Kärlek (Love)

Why did I love Sweden? 

How does one come to fall in love with any person or place? What precipitates such a transformation, from comfort and congeniality to a sudden yearning for more, to hold the object of such desire in continuous and direct view of the eye and heart. When does this love become a new truth, as holy and vital as every movement in the universe that has served to bring that moment into inception? Said the little prince, "Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye." 

I knew I was in love when everyday existence became poetry. Until the day of my return to Sweden, the only thing that had ever made a place home for me was my family. When I returned from Berlin, I realized I had missed Lund in the four days I had been gone. I had missed that cold little country made warm by the sincerity of its people. And when I returned to California, I was not leaving Lund for home. I was leaving home for home. Again and again, Swedes, both homegrown and naturalized, were like flowers in a cold spring. Slow, perhaps, to open, but once they did, what beauty, and how worth waiting for. I lived in concrete-laced suburbia no longer, and found myself instead in a place gently cradled by nature, where the people lived in a mutual coexistence with the earth, with the understanding that nature was not something to be dominated, but rather an entity to be respected and even revered. A place where roses grew out of the sidewalk. A place where the night, for all its bitter cold and growing hours, became a place of solace and quiet safety. 

Mind you, I don't mean to exoticize Sweden. Many aspects have to do with the circumstance of that time in my life: it happened to be the first time I truly lived by myself, outside of America. And this place just so happened to be the medium of a lot of personal growth and change. I think I would have made the most of my experience if I had gone to South Africa or Turkey, too, which were my 2nd and 3rd choices (how different the experience would have been!). But it's unfair to take away from Sweden its unique characteristics that were conducive to such change, as tough as these growing pains can be. 

Not to be overlooked was the growth of a love of self. I do not mean vanity, which is not lacking in Sweden, as much as so many other Western countries. Rather, I was made to fall a little in love with myself, in a way that has happened so rarely in my life. My reflection was altered in the slightest of ways with Sweden as my looking glass, and what I saw was at once unfamiliar and more beautiful than myself, and yet was still me. Self-acceptance was sown at last, and it flourished in the Swedish cold. 

And then the memories. 

I remember dark, winter nights, lying in candlelit rooms, with Swedish jazz playing as quietly as the rain that pitter-pattered on the windows. 

I remember the surprising pride that stirred in my voice when I told Stefano in Berlin that I was studying in Sweden, and he was always welcome to visit from Italy.

I remember not regretting saying yes to dancing, even though I can't dance. 

I remember getting lost, all the time. And to be lost, was to be found.

I remember biking, and biking, and biking, and finding, ironically, absolute freedom in the line that closed upon itself, to make a circle. 

I remember that delicious principle of USUFRUCT. Natural and harmless. And I remember asking permission, just once. Matt and I were riding past a bunch of farms, and I noticed a house with an apple tree in the front, still loaded with good-looking apples this late into the fall. I rested my bike against the gate of a stranger's yard, and knocked on her door. I asked her if I could pick some apples, and she said yes, adding that they were particularly suited for apple pie. Perfect. 

I remember the freedom of not being Swedish in a Swedish land. And at once, the constraint. 

I remember being healed. As Menninger said, love cures people--both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.