Dragonboat races...

The sound of drums outside my kitchen window at breakfast...Pink Floyd on the sound system across the canal in Ekbacken Park...Lots of young voices...It could only be: Dragonboat races!...A twice-yearly happening here on our canal in Åkersberga, not even 30m from our front door...
Images of young Sweden...I have devoted a lot of my time to youth, in ministry and in school commissions, in different lands, over the past 25 years, I still get such a kick out out of them, it's energizing, and they are so gracious to let me hang out with 'em now and then...
It's beautiful... 

Clouds...

The clouds over our part of the word, that is, central Sweden, over here by the Baltic coast, have been just amazingly beautiful these past weeks!...I have always been struck by the immense hugeness of the sky in this land...I at first thought it was just due to the lower, more even landscape, compared to the jagged Alpine horizons I was used to, and that is part of it...Patrick tells me it's also because the earth is actually not perfectly spherical, a bowling ball shape, but instead sort of flattened near the poles, so that the curve of the horizon up here in 55-60 latitudes starts to be flatter, thus så där voilà! bigger sky!...We're living on a beautiful blue, er, tomato, or perhaps, onion!...

Back to the clouds...lately they have been giant white-blue-grey cumulonimbus, massing into thunderheads and producing storm fronts...I love lightning and thunderstorms, comes from growing up in the bottom end of Tornado Alley USA...My reflex is to run OUTdoors when it hits!...And those marching cumulus ranks across the big, wide Nordic blue sky...Sunsets are 360-degree celestial Omnimax, something in all directions...The best are those late-in-the-day cumulonimbus-thunderhead towers off on the horizon, absolutely colossal in scale, over the little tiny cars and trucks on the thin ribbon of Highway 276, the toy blue Roslags train, the little red Lego houses...

I once checked out a book of black-and-white photographs of clouds and skies over France... The point was to show the timeless nature of the cloud formations over the towns and villages whose lives went on year in, year out...It was powerful...I often look up and see timeless skies with cirrus, nimbus, and stratus, always up there over us, while we are born, and live, and move on, while countries make war, while people become free and are fed, while cars go from big to boxy to roundy-smooth to New Edge-angular, while we fall in love, learn to play piano, and move our lives all over the earth, animals disappear, people work for justice...

Up above the clouds, up among the cumulonimbus towers, in the open, clear sky, above the storm front, with only the sun and this Boeing 767, it is a bigger reality...Both sides now, she sang?...

Something about eternity, some kind of ecstacy got a hold on me, Bruce Cockburn's early song comes back...Lots of big thoughts from watching these late-summer clouds over Stockholm...I think of how significant and precious we are, every one of us, here on this marbled blue onion, to God, the One who is not just above all but here with us, has come to visit us...These beautiful clouds remind me of God's eternity, of His power, and that He goes on and on...Then I return to my train-and-bus trip, my work here "below", my family, my neighbor, my city, and I know it is all significant, it is a gift...And I thank my parents for teaching me the names of the clouds... 

Surströmming at Larssons'...!

And so it was...Nils-Erik and I opened this year's Red Wolf brand fermented herring at Larssons' home in Näsby Park, and Majvor took us through the steps to a great surströmming experience: How to build your own...Hard-cracker bread, boiled potatoes, chopped onion, butter, a slice of Västerbotten cheese, lay those slices of herring across the top like Stockholm sunbathers on rocks by the sea, another cracker on top, sanndwich-like...then enjoy!...Honestly?...It was really good! And I'm not just being my usual culturally polite!...Truly tasty!...Not at all the traumatic sensory melt-down and flee-for-your-life yuck-fest some have described, not at all (I realize this a highly personal thing...)...As good as marinated herring (sill), a lot saltier, doesn't taste anything like the scent given off..Speaking of which: the mythical smell, which I had braced myself for, especially as the opener penetrated the can, was not nearly as strong as I had expected...I have eaten much more odiforous cheeses in central France that instantly cured all respiratory ailments...And that fruit in Thailand whose smell could take the paint off walls, yet had a faintly sour-banana taste, in fact...So, shake your heads amusedly but I really like surstömming...My life is now divided into Before and After, I can never pretend to not know what I have come to experience personally and for all time to our children's children and to our collective human destinies united in one accord as we embrace the dawning of endless tomorrows of sun-lit hope reaching the heartlands of our enlightened spirits boldly joining hands and voices exalting, willy-nilly, one brother- and sisterhood of joyful serendipitous release of celestial energy towards an ever-expanding future and yes, I think we'll do this again!...Thanks, Majvor and Nils-Erik!...Always great to see these friends...

So now you know!...

 

Da fish...

No, not there yet, going to Larssons' in a few minutes, for our own Surströmmingspremiär, but it seemed to me that I gave it a rather unfair description yesterday in this space, pre-gustative-ly as it were...I actually read on a school calender entry today that this herring-based specialty is actually not rotten, as even some Swedish friends, non-surstömming-aficionados, have said, but fermented, like sour milk (filmjölk), not milk-gone-bad, and that it was canned after careful preparation in controlled-temperature environment sometime in the beginning of summer, not last year, and the can will not be bloated, but still probably will be opened outdoors...I will compare it to my other references in odorifous-yet-tasty gastronomic events: eating the dorian fruit in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and the Époisses cheese in Ste. Anywhere, France...We'll see who wins...

May this essential clarification change your life!...

Days of falling apples...

Wild apples falling on backyard lawns and roadside fence-lines...late days of summer here in Mellan-Sverige, school starts tomorrow for my kids, the rest of us sort of back in the rhythm of work, sort of not, trying to fit that last picnic in, that last swim, even as black sweaters appear on Stockholmers everywhere...Fascinating, this time of transition between seasons, just at the edge of the change...In the City we'll hold out as long as possible, sipping our dubbel macchiatos on the outdoor café-terrasses till our shoulders are too cold, the sun hanging lower at the other end of St. Eriksgatan...Maybe September will be nice again this year...I can easily imagine the whole scene covered in blue-white snow again, but that's because I love Swedish winters...I won't take you there just yet!...

Tomorrow I will celebrate that epic moment of La Gastronomie Suédoise, in the company of our good friends the Larssons: Surströmming...Herring in the most advanced stages of, er, nuclear fision, canned sometime last year with no preservatives, served from bloated cans out in the local birch forest as far from the house as possible...Please extinguish all smoking materials...I will try just about anything (except fromage corse) at least once, and I usually like it, being the curious, open-spirited Michael Palin-wannabe that I am...I'll let you know how it, uh, goes...

I love Sweden...

A day off after 2 or was it 3 intensive weeks, hanging out with 150 kids out in Tensta with our Sommarkul outreach, followed by a week of Open Café evenings at New Life, my church in Kungsholmen in downtown Stockholm, music, new friends, people off the street, prayer, shooting the breeze...preached yesterday at New Life on Psalm 139, one of those passages that are just part of my very soul now, it was intense and I loved it and apparently more than a few were touched deeply, I am thankful!...Came home and my son Pat made this blog look like this...Even got my friend Sam's artwork in the title box...So today was that day off I mentioned further up in this-stream-of-conscious...Beautiful day-after-a-rainstorm here in Åkersberga, all smelling of damp woods and cleaned off...Went to Dommarudden, an "insjö", a lake nearby...The spruce and pine and birch woods, the red-with-white-trim old buildings and stugas, granite rock-masses all around crystal-clear water with the grey-blue almost-threatening sky above, 2 guys fishing off a dock like in the Norrlands Guld commercials...Family goes off to the swimming spot, I go for a run first, one hour out in the country around this outlying-not-quite-a-suburb-of-Stockholm-town-in-the-forest, horse farms, open fields, just the right temperature, cool wind...Get back to Dommarudden and family and pull off my Asics and jump in the cold water, up to my neck in wonderfulness, I can see my feet on the coarse sand on the bottom, guy casts his line out further up, horizon of dark evergreen and granite cliffs over silver water-surface...I am still amazed we are here, 2 years later, such a beautiful place, such a beautiful city way over there, such incredible new friends we work with, such nice people we have met, a lovely land I have traveled in from north to south and west to, uh, out in the Baltic...This spot on the wild edges of Österåker, in this clear water, yet one more reason...I love Sweden!

Hello...

Hello there!...

I just now today started this blog...I hope to post here, in the very near future, things that will make us laugh, bring us together if not in space then in spirit, make us think, stimulate, encourage, grow...all within easy reach of an authentic italian double macchiato wherever we are...

In this, I will no doubt get professional graphic help from my son (vonwebster.blogspot.com) and my daughter in France, I am about a half-generation behind in the technoworld...I just love words, whatever language, and people, whatever, er, planet...

See you soon...