we were able to discover in ice and snow, what joy Elouan found in frozen streams and snowflakes falling from the sky (if you are interested in insights into our past months, please feel free to look at the past blog posts). Even though we lived here isolated in the forest; it was never lonely. Friends were visiting us from time to time. Also our mothers came for some days. In between, we even lived with a second family. Beside celebrating joy and games togethe we were allowed to look into the deepest depths of community processes. Interpersonal conflicts, as well as trying to keep up with the agreed working hours while two children kept us constantly busy, challenged us deeply at times. In the end, it was almost nice to be just us for a change. But in it all, we were able to find our joys, values and teachings. Now a great chapter is coming to an end. I don't know the last time I stayed in one place for so long. Apart from a trip to the local national park, and shopping trips to the town of "Ed" about an hour away, we were just here. In the house, in the garden, in the forest, at the lake. We certainly didn't move more than 5 km away from the house. It was a faithful winter home for us, the tranquil Källekasa in Dalsland. We feel great gratitude towards this place, and Matthias, the owner of Källekasa. And to all the people who have prepared firewood over the past summers. All the nicer to leave some gifts to this place: A new sun terrace, a bookshelf made out of a birch tree from the local forest, a shelter full of firewood, a splash shield for the sink in the kitchen, a tip-top tidy workshop, with new workbenches, insulated drain pipes so they won't be blocked by ice next winter, lots of young plants for the garden, and three non-functioning saunas. Yes, the sauna thing was a thing. Somehow, I guess, it wasn't meant to be that we got to enjoy the sweat this winter. There was the worm in it right from the start. At some point I had to surrender and end the venture.

Instead, the foundations for a really nice log cabin sauna have been laid, which will probably soon be completed by journeymen. Most of the logs are already peeled and lying next to it. One of the attempts to build a temporary sauna can now be used as a forest terrace with a view of the lake, and another offers a wonderful forest play cave for children and adults. Even if something in us longs to put energy into our own land for a change, it feels good to leave this place knowing that we have enriched it by being here. I think that's something you learn sooner or later in your life of travel; leave a place more beautiful than you found it, so that it will always remain open to others. And if you believe in karma, you know the rest anyway ;)

There is still a lot to do before our leaving on 4 May: Cleaning the car, cleaning the cabin, cleaning the house, painting the wall that Elouan had drawn on, closing the bookshelf, carrying our things from the house into the cabin and sorting them, carrying Matthias' things from the shed into the house and sorting them, and much more. But we are motivated to give it another relaxed full push, because now that the air smells warm again, the wind is favourable enough to weigh anchor and set sail. Where to? Only Allah knows. Or the universe. Or the three Norns who weave the threads of fate together. In any case, our first course is further north; into the spring explosion of Sweden. To enjoy the freedom and peace of Scandinavia's beautiful nature for a while. Then find money somewhere. Meet places and people who can inspire us for our life's journey. Maybe even find our home, our homeland? One thing is certain: After midsummer we will slowly sail down to the Alps. What happens in between? You will certainly find out in future blog posts. Until then, have a great year and enjoy the miracle that is you!

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"I have to scream a spring shout or I'll burst. Listen! You surely hear the spring!" -Ronja Robber's Daughter