Some days ago, a little boy here in Sweden died. Children do that now and then, however much we don’t want it to happen, but in this particular case the boy didn’t die due to an accident or to illness. No, he died due to being forgotten. After having spent the entire day strapped into […]
In recent years, we’ve heard a lot about light pollution, this being the encroachment of electrical light on the darkness of night. I don’t think anyone denies the benefit of artificial light – for those of us that live in the northern hemisphere, life would be very, very, very (you get the picture, right?) dark
In a little town in southern Sweden stands a magnificent baroque church, the Church of Holy Trinity, inaugurated in the early seventeenth century. At the time, the present somnolent town of Kristianstad was a bustling metropolis (in relative terms) a centre of administration in the Danish kingdom. Yup; Danish. When the church was built, most
A letter to someone very dear: “Time is running out. I want to tell you that I love you, so very much do I love you. But my tongue is glued to my palate, my vocal chords are incapable of forming that necessary initial vowel. There are times when I dislike you, when I find
No sooner have we celebrated the fact that we’ve all survived the end of the world as predicted by the Maya calendar (which, BTW, seems to have been a TOTAL misunderstanding as the Mayans mainly concluded one cycle of time would end on the 21 of December 2012 and be replaced by a new one)
I spent Christmas away from home – very far away. On Christmas Eve, I lay awake most of the night listening to the hyenas scrabbling at the canvas of our tent. On Christmas Day, I lay just as awake, listening to the two lions that roared in chorus (or maybe they were roaring AT each
Man, mud and jeeps – a reflection on human perseverance Read More »
There’s a poem I particularly love that’s called Canción de Cuna (Lullaby) by Juan Ramón Jimenez, a Spanish poet. No; dormida no te beso. Tú me has dado tu alma con tus ojos abiertos -o jardín estrellado- a tu cuerpo. No, dormida no eres tú…No, no, no te beso! …Infiel te fuera a ti si
Since man took his first shaky intellectual steps, we’ve been thinking about The Final Day. All religious beliefs contain some sort of Day of Reckoning, and implicit in this is the belief that Someday It Will All End. The Maya Indians believed that this would come to happen on December 21 of 2012. Okay, so
There’s a poem by Swedish Nobel Laureate Pär Lagerkvist that deals with death and afterlife, in which he rather sadly states that “soon it will all be taken from me; the trees, the clouds, the ground upon which I tread. I will wander on alone, leaving not the slightest trace.” But people do leave imprints
One of my favourite pastimes is to visit old churches. Not the fancy, huge Cathedrals, but rather the small, dilapidated churches that so generously dot our continent. The gate to the graveyard might squeak (or yet it might not, the hinges kept oiled by some diligent soul), headstones stand in ordered rows that degenerate to