Snoweagle’s Lofty Perspectives
An eagle’s eye on life…I den mörkaste natt…
I den mörkaste natt finns ändock hopp om ljus. En skimrande låga som sprider värma med sin glans. Spröda stämmor som klinga och skänka glädje och tro på gott och kärlek. Dofter av bakverk och nymalet svart. Glittret som stjärnors strålars krans.
En riktigt God Lucia
(translation of a mail sent to all my swedishspeaking friends)
“In the darkest of nights there is still hope for light. A shimmering, flickering flame spreads its warmth and light in us all. Delicate voices bring joy and a hope for love and goodness. The magic fragrance of fresh baked saffron buns and fresh brewed coffee. Tinsel like the glistening sparks of eternal stars – Lucia!”
Sancta Lucia
On this day we celebrate one of the most swedish and moving of all festivals. Or rather not so much a festival as a cermony. Sancta Lucia.
The Queen of Light comes into each home all dressed in white with candles in a wreath on her head, followed by an entourage of “luciamaidens“ (her handmaidens, all dressed in white gowns with tinsel in their hair, holding a candle) and “star boys” (with white papercones on their heads, holding a candle or a stick with a paper star), all singing a great part of the traditional christmas songs that have been sung for centuries. All accompanied by the sweet fragrance of fresh brewed coffee and fresh baked saffron buns and peppercakes.
It is a tradition of light and warm love so important to us all in the darkest part of the year. A tradition that is bestowed upon all recipients of the Nobel Prize each year as they are woken out of their slumber in their hotelsuites by the annual Luciabride and her singing followers. A memory for life.
A tradition that in so many ways defines Sweden internationally and conveys this sence of beauty and serene innocence so gratefully embraced by the tourist industry.
In the sentimental parts of my heart (I just love christmas), this day bears the greatest significance. It gives me warm and fuzzy feelings of days gone by. Of childhood dreams, hopes and magic. It enthralles with its beauty, with the inherent message of love to everybody and hope for a better world.
The songs that cast bridges between now and the past. The smells that trigger memories. A moment of peace in the middle of everyday hustle, bustle and stress. A moment of meditation and perhaps the beginning of bookends of a year approaching its end. Another leaf about to be turned by the hand of time.
Photo: www.imagebank.sweden.se Nicho Södling/Swedish Institute
This is the absolute “leitmotiv” sung by everybody during the procession. The “Silent Night” of 13 December, of Sankta Lucia, if you like.
Sankta Lucia (swedish trad. song)
Natten går tunga fjät
rund gård och stuva;
kring jord, som sol förlät,
skuggorna ruva.
Då i vårt mörka hus,
stiger med tända ljus,
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.
Natten går stor och stum
nu hörs dess vingar
i alla tysta rum
sus som av vingar.
Se, på vår tröskel står
vitklädd med ljus i hår
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.
Mörkret ska flykta snart
ur jordens dalar
så hon ett underbart
ord till oss talar.
Dagen ska åter ny
stiga ur rosig sky
Sankta Lucia, Sankta Lucia.
Santa Lucia (translat.)
The night goes with weighty step
round yard and (stove i.e. house, hearth?)
round earth, the sun departs
leave the woods brooding
There in our dark house,
appears with lighted candles
Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.
The night goes great and mute
now hear it swings
in every silent room
murmurs as if from wings.
Look at our threshold stands
white-clad with lights in her hair
Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.
The darkness shall soon depart
from the earth’s valleys
thus she speaks
a wonderful word to us
The day shall rise anew
from the rosy sky.
Saint Lucia, Saint Lucia.
I wish you all a joyfull Sancta Lucia
with peace and love.
The Snoweagle
Fall musings…
The ceaseless cycle of life softly spinning in undulating circles without beginning or end. Summer. Fall. Winter. Spring. Endless repetition of seasons clearly defining the progression of time and in itself a mirror of a life.
Fall has come with chilly winds rusteling stillgreen leaves with the sound of old parchement. In my memory lingers a faint echo of early spring with it’s lush green mornings so full of life and warmth. Early summer mornings on the old wooden porch already warm from the slowly rising suns first touch of solar beams. The enticing scent of freshly brewed coffe and a still warm roll waiting to be tasted and enjoyed. A moment of meditative peace. My soul breathes deeply, without effort drinking the moment so precious and dear. Memorizing. Feeling. Hearing the soft voice of nature. Closing my eyes I sit with my face turned towards the morning sun. Feeling the warmth. Bathing in the golden light that fills my soul through my closed lids. Life is good.
Memories…
Another season comes to an end and transcends into the next. Another cycle almost complete. The vibrant colors and musty smell of wilting leafes fills my senses. Memories interlocked with the code of smells are set free as synapses with a click and bright sparks release an instant (senti)mental journey back in time.
Through the dark tunnel of memories past I suddenly find myself five years old again. We had returned from Denmark to Sweden after living there a year and a half. In waiting for a new appartement-house to go through it’s finalizing stages of construction, my parents and I lived in a small cottage in the countryside.
The cottage was embedded in a forest of larch, birch and pine. It was fall and leaves were thrown through the air by windgusts, whirling around in a final dance before landing on the yellowing lawn to create a reddish brown carpet of decay.
One day my father came to me, took my hand and walked me to a remote part of the garden. There stood the tiniest little house with a slanted roof that I didn’t remember seeing before. It had one window with wooden spruces and a darkbrown wooden door. The walls were covered with leaves in all shades of yellow, red, brown and dark greens.
He walked up to the house and opened the door which creaked slightly in protest. “This is yours, my son”, he said. I stared in disbelief and then ran through the door into the tiny house. It had a small table made of planks and a small, rickety chair. In one corner stood an old rusty ironscast stove with an equally rusty frying pan on top. I was in heaven! My own house!
“But how…?”
“I built this over the weekend when you were away with mum. The walls are made of two layers of chickenwebbing filled with leaves in between and the roof is made of planks. Mum and I thought that you might like to have someplace to play since the cottage is so small.”
I was amazed. Five years old and not eactly spolied, this was truely the greatest gift I had received ever. The love of a father. The musty smell of decaying leaves filled the tiny space inside the tiny house.
And I was so happy…
Hello world!
Ah! A sentimental wiff from halcyon days past. I still recall those magic BASIC-programing days when I felt like the Master of Universe as I watched the result of my first tentative attempts at the noble art of programing in BASIC. A steady stream of “Hello World” flowed down my darkbrown ADB screen like a neverending cascade of golden yellow text. I was mezmerized – until my tutor called me back to reality and the next assignement.
Hello World indeed!
So…what makes me different…
from 70 million other blogsters? How do I stand out among 120 000 newstarted blogs / day. Not much I reckon. Yet there is that old saying that we are all unique creatures under God, so I guess there may be some hope for me and you.
The sheere mass of blogs today is mindboggling really. 70 million! (check out the latest headcount at technoratis homepage http://technorati.com/weblog/2007/04/328.html). Considering we all will have our 15 minutes of fame in our life according to Andy Warhol we better start reading each others blogs right now. OK that means if I spend 15 minutes on each blogg as of now I will need…hmmm let see…4 to the hour…96 per day…35040…1998 years to read them all.
Ah, being a buddhist…piece of cake…that will keep me busy for a couple of lifetimes. Nice. But then there is the accumulative effect of further blogs being added every 2point something second…and others being uppdated with new stories…or revised…that makes…nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Ahemmm…okoko…so what to do instead…stand out ok…how about pictures?
what did you say? I can’t place photos here? Bugger!…
how about painting with letters?
O
OO
OOO
OÖOO
OOOOO
OOOÖOO
OOOOOOO
OÖOOOOOO
OOOOOOOOO
M
M
M
M
no? what, too lame? can’t see what it is? Come on! Yuletide nearing for gods sake! Take a guess. It is green, if it is from Tchernobyl it glows in the dark…if it is from China it carries a faint whiff of chemicals…makes life a pain if it stands on a rug…even six months after the fella has left the house…in sweden they tend to dance around it on christmas eve…
Palmtree? Where did that come from? Come on! Get serious! This is a very important piece of christmas decoration that brings twinkles of expectation into the eyes of the little ones on this special day. Expectations of that Xbox that made daddy add to the mortgage (not a wise thing to do these days…)…or the kitten sweltering in a dark box with holes (oh, better put some tape over the holes so nobody can look inside)…
Yes, the christmas tree. Congratulations! There you go…have one of my homemade figbonbons with yogurth.
Okokok…so no contests either. I give up. I don’t know how to stand out in this blogcrowd…never mind.
All I say instead is…
Enjoy life and live it to the fullest!
I am off to catch another hotair bubble rising
The Snoweagle
Waves over Phi Phi…
This article was previously posted as one of my first bloggs on “Livejournal”. It was written in the aftermath of the Tsunami 26 December 2004.
A Paradise Lost…
Sleepy morning…
The sound of soft clucking waves along the sandy shore…
Peace of mind…
The pearling laughter from little children bouncing like shiny bubbles in the warm summer air…
Another good day…
Peace…
Silence…
Then a murmuring sound in the distance…
Nobody hears…
Nobody sees…
An approaching white line stretching across the horizon…
The murmuring sound grows louder…
and louder…
and louder…
Until it becomes…
A thundering, howling roar like a sonic freighttrain wall pushing the air itself in front of it…
Panic!
Too late to run!
Nowhere to run!
A brown water inferno catching up with the speed of a sportscar…!
Swirling masses of water…broken glas…sheet metal…twisted bodies…mixing with concrete blocks from demolished buildings torn down by the sheer force of the enormous energy within the tsunamiwave.
Screams of pain and fear are everywhere. Screams cut dead and replaced by others. Water turning into sludge and into mud. No up nor down. Impossible to swim. Slamming into unseen objects. Grappling for a hold. Anything. No strength. No hope. No life.
The Tsunami
The tsunami struck an unsuspecting world with its horrible strength virtually out of the blue. Images where cabled out to an unbelieving and uncomprehending world. A world, that to begin with, found it very hard to fathom the wast magnitude of the disaster.
It wasn’t the first catastrophe to mame man, but somehow the geographical scale of it, the unexpected suddenness and the fact that it happened right in front of our eyes (radio, tv, web, newspapers) on an unprecidented scale made it oh so different.
In many ways, the reaction of most people was a global one, as a direct result of the globalizing times we live in. It was a trauma shared by everyone at the same time everywhere.
Satellite photo of the Tsunami in action.
It was a trauma shared by west and east equally.
For the swedish population it was the single-file most traumatic and massive loss of lives on such a large scale since the sinking of the ferry “Estonia” 10 years prior. We are pretty much protected from large scale disasters of any kind, so this hit us in a very soft spot.
What is reality in many ways to others, became an incredible shock to us.
Tsunami Aid
It is sad to admit and realize this, but the fact that so many westerners perished in the tsunami, is most likely that one reason why the nations dished out such an incredible amount of money in such a short time. We all did, me included.
That and the fact that most of us either were directly affected by a personal loss of close friends and family or knew somebody who had lost somebody. I personally lost several friends on Phi Phi and Khao Lak. A loss on a scale that created a national trauma. A trauma which to a great extent still is very present in many of us to this day.
A trauma that shared by and with many other nations and therefor initiated such a strong reaction. A kind of community in sorrow was created for the briefest of moments and stood as proof to all of us just what empathic feelings mankind is capable of, where everybody makes that extra effort and gives just a tiny portion of their income to support others in need.
How easy it could be to make this world into a much better and different place if we could keep up that momentum of care and understanding. However, memories fade to fast too soon in most of us and are replaced by the deep dark shadows of new disasters attracting the insatiable attention of the media hungry for the next scoop.
The Book that tells the story and keeps memories alive
My contribution so far, in regard to the tsunami, has been this book that I made together with a dedicated group of people, who all had losses to bear from that day.
The name of the book is “Phi Phi Island – a paradise lost”. It tells the story of Phi Phi Island before the tsunami and continues with what happened during and after the tsunami.
By now it is probably submerged in an onslaught of various other recounts of what happened that day. For some odd reason, in part political no doubt, Koh Phi Phi has been kept out of the main focus all the time. All eyes have, with very good reason, been concentrated on the plight of Banda Ache as well as on Phuket and Khao Lak.
It has been difficult to create an interest in people as to what happened on Phi Phi Island, in spite of the fact that over 1300 people still are missing, presumed dead, on the island (among those 578 swedes). This book is one of several attempts to tell that story and to remind people of what happened.
The Foundation(s)
The book is one of several projects initiated by the swedish foundation “Thailand Islands Foundation”. The foundation itself is the creation of Johan Stael von Holstein and his wife Jessica. For them Phi Phi Island had become a second home after many visits as backpackers and as a family over the years.
Johan was one of many in Sweden felt an immediate urge to act, and one of those who had the possibility to act very quickly, by going down to Phi Phi in an attempt to understand what had happened and what needed to be done. The foundation was formed in an instant. It’s purpose was to provide a formalized and legalized way of collecting funds that could be used in helping Phi Phi Island back on it’s feet.
In that initial period, several other foundations were initiated with the sole purpose to help the islanders. Apart from Thailand Island Foundation, the others were Hi Phi Phi, and Phi Phi Releve Toi. These three organisations cooperated in the organisation of work done mostly by volunteers and islanders.
Everything around the book has been made possible through the very generous sponsorship from many, many people and companies, who have contributed with their photos, their stories and their time. We created a little core volunteergroup consisting of Magnus Rehn as Project Manager, Carin Selvin as Main Writer and myself as Art Director.
We were helped immensely by a very gifted group of photographers (Roger Schederin, Magnus Laupa and Fredric Alm from Kontinent) who did a great job processing each and every photo used in the book. Photos that were sent to us by amateurs and pros alike!
It took time and it was hard work mostly done during those hours left after work and on weekends. And still it is nothing compared to the pure physical challenge so many faced on Phi Phi Island itself.
The Heroes
Many people grew beyond themselves in face of the incredible hardship they were standing up against from day zero after the wave. Entrepreneurial spirits who quickly took command and helped people who were badly hurt and needed medical help.
Men and women who took charge of helping the islanders back to life. Who selflessly aided in the gruesome work of gathering any items that might help in identifying those who had lost their lives on that day. Heroes who with their bare hands tirelessly removed tons upon tons of rubble and debris from the island. Who made sure that help was given where the local government showed scant interest in doing so in the beginning.
People like Carl Magnus Steiner (owner of Carlito’s Bar), Emiel Kok (founder and driving force of Hi Phi Phi), Darren Windetts, Geoffrey (Geoff) Colmer, Erik Liungman, DTiem, Jenny and Neill and many many others.
There are so many many more who deserve to be mentioned by name, to never be forgotten.
Carl Steiner paying a longtail boatsman 25 000B so he will be able to repair his boat. (photo: Titicaco)
Aiye and Emiel from Hiphiphi. (photo: Titicaco)
Carl Steiner and Geoff Colmer (on one of the five daily rounds collecting items for identification. (photo: Titicaco)
Carl and Geoff on one of the five daily rounds collecting items for identification. (photo: Titicaco)
So many volunteers who willingly offered their time, their money and their strength to help. I wish it were possible to gather the names of all those who took part in this, Thai and Farang alike so that a “Hall of Recognition” could be created in recognition of all those who truly deserve rememberance. Would that be possible?
What about the Book?
Today the book exists in two language versions – swedish and english.
The swedish version was released in Stockholm on 28 September at a releaseparty in the restaurant Koh Phangan.
The english version was subsequently relesed on 1 November on Phi Phi Island in Carlito’s Bar which was one of the major gathering points for volunteers during the first months after the tsunami.
Anyway…the book is sold in various divingshops on the island and we are constantly in the process of trying to find the cheapest way possible to send more books from Sweden down to Phi Phi. It is my sincere hope that the book can somehow contribute to the recovery of the island and it’s population.
If you feel so inclined 
please visit the books website www.phiphibook.com and have a look. (Many of the links to amazon.com etc. are unfortunately not valid anymore.)
Take care and enjoy life at its fullest!
Robert
“Life is a gift so easily taken for granted”
Another letter to a friend…
Dear friend, Things change all the time. Such is life that nothing is – or should be constant or certain. Things die and you grieve their loss…the passing of love…the end of an employment…the death of somebody close to you…The End But then again…where one thing ends, another begins. New possibilities arise and create new hope for better things to come. I know, it may sound simplistic but – don’t loose faith nor your will and drive to continue. They say that when one window closes, another opens someplace else. However, to see the next one opening, you need to keep moving on. Those who remain standing still, staring at the window that once was open, will only be left behind staring into the dark. Move on and create your own possibilities to encounter new openings! Be prepared for a window opening where you least expect it. Perhaps with a completely different view than what you expected to see. Have the courage to step through this window with an open mind and soul – it may take you to uncharted territory where your soul finds space and free air to expand and grow once again. my dear friend, keep the faith, until my next letter… in quiet esteem, Robert
