An American in Norway (Part 4)

Often I am asked about the how’s and why’s as regards to my life on (several) remote farms in the desolate north of Norway.  Here is a little introductory essay I wrote at age 29, in a tiny book I made entitled “Styvi Gaard:  Life Beyond the Road’s End”, which I offer here as partial explanation.  The year was 1995, and I was still rather naïve:  I had not yet realized the depths of the evil of this world.  Back then (and until quite recently, in fact) I bought into the “global warming” propaganda and placed most of the blame regarding environmental degradation upon humanity, rather than the shape-shifting lizard people ruling the world – in high places – pulling the strings — and orchestrating the endless conspiracies against us.  Most of us can now recognize that we’ve been lied to all our lives.  The truth that was hidden in now in plain sight.

In western Norway, alongside the staggeringly sublime and wild Nærøyfjord, and surrounded by tremendous mountains rising 6,000 feet straight up from the sea, lies the remote and roadless farmstead, Styvi.  Such a place has been lost in time.  There it sits, at the foot of Nonosi, apparently a mere quaint relic, irresistible to the cameras of the endless stream of tourists, passing by on cruise ships and ferries.

And yet, if one looks carefully, there seems to be activity on that hillside;  an elderly woman tending a flowerbed; a white-haired gentleman hoeing potatoes; a rooster and several chickens scratching about a barnyard; a young man clad in overalls cutting hay with a scythe; a small child running after a flock of sheep.  Styvi indeed clings to the margins, and likewise we cling to it… perhaps its days are numbered… if a local community is not here allowed again to flourish.  Nevertheless, it is the place that has been chosen by one particular young American-Norwegian family, to bring them home again, escaping a world tragically severed from the lacking in local history, continuity, purpose, and meaning.  The farm we inhabit at Styvi is a sacred place, not by virtue of some unique property, although it is of course unique, as all places, and all flowers, are unique.  All places have the potential to reveal the sacred, if evidence is there to suggest that it is loved and cared for in its particulars, with a reverence for all that came before and all that is yet to come.  At Styvi we do not wish to relive history, as in a museum, but to uncover ourselves, and our relationship to the farm…and also by way of the birds, and the wild plants, and all the small things growing here.

In a consumer society where, in the words of the American author Wendell Berry, “they think that the summit of human achievement is a high-paying job that involves no work” we wish, in contrast, to ferret out the sacred through labor-intensive toil, frugality, an affection for the cultural particulars of the place – natural and human —  and a devotion to good works.  Indeed, ours is a generation of rootless tumbleweeds, raised on Cheez-Doodles, Coca-Cola, television, and other miracles of modern technology; but we are providing to ourselves that it is not too late to come home, as are countless others, young and old alike, who wish to reclaim integrity and meaning from out of the prevalent bleak landscape of fast food joints, highways, and shopping malls.