Personal Blogs

Here I Stand in Scandinavia

I must have been twelve or thirteen when my music teacher wheeled the record player into our classroom and dropped the needle onto something that would stay with me all my life. The music of Edvard Grieg, and later Sibelius, came spilling out—strange, haunting, majestic. It wasn’t just sound. It was a feeling. As the notes of Morning Mood drifted through the room, I felt something stir, something I couldn’t name then. A kind of ache. A homesickness for a place I’d never been.

That place was Scandinavia.

At the time, I didn’t understand why the music moved me so deeply. I only knew that it reached into some forgotten room of my soul and opened the window wide. The vast fjords, the northern lights, the snow-covered pines—I hadn’t seen them, but I had. I carried them inside me like a memory from another life.

Years later, I found listened carefully to the lyrics of their song, Scandinavia, that gave words to that childhood ache: Scandinavia. I listened and was undone. “Here we stand in Scandinavia,” it begins, a simple line, yet one that placed me not just on a map, but in a moment. A moment thick with memory and mystery.

The song isn’t about tourism. It’s not about hiking trails or Viking museums. It’s about something far deeper: the longing for belonging. A yearning not just for a land, but for a homeland of the soul.

"We watched it rise / In morning skies of fire and wine / The boats that carried us / Young golden lives / Leaving on a rising tide…"

That verse brought back so much. Youth. Departure. The feeling of setting out, wide-eyed, onto life’s open sea, hoping the tide will carry you to meaning, to love, to purpose. But perhaps we’re all really searching for one thing: home.

And not necessarily the one we were born into.

The phrase that haunts the chorus—"Here we stand"—is both declaration and confession. We’re standing, yes. But where? In a landscape that both is and isn't ours. Scandinavia becomes symbolic. A place of memory, of spiritual resonance. Not a destination on a cruise itinerary, but a metaphor for something higher, purer, more eternal ; the soul's destiny.

Here the song becomes prayer. The kind of prayer you whisper without realizing it’s a prayer at all. It’s the kind of longing that can’t be satisfied by geography or even human love. It’s the ache that C.S. Lewis once called “the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.”

That’s what Grieg's music stirred in me all those years ago. And what Runrig reawakened. I see now that what I felt wasn’t just homesickness for Norway or Finland—it was homesickness for another world entirely. The kind of world that Isaiah spoke of when he wrote of deserts blooming and swords beaten into ploughshares. A world where the cold ache of separation is finally healed.

I’ve come to believe that this deep yearning we carry—the one we find in art, music, poetry—is not weakness. It’s not sentimentalism. It’s evidence. Evidence that we are made for something more. For a Kingdom that is not of this world, yet not far from any one of us.

The songwriter of Scandinavia, like many poets and musicians before him, touches something eternal. And like a poem, it becomes part of the reader who engages with it. The listener is drawn into the same river of longing. That current, which begins in the soul, runs through every human heart and finds its source not in nostalgia, but in promise.

“There’s nothing new beneath the sun,” the song says, echoing Ecclesiastes. And it’s true. This yearning isn’t new. But it’s fresh each time we feel it. Every time music moves us, or a northern sky takes our breath away, or a word of Scripture stirs our spirit—we are reminded. We are not yet home.

But we will be.

And in the meantime, here we stand—in Scandinavia, or wherever our feet happen to be—hearts tuned to the music of another world.

Scandinavia: Runrig

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8xczE0TOU

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"Tell me what you own, and I'll tell you who you are."

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“What is it I possess that would best define who I am?”

The day began like any other day on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia was scheduled to complete its 28th mission. But at 9:00 AM Eastern Time as Columbia re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, it took a devastating turn due to a previously undetected flaw.

During launching, a piece of the shuttles insolation struck the left wing, damaging the thermal protection system. This apparent minor flaw became catastrophic upon re-entry as superheated gases penetrated and undermined the wing, leading to the shuttle’s disintegration over Texas. All seven crew members were tragically lost, and fragments of the shuttle scattered over a great landmass.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, it emerged among the debris a Runrig CD belonging to Laurel Clark, the operational surgeon. For those unfamiliar with the Scottish Celtic rock group, they have music and lyrics that deeply connect with universal themes such as migration, spiritualty, attachment to the land and the search for meaning.

Having read about Laurel Clark's spirit, I can see how this music may have deeply resonated with her, known for her adventurous spirit and appreciation for understanding the universe we inhabit.

Runrig's Stamping Ground was the album that emerged from the wreckage. Lyrics that explore the human spirit with the intertwining of Celtic rhythms that evoke both the personal and our collective journeys. Tracks like “Running to the Light,” “The Stamping Ground,” and “Wall of China” speak to resilience and the search for meaning, themes that undoubtedly mirrored Clark's own quest in the cosmos. As an astronaut, she was part of a pioneering effort to explore beyond Earth, to understand humanity’s place in the vast expanse of the universe. It is easy to imagine her listening to Runrig’s evocative melodies while gazing at the Earth from orbit, finding solace and inspiration in the music’s grounding yet expansive themes.

The recovery of the CD also serves as a poignant reminder of what is left behind in the wake of tragedy. Laurel Clark and her fellow crew members perished in the pursuit of knowledge and exploration; their lives woven into the fabric of human progress. Yet, small artifacts like the Runrig album allow us to connect to them on a personal level, to understand their loves, hopes, and dreams.

At this stage of my life, with cancers eating away at my existence, I ponder on that CD and legacy Laurel left behind, asking myself, “What is it I possess that would best define who I am?”

This question is as profound as what it means to be human. Here, I merge the two ideas of this book I am writing, What it Means to Be Human: A Writer's Notebook. I conclude this because, packed into my series of personal essays are what defines me: my spirituality, my cares, wisdom gained, wisdom lost and what really matters when we shift away from the fickleness of human pursuit and vanity, as I run towards the light in my endeavour to embrace life’s meaning and strive for the promised land.

This reflection does not merely chronicle a physical journey but also captures a spiritual sojourn towards understanding our place in the cosmos. It highlights our enduring search for meaning and connection—both to fellow humans and the Creator—underscoring that what we leave behind may be small in physical form but vast in symbolic significance.

In pondering the legacies, we craft and the artifacts of our lives, we find that our true measure is not just in the paths we tread but, in the light, we leave behind for others to follow.

Running to the Light: Runrig. Running To The Light