In winter 1999 in Stockholm I saw an article with the headline
"The mooses protest", which is also the name of an old song. Looking at it I got a sudden inspiration and I quickly wrote a long story about the protesting mooses and their intentions.
I made a copy of it and went out to the mail box to send the story to a friend.
When I came back and opened the front door I heard a big boom behind my back! It was the sound of a lightning! We usually do not have any thunder in winter so it was something very unusual.
From Native American Indian mythology I had learned that the moose is the
"Keeper of Thunder and Lightning"! Wow!
I had written a fable about the mooses´ protests against the high frequency towers, that Telia (mobile-phone company) had put up in the forests.
Seven years later a moose destroyed their office in Örebro by committing suicide in the room.
http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/alg-sprang-in-i-telia-huset/
Here is the moose-protest, where they tell you that they demand free passage over all roads and the immediate stop of the sprayings of poisonous chemicals on their food.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPn_fcrhZ40
Half a year later, in summer 1999, I jumped into my old car and drove off to Värmland to visit the so called
"Forest People" where I had never been before.
I lived in my teepe high up on their mountain over summer and then I met the Hermit, who was living alone on another mountain top and he said that I could rent a room in his house if I wanted to.
I moved in and after a while a woman who had a cottage in the forest said: "Take your paintings and come with me!" So I did and at the end of the day I had become a member of the group of artisans who in summer sell their handicrafts in the old
Church Stables in Ekshärad.
http://www.segenas.se/kyrkstallar.htm
There was a carpenter who made small pieces of wood shaped in the form of a moose and I thought it could be fun to make such a drawing on a card and after a month I had made a heap of moose-cards whereafter I realised that it was very fun to make cards and I continued to invent other designs.
At that time I was mainly focusing on the old Swedish patterns that we call Kurbits, so now I started to make these kurbits patterns also on my cards.
So every summer I now spent 14 days in the Church Stables and that was the only time that I was spending outside of the Hermit´s mountain, which was a silent place with no neighbours. Only the sounds of the birds, some sheep, a rooster, the cat, the rain, the storms that knocked down the trees, the thunder and the fire in the stove.
Almost no sound at all from the silent Hermit, who was walking around in the darkness with his little lamp, chewing on his pipe.
The people in Ekshärad are traditionally called the Red Indians and in the middle of Ekshärad there is a huge Totem Pole, which shows the history of Ekshärad.
http://xhar.se/kyrkheden/totem.html
Even their little "super market" is called
Indianen (the Red Indian).
Today there is a Dutch woman who runs a place called
The SundDance Ranch where she has "cowboy horses".
http://www.sundanceranch.eu/index.php/en
For six years I was also a hermit in the forest, carrying water and chopping woods and making fire every black and ice-cold morning during long winters.
There was no electricity to warm up the house, only the real, living fire.
We never through any garbage into this fire, nothing from the modern world except for tiny pieces of candle grease to start the fire. Never any paper! Only material from the forest, like small, dry pine sticks and dry lichen.
I can say that my higher mind woke up from being confronted with only fire, earth, water and wind in such an intense way for such a long period of isolation and I got the answers to my main philosophical questions. From the stove!
Intense isolation can be better for the mind
than an overload of all kinds of information.
 |
Often I did not even dare to go out
because this one was standing in front of the house. |
After six years I moved to Torsby, which means
Tor´s Village. The name Tor is the same as the English name Thor, the old Nordic God of Thunder, who comes over the sky with his hammer to wake us up..
Now was the time to learn how to use a computer which I knew nothing about as I had been living isolated without any information about such things at all and also without access to the electricity net.
My old friends had now started to use Facebook and I could not even start up a laptop.
It took years to learn the basics.
Don´t drive to fast in this area!
Once I got a huge moose on the top of the car. The meeting car lifted up the big moose, which then continued to slide in full speed on the roof of our car.
Once, on my way to Ekshärad, I met a car which was flashing and flashing extremely much with at least ten lights that were all over the front of his car. I did not understand what it was about, but when I had almost stopped my car a huge Moose bull came running towards me on my side of the road!!!
Another day, on the narrow gravel road in the deep pine forest, I suddenly remembered that an old hunter had told me that this was the area that belonged to a moose cow. So I slowed down and then she appeared on the road in front of me.
Cards
Small cards are deeply rooted in my subconscious mind because when I was a child I had my grandmother´s box with beautiful cards to play with (and no other pictures in the home except for two or three oil paintings, that she had made).
Here is a card that she painted when she was 16 years old.
I have remade it and changed it a little.
