Stamp of the Day: Lighthouse (Svenska Högarna, Sweden)

Anybody that has read Tove Jansson's books about the Moomin Trolls knows that she has a special relationship to the sea.  The book Moominpappa at Sea ('Pappan och havet' in Swedish) takes place during a summer at a lighthouse far out in the archipelago on a little island, remote, scary, and beautiful.  Lighthouses are amazing buildings, sturdy by design, but isolated and lonely.  To get up to the action, the light, you have to step and step and step upwards through dark stairs, like a tunnel through a mountain.

These days lighthouses are endangered.  Most have no living people in them, and many have stopped shining.  Some are for sale. Some are taken by the oceans.  And most ships has GPS monitors that take you through the night.  Just 100 years ago, a blip in the time on Earth, there was just the sea, a boat, and a light at the distance, and nothing else to rely on.  Well compasses too, of course.  And sunrise and stars.  

Now it is all electronic, and abysmally insecure, unfortunately. A few irate or unresponsive electrons (=no juice!) and you are met by a black screen.  Few people in the past had a non-functioning compass (unless you put an iron rod next to it), but I think we all have swore over bad GPS directions or digital maps that suddenly show you driving in a river when in fact you are on a street in a city.  GPS is so convenient and insecure at the same time, it is scary.  It is like a teddy bear that can be lost at any time, and then what do you do.

Today's stamp is from Sweden, and shows the lighthouse at Svenska Högarna (which means 'The Swedish Mounds', which is here on Google Maps. It is out in nowhere, in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland.  Tove Jansson could have used this as her lighthouse for her book, that is for sure. It is one of the few lighthouses in Sweden that still has staff year-round.

Stamp of the Day: Gotska Sandön

In the Baltic Sea, far out north of the biggest Baltic island of Gotland, lays a smallish island made from sand.  It is appropriately named 'Gotska Sandön', which means the 'Gothic Sand Island'.  It is a magical, rough place of excessive beauty, and has a long history as a place for pirates that plundered ships that had wrecked on the sand barriers.  There was never many people living on this island, just a small group of farmers or traders, and today mostly ecotourists visit in the summer.

I was there in 1982, when I was 15, on a trip I have vivid memories from.  You had to travel there on a fishing boat, about 4-5 hours over the sea, and we had to bring all food and everything else we needed.  There is freshwater on the island, but not much. There is no harbor, so you have to use a small dingy to get ashore and wade the last part in the waves (which are cold in this part of the world).  Of course you can only get to the island when the weather is calm too. 

These days it is a Swedish National Park, and most of the island is pure sand with either pine or oak forest.  Large sand dunes along the beaches, some orchids (like the pink one above), nesting terns, and driftwood.  Walking on the dunes is one step forward, glide two steps back.  There are pebbles on the beaches that are totally transparent, from quartz.  It was pure wonderful Swedish summer, green, lush, sunny and not too hot.

This Swedish stamp was made by the artist Gunnar Brusewitz, a famous watercolor painter who painted Swedish nature. Here are some more photos from this island (Flickr pool). And, this is how it looks like from the air.

Stamp of the day: The most amazing creatures...

Have you ever seen a live nudibranch in the wild open sea? (nakensnäcka in Swedish).  I think I might have seen one once, off the coast of Norway on the island of Runde.  I know I definitely saw a squid there, swimming in the kelp, while I was kayaking on the sea surface and being amazed at all the amazing sealife we didn't have in the biodiversity-poor Baltic Sea.  Anyway, nudibranchs are so incredibly cool. They swim, sail, change shape, and have the most amazing colors and patterns.  If I am reborn as an animal I often think I butterfly or cross beak (bird) might be fun, but recently I have been thinking nudibranchs might have a really interesting life too.  Some float around in the sea as plankton until they find an interesting place, others eat algae until them themselves become photosynthetic.  Life is truly amazing...

Stamps are from Australia and all about nudibranchs...

Lommens bod

Pastel painting is very fun and exciting. Here is a painting I made from the archipelago outside Stockholm. It is a painting from the island Gillöga and shows Lommen's bod.

[LS comment: 'Bod' is the Swedish word for a small house or outbuilding, usually not made to live in but to store things in. A 'vedbod' is for storing firewood, for example]

Stamp of the Day: Blue whale (Blåval)

Balaenoptera musculus - muscular indeed are these giants of the Earth.  I have never seen one, but I would love to.  This stamp is a joint issue between Sweden and Canada from 2010.  Very few whales reach Swedish waters, only some lost ones come in between Sweden and Denmark.  The Baltic See is too sweetwaterish (brackish) for most sea creatures to survive well there, so it is only along the West Coast of Sweden you can really see any small dolphins or smaller whales.  So Sweden weren't really in the whaling business. We stuck to herring, timber, and mechanical innovations like the ball bearings, dynamite, and gauge blocks. I wonder what whales are thinking when they swim in the ocean these days.... wouldn't it be interesting to know?

Tranströmer - tired of words

During the Nobel Prize party a few days ago, the wife of Thomas Tranströmer, the Novel Laureate in Literature, read this wonderful poem by him:  

Trött på alla som kommer med ord, ord, men inget språk
for jag till den snötäckta ön.
Det vilda har inga ord.
De oskrivna sidorna breder ut sig åt alla håll!
Jag stöter på spåren av rådjursklövar i snön.
Språk men inga ord.

Tired of everybody that comes with words, words, but no language

I traveled to the snow-covered island.

The wild has no words.

The unwritten pages extend outwards in all directions!

I discover the tracks of deer hooves in the snow.

Language but no words.

Thomas Tranströmer [translation by LS]

I can see it in front of me, an island surrounded by frozen water in winter, stillness, no people, just the man and the snow, frozen bare branches, blue icy sky, and a few birds looking for something to eat in the brush.  And then the tracks of the deer, winding its way through the landscape, telling a story without words.

Winter Sun, a photo from the Finnish Baltic archipelago by Niklas Sjöblom (Flickr)

In a way this also reminds me of a very different poem/song, Blå Hjärtans Blues, by Eva Dahlgren.  In English, the song (called Blue Hearts' Blues) starts with these lines (translated by me):

The island lays empty in the winter sea

a last ferry turns back towards the city

at the pier, here I stand

and see my lover choose

My head so heavy of the truth

I see your foot tracks in the snow on the way home

so light steps that say so much more

than frozen words on your lips

Bye baby blue
caresses me in the night

with her sadness
bye baby blue
all these memories

in a dull moonlight blue tune
[cont.]

That is the beginning of this song about relationships, break-ups, winter, ice, and islands, just like Tranströmer's poem. The blues song ('bye baby blue', etc.) she refers to I guess is something by Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday. Listen to Eva performing the song here: Youtube link, and here are the complete Swedish lyrics.

OK snapshot: Stockholms hamnar... (Stockholm's harbor....)

...jumps the shark.

(LS comment: I guess they mean mind the gap, but I didn't get that at first :)

EH snapshot: Godahoppsudden Askö Södermanland

Travel report from EH, out kayaking in the Baltic archipelago of Sweden.
" Vi paddlade nära Julafton och rundade Godahoppsudden... (Julafton är en fyr nära Trosa)"

Translation: We kayaked near Christmas and around the Cape of Good Hope... (Christmas is a light house near Trosa and Askö).