Trip to the Arctic

Kids, this is a total treat for your eyes and senses. It was sent to me some time ago by Bren (Daydreamertoo), and when Hannah over at Real Toads set us the challenge to speak from the point of view of a denizen of the northern tundra, as part of her Transforming Fridays series, this video popped up in my memory.

It is a few minutes long, but the photographs are among the most stunning I have ever seen, revealing the beauty of this distant land that most of us will never see. Pour a cup of tea, sit back and plunge for a few moments into another very beautiful world. There are shots of a polar bear befriending a chained up Husky (!!!), and the northern lights are astounding and mystical. A most fascinating video, just stunning. Enjoy. My words will be a far cry from what you will see on your screen - the photos are truly the best poem anyone could write about this part of the world. They are identified as being of Lapland, north of the Arctic Circle, in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

I spent one winter in the north, not quite the Arctic, but close. Pup loved it, old wolf that he was......he would bury himself in the snow, photo below, just his eyes peering out, and he never wanted to come inside. I had to force him in, I always worried he would be cold! We would go to bed at night and in the morning discover so much snow had fallen overnight that it came halfway up even the second-story doorway. We would literally have to dig our way out.

Farther north is the tundra :  beautiful and austere, where life is stripped down to the essentials.

Land of snow, ice

and pristine beauty,

life is about survival here,

battling the elements,

the bitter cold, 

the dangers

of crossing ice and

melting tundra.

Yet it is also a land

of awesome 

and untouched beauty,

primordial, pristine and predatory,

far from the world

of man-made chaos, 

politics, Talking Heads,

discord, 

disconnection

 and war.

Here, we live interdependently,

human and dog,

reindeer and fish

and bear,

under the same

big sky.

Here, our souls expand

under a limitless horizon.

Here, the mystical and the magical

are close and wondrous,

 where life and death

walk hand in hand,

through a white 

and untouched landscape,

colored by the Northern Lights,

silent and spectacularly

beautiful,

a land

carved in ice.

Pup, up north

this was taken  out of the second-story doorway-

one night's snowfall!