Walking Sarek
body and Science in a sub-Arctic Wild
What happens when you walk the wild of the sub-Arctic Swedish mountains, as if for the first time? This is a travel story of a week’s solo hike by a natural scientist intimately familiar with these mountain landscapes. Part travel book, part reflective meeting of the land’s rocky formations and its inhabitants, the reader is taken along a path of discovery of what it means to experience landscape without denying our understanding of the land. By allowing our personal experience to return and meet what we already can say, the world opens up in wonder again and restores a deep sense of belonging. The book is richly illustrated throughout with the author’s landscape photography.
Jan Boelhouwers is Professor of Geography with a specialisation in cold region landscape development and slope processes. As a geomorphologist, he has extensive research experience from sub-polar regions of the southern and northern hemisphere, as well as southern African mountains. Over the past fifteen years he has integrated philosophies and practices of embodied awareness in his understanding of natural landscapes.
“As a recovering academic, Jan Boelhouwers finds fresh words as he explores the life that is right in front of him. A tale of rocks, large landscape and unexpected experiences, this travel story will want you to pack your bags, leave all sense of culture, and just experience the world as it is supposed to be.” Joakim Elisson.
Tomorrow, 27 July 2014, I will get aboard the Arctic Circle night train from Uppsala to Gällivare and then take the bus to Stora Sjöfallet to hike in Swedish Lapland for a week. It will be 32 years after my first hike in Swedish Lapland that I revisit the same location of Stora Sjöfallet. I was then a Dutch student in Physical Geography and walked with three study friends north to Kebnekaise and on to Riksgränsen. This time I will go south into Sarek, probably towards the Akka massif that we viewed from a distance then, maybe also to Sarektjåkka, the highest peak in this national park.
Of course, I go because I love this sub-Arctic alpine wilderness. I am attracted to the idea of walking in the wild without paths, mountain stations, rangers or mobile phone connection. Something happens with nature above the treeline. Both in high mountains and in polar regions the balance of life changes in favour of tundra, rock, ice and the challenges of weather. I find myself a visitor in a strange land where I am always in the tangible presence of forces so much larger than myself. And there is another motivation this time.
Mountains in cold regions have been a topic of academic study for me for over 30 years. You could say I have an educated view of them. Over the past twelve years I have visited Swedish Lapland every summer, mostly in the Abisko mountains. Now a professor in geomorphology I have done fieldwork with students and colleagues on climate and ground frost-related processes and landforms, their interaction with ecosystems, landscape effects of lemmings etc. The more I read about this kind of natural landscape, the more concepts and theories become entangled in my understanding of this wild nature. Through my education I place a cultural understanding on what I meet when walking. No longer do I see the mountain, but ‘the folded metamorphic gneiss’, the signs of ‘weathering’ processes, the resulting ‘block fields’ and their indicators of climate change. Academic study brings more distinctions and subtleties, but also more of a distance, as if my academic knowledge creates a misty veil, a filter that stands between me and the landscape. Carl Jung described this as the second creation of the world.
More than anything, I want to use this hike to reconnect with the wild directly, the primary world as perceived through my human bodily awareness. It is that raw direct engagement that can build again a felt relationship with landscape; mountains where culture is not absent but also does not dominate or impose on a more direct speaking of Earth. I want to return to a landscape that has fascinated me for so many years freshly, with a beginner’s mind.
How does my educated understanding interact with a direct embodied knowing? And what do I mean by ‘embodied knowing’ and ‘beginner’s mind’? There is something I need to clarify about this embodied engagement with landscape. Surely, creating knowledge always is based in human experience and perception. In other words, my views of the world are human perspectives based in a human body. This what ‘phenomenology’ recognizes and works with. David Abram (1997) formed an entry point here, while Lakoff and Johnsson (1999) go deeper if you like philosophy. Gene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit is, as far as I know, the most subtle and profound understanding of the nature of human embodiment and lived process.
More important than theory are my own practices of deepening experience of the land. At the same time as my annual fieldtrips to the Abisko mountains started, I also entered an ongoing journey of self-study with Russell Delman. I committed to a regular sitting practice, the so-called ‘just sitting’ or shikantaza, as beautifully described by Uchiyama (2004). Just sitting offers a way of just being with my thoughts, to meet them with kind-heartedness without being caught up in their stories. Over time this practice has shown me the relativity of my thinking about landscape, how to hold them lightly. My science found its rightful place again as a tool for understanding and appreciation of nature rather than an identity within me that claims to know reality. This is an ongoing journey.
Russell also introduced me to the surprisingly profound practices of awareness through movement developed by Moshé Feldenkrais. These are gentle movements aimed at developing a more subtle awareness of the physical body, its freedom and constrictions. They have offered a path of discovery into the wisdom of the body, the way my personal history expresses itself in the way I can and am restricted in my posture and movement. At its deepest level it has taught me how I close myself off to free experiencing and new learning by physically contracting and how that can be released by simply bringing my attention to these places. I am reminded of Carl Rogers’ curious paradox: I need to fully accept myself as I am before I can change.
The third component of Russell’s program is based on Focusing, the practice of listening and speaking from the bodily sense of a lived situation. I have taken like a fish to water to this practice and Focusing has become a way of life more than anything. The body as a living process knows its situation. Where my thinking can go in all directions, when I pause and take time to listen, my bodily sense speaks unmistakably what feels right or wrong for it. It brings a way of authentic knowing that carries a deeper truth for me than any theoretical construct. For example, when I cross a road my body knows how to respond to traffic instantaneously without me thinking about it. When walking in the countryside, just one step changes unremarkable scenery into one of wondrous beauty. My body response is instantaneous, very precise and often full of implicit meaning.
Particular for me as a physical geographer, I have spent much time developing a way of listening and bringing words to the way I meet and engage the landscape in which I find myself. My situated, bodily living meets landscape and in the meeting something happens. Most remarkable is often the reciprocity in this meeting. Pausing, just sensing in the moment opens up something that is more than what I already carry within me. The landscape opens up in the interaction and offers itself in return to my receptiveness. Whatever comes can be put in words that are often metaphorical, full of surprise and somehow capable of deep meaning. It is my intention to seek this kind of meeting with the Sarek landscape. I will bring a voice recorder and use this Focusing approach to explore this embodied listening in nature and how it interacts with my scientifically educated embodied mind.
It is 17:40 I’m in my tent and it rains outside. I’ve just eaten supper, a delightful combination of instant noodles, soya mince and sardines in tomato sauce and it tasted wonderful. My body needed this, it has been a pretty tough first walking day.
Last night Claire dropped me off at the station. The night train is fifty minutes delayed due to a thunder storm over Stockholm. The warm, humid summer evening in the centre of town weighs down in silence. I sit on the steps leading down from the station platform to the cycle parking area, taking in the sun that is still out above the high-rise apartment blocks around me. The rumble of a lone car echoes toward me every now and then in an otherwise seemingly deserted town. A few other backpackers idling on the platform are the only other people around. A voice out of nowhere announces the imminent arrival of the train that two minutes later hisses towards me and comes to a standstill with a dry screech and shudder. I lug my backpack on board and enter an overnight cabin. It has three bunks on either side. The cabin is already occupied by five men so my hope for some quiet and privacy vaporizes before it is even an articulated thought. At the next station lots of people enter the train. Two girls enter our cabin, looking lost and ask if they can sit with us. Their train has been cancelled, also due to the thunder storm and so have no place to go in our now overloaded train. We accommodate them up to Sundsvall where we arrive at 23:30.
After Sundsvall we finally put our bunks down and do so hurriedly to try to get some sleep. In my case that doesn’t work very well with my head right under an open window, the loud noise of the train and occasional snoring competitions. Finally dropping off in the early morning an announcement at 7am tells us that we have to vacate the train in half an hour and take replacement busses to Gällivare. No reason given. We immediately get up and start packing our bags, preparing to leave the train. This means we also leave behind the bistro car where I planned to have a good breakfast before starting my walk.
The bus takes us to Porjus over a potholed E45 with many roadworks. In town we chase the regional bus, the bus driver speaks agitatedly in his mobile phone about wasted time. We catch up with bus 93 in front of a petrol station, drag our bags into its luggage compartment and take off for a drive on a single lane tar road into swamps and stunted sub-Arctic spruce forest. Bus 93, which also delivers newspapers along the way, eventually arrives at mid-day at the hydroelectricity dam where I will cross Akkajaure (jaure = lake), my entry point into the Stora Sjöfallet and Sarek national parks. So far today I’ve had one apple and one banana, the last fresh things I took with me. Still, a roadside lunch doesn’t appeal and I walk across the dam and start my climb through mountain birch forest. It is not steep at first, but without a path finding my way takes some attention. As soon as I’m out of the birch trees I stop for lunch and have my ration of four knäckebröd with peanut butter and jam. The climb out of the valley that follows is a slog, the pack feels heavy and uncomfortable, the overgrown terrain requires pushing through dwarf willow scrub with their feet in slopping mud and I’m tired. As soon I get to the top I descend into a block-strewn valley with a small lake and pitch my tent. Soon rain sets in rattling on my tent. I’m kind of fed up with this day.
Rule number one for embodied practices in nature: you need to be fairly comfortable. Hard physical exercise took up so much of my attention today that there is no way I could be available for a more subtle awareness of the landscape. You need to be available for something else than straining muscles and 24kg on your back. Out in nature, absolutely, but not in this way. That’s the overwhelming take home message after day one.
It’s early evening and the rain has stopped. I get out of the tent to see where I am. A crow flies by with a challenging call: ‘what are you doing here? Who are you in this landscape?’ a question that arises out of being seen. Walking here, my presence is noticed as something new entering this community of beings large and small and very awake. There is a small mountain with a distinct presence straight in front of me. It may not have a name on the map, it certainly is not the highest peak, but it is old, it has seen things and it sees all who enter its domain. It’s like the grandmother of all the boulders scattered across the surface here. Each boulder has a voice, this is a playground.
The ground is unusually dry, smaller streams carry no water in their beds, small wetlands are spongy but not soppy. There is plenty of cloudberry here, which is new for me. Plenty of blueberry, I taste the food of bear, a first taste of this sub-Arctic jungle. This is a landscape exposed and raw. Formed out of winter, it knows frost and snow and ice. There is no abundant diversity of life here. This place is more primitive, a pioneering landscape closely connected still to the life of the bedrock, the first coming forth out of this geological Earth. An old ongoing evolution surrounds me. Contortions in the bedrock tell a very deep and ancient history, a telling from a source that is primordially connected to the rest of the universe. An image comes of the early days of the solar system in which matter gathers around the Sun to form this clump, this planet. This Earth moulded by very primitive forces, fiery demons that live deep within it. Earth appears solid, immobile, but not so. You can see where Tolkien got his inspirations from.
I meet the mountain, it meets me, its presence tangible. And I meet a different spirit: sky, air, and carried through the sky this strange alien element of water, this shape changer that works the earth surface and in and through it. This is where my geomorphology comes to life, my understanding of transformations of the earth surface and an unfolding from abiotic processes to organic life. Geomorphology as the study of the preparation for earthly life. How is it that this rock in front of me crumbles? That the shape that remains, the morphology of geo (earth), is a token of everything that has already been worn away, the negative, the inverted space. All that has dissipated from this clunk of rock, from this particular part of earth, to offer itself as the material of life. Earth material out of which life evolves and continues evolving, cycling and transforming through it. All the boulders are stages of that, all with their common and particular storytelling.
Geomorphology as an academic discipline defines itself, that is, the people practicing it have come to a consensus about what they collectively profess, as the study of landforms and processes that shape the earth surface, what we call landscape. The hundreds of books and tens of thousands of papers written by this community of practitioners have named and classified this continuous earth surface into objects and forms, and grouped and labelled the ongoing transformations and evolving of landscape into processes and mechanisms. Based on these labels, theories are developed about what drives change in landscapes, the importance of climate, rock structures, weathering, etc. as conceptual ideas. These have become cultural constructs that are now so persuasive that by and large the whole scientific community accepts these concepts not as abstractions of reality, but as reality itself. It is the only legitimate language on offer in this, what Shawn Wilson (2008) refers to as the ‘dominant paradigm’.
Already in this first contact with landscape, bringing some words to how I experientially perceive landscape, differences with a rational description are immediately apparent.
‘Each boulder has a voice’, ‘water as a shape-changer’, ‘the fiery demons that live deep within the Earth’, ’my presence is noticed by this community of beings’
Landscape as animate, filled with beings that are alive, that talk back and that live as a community. This is by all means an unscientific, irrational understanding of landscape. The words that came about the ancient evolving of Earth, used some idea I read about how planets emerged out of gravitational concentrations of matter circling the Sun. But that conceptual idea lives in my head as an enriching supplement, rather than as a core of my personal mythology of this Earth. And to be sure, this personal mythology is also a construction, a secondary step out of what is experienced as lived reality.
I am inclined to shift my understanding that all concepts are metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1981, 1999), to embrace the phenomena of earth as allegories that carry a deeper meaning, an essential knowing that my individual life is intricately interconnected with all of Earth, indeed the whole cosmos (Hesse 1976, Gendlin 1997). Concepts as metaphors seems correct for our cultural and scientific understandings, but natural phenomena carry a more, as in ‘the more’ of bio-spiritual focusing (Campbell and McMahon 1997), and are better understood as allegories. This natural landscape, or nature, as I encounter it here lives deeper than a complex system of interrelated objects linked by flows of energy and matter. Even complex systems theory, which allows for self-organisation and emergent properties and more-than-deterministic interactions, is fundamentally based in an already objectified, and therefore secondary, conceptualization of reality.
The philosophy of the implicit by Gene Gendlin (1997) appears most subtly aware as an encompassing framework that integrates both the experiential and scientific models of reality. In this case, it feels very right to understand natural landscape as an ‘intricate complexity’ of an ongoing living-forward unfolding (=process), out of which forms manifest. As I re-read this transcript, I am reminded of David Bohm (1980), who summarizes his understanding of ‘The implicate order’ as:
The proposal for a new general form of insight is that all matter is of this nature: That is, there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances. Rather, they are different aspects of one whole and unbroken movement. (Bohm, 1980: p.14).
Thus, ‘interaction first’ before objects even exist. That means not the action between objects, as ‘interaction’ is normally defined. As my own bodily living process is part of this ongoing unfolding of nature, my human interconnectedness with this wilderness I am standing in, is a given. At that sensory level of interconnection, landscape does see me, speaks back to me, is animated, without me anthropomorphizing, projecting a sentimentality, onto it.
I am most encouraged here by the writing of Shawn Wilson (2008) who aims to establish a philosophical paradigm for indigenous knowledge and research. Core of what he defines as indigenous knowledge are the principles of relationality, and relational accountability. It is exactly this relationality, what I describe as the fundamental human interconnectedness with nature that feels acknowledged and embraced by this framework. If I accept that then there cannot but be a deep respect for nature and my relationship with it. Relational accountability is then the core principle of a respectful ethics that takes care of, rather than exploits and dominates over, other people and nature.