Billy Says:
When we first thought of the idea of spending some time WWOOFing in Sweden, we searched their website and immediately kulturstationen stood out as the most intriguing and beautiful of all the projects. The vision is clear, and excellent. They have taken a space that was once the centerpoint of industry and international trade - within an otherwise sparsely populated rural area - the train station erected by the iron company, and are turning it, once again, into a hub of activity. Except this time, the rail line is replaced by a bike path, and so people come to the station and connect to the outside world through visitors, movies, and the sharing of radical and alternative ideas. The focus is no longer on trading products for money, labor for capital, but instead to trade companionship and conversation, with food and pleasure to go with it.
Artur and Minna have a lot of work ahead of them in order to reach that vision. They have inherited a space that was misused by a crazy animal nut (17 dogs, 17 cats, multiple horses, rabbits, sheep, etc.) for nearly twenty years: a man that walled himself off with a huge fence while his space deteriorated behind the wall. Like I´ve seen with friends doing rehab in the states, taking a space that has been ill-used and putting it to good use is so much harder - and more necessary and honorable, often - than tearing down and starting from scratch. But Artur and Minna are really dedicated folks, and they´ve already been at it for a year and a half, while raising a child and holding down full time jobs as well. Their determination to work through the spartan conditions of the current Myra station, while maintaining a love of the Kulturstationen they see in their minds, reminds me of the steadfast settlers in colonial america (minus the genocidal, money-hungry drive).
Working with Artur and Minna is a wonderful experience. They are both extremely supportive of our autonomy and happiness, and repeatedly reassure us that we are encouraged to speak up and share all of ourselves with the work. It is nothing at all like the typical boss-worker (or even volunteer-manager) relationship. It feels much more like family, like peers co-creating a beautiful thing. We contributed only a small bit of labor to their project. Mostly we just got the outdoor toilet to a good place, mowed the lawn, made a few meals, and tended to their son Josef a bit as well. The nature of our current trip meant that we didn´t have time to help tackle some of the larger projects, such as ripping out the floor in the living/guest room and putting in a new one. Still, I look forward to returning to Kulturstationen in the years to come, both to contribute our labor and ideas, and also to celebrate the coming success of the project. I strongly encourage anyone interested in creating alternative spaces for radical ideas and people to thrive to go and work with kulturstationen.
Billy reads to his young, uninterested pupil, Josef (18 months old)When we first thought of the idea of spending some time WWOOFing in Sweden, we searched their website and immediately kulturstationen stood out as the most intriguing and beautiful of all the projects. The vision is clear, and excellent. They have taken a space that was once the centerpoint of industry and international trade - within an otherwise sparsely populated rural area - the train station erected by the iron company, and are turning it, once again, into a hub of activity. Except this time, the rail line is replaced by a bike path, and so people come to the station and connect to the outside world through visitors, movies, and the sharing of radical and alternative ideas. The focus is no longer on trading products for money, labor for capital, but instead to trade companionship and conversation, with food and pleasure to go with it.
Artur and Minna have a lot of work ahead of them in order to reach that vision. They have inherited a space that was misused by a crazy animal nut (17 dogs, 17 cats, multiple horses, rabbits, sheep, etc.) for nearly twenty years: a man that walled himself off with a huge fence while his space deteriorated behind the wall. Like I´ve seen with friends doing rehab in the states, taking a space that has been ill-used and putting it to good use is so much harder - and more necessary and honorable, often - than tearing down and starting from scratch. But Artur and Minna are really dedicated folks, and they´ve already been at it for a year and a half, while raising a child and holding down full time jobs as well. Their determination to work through the spartan conditions of the current Myra station, while maintaining a love of the Kulturstationen they see in their minds, reminds me of the steadfast settlers in colonial america (minus the genocidal, money-hungry drive).
Working with Artur and Minna is a wonderful experience. They are both extremely supportive of our autonomy and happiness, and repeatedly reassure us that we are encouraged to speak up and share all of ourselves with the work. It is nothing at all like the typical boss-worker (or even volunteer-manager) relationship. It feels much more like family, like peers co-creating a beautiful thing. We contributed only a small bit of labor to their project. Mostly we just got the outdoor toilet to a good place, mowed the lawn, made a few meals, and tended to their son Josef a bit as well. The nature of our current trip meant that we didn´t have time to help tackle some of the larger projects, such as ripping out the floor in the living/guest room and putting in a new one. Still, I look forward to returning to Kulturstationen in the years to come, both to contribute our labor and ideas, and also to celebrate the coming success of the project. I strongly encourage anyone interested in creating alternative spaces for radical ideas and people to thrive to go and work with kulturstationen.
Billy lounges on the luxurious platform of the future "Culture Station"
Rural setting of Varmland
Forget lawn-mowing... try the weed-whacker!
Snack break with the Swedish high-school laborers
The Beautiful but smelly guest room
Midsummer Candlelight table
Friends of Artur & Minna at Midsummer's Celebration
Midsummer's Feast
Says Libby:
Staying with Artur and Minna was overall a delightful experience. Both Billy and I felt like we were on equal footing with them and that they were extremely open to letting us shape a general assignment into a specific vision of our own.
As for family life, it felt special to be around Artur and Minna and to see their mutual passion for the project they've created, as well as their affection for each other. Artur works full-time from home organizing and fundraising for a large music festival to take place later this summer, so he was quite busy answering and making calls, all the while organizing for the event of the summer: the Midsummer Celebration. Because so many winter hours are spent in darkness, with the sun making only a brief appearance each day (if at all, in the far north), the arrival of the longest day of the year is celebrated with great festivities and revelry. Christmas and Missumers, we were told, are the 2 most widely celebrated holidays in Sweden, but Midsummer i considered the more outrageous, as one is expected to pass Christmas with one's family, but Midsummer ismarked by heavy drinking with one's close friends, as it lacks the religious seriousness of Christmas. Artur had many stories to share from relentless travels all over the Eruopean and Asian continents, of such & such strange or comedic character who'd given him a lift while hitching from here to there. His knack for mimicry made him a delightful storyteller.
Minna, who is designing her own fashion line, oversaw our work, and also flung herself with great dedication to the task of nettle removal; the vast yard between the house/station and the stable, overgrown with tall grasses and weeds, had an abundance of the painful plants. One afternoon when Billy was sick and still sleeping, I had prepared lunch for all of us, as well as some tea I was taking out to B. Minna was pulling up nettles out by the stable, and I stopped by to tell her lunch was ready. "I'm very much in the head of the nettles right now -- I can tell how they think" she said, "and how they grow. They put down these roots and *schoonk!*-- grab together and they become so strong, and if someone tells them not to come up in one spot, they work together to stay connected and find another place to grow, and this is how I want the people who come here to be; theyäll become strong together. I want our people to be like nettles!" Minna seemed to me a wild spirit, someone who takes seriously to the earth and who proved herself to be very sensitive to the energies of those around her.
The youngest member of the Kulturstationen trifecta is Josef, 18 mos., who is one of the most fun kids to spend time with I've met in a long time. When we first arrived, we spent an hour entertaining him/being entertained BY him, and found him incredibly curious. We tried out all of our "kid" tricks within a very short time, and while Josef had a limited attention span for most games, he took forever to get bored of running around us as we lay on the floor of the living room, completing many a lap around its circumference with his pacifier obscuring his broad grin as we cheered him on. There ended up being many children around for the midsummer weekend-- seems like Artur and Minna's generation of friends (though not so much older than us) has hit the reproductive phase of life, and we realied once there were kids crawling everywhere that we were quite content to be able to walk away from the responsibility of tireless attention after an hour or two of play and to let the parents be parents. Not now, thank you. I was also really reminded of the importance of raising kids within the support of a strong community to be able to provide some relief amongst the parents, especially in an isolated area like Värmland.
Midsummer tradition includes the chopping down of a tree. Gender roles are prominent; the men go off into the woods to do the chopping and hauling, while the women and girls gather flowers, vines, and greenery to wrap around the pole. Artur described to us that the ritual had very secular origins, but that the Christian tradition had since influenced the procedure, and instead of a simple pole being erected in to the hol made in the ground (a pretty overt symbol of fertilization), an extra tree was now usually added to make the pole into a cross. Artur insidsted that the ceremony on their land would remain a cross-less, rather hedonistic celebration, and chuckled, joking that they'd brought us there to be sacrificed, not to be simple wwoof volunteers.
Friends started showing up Thursday afternoon. Tuckered out from work and with Billy sick, we curled up for a nap before the commencment of official festivites. One of the more amusing moments of that afternnon occured when a young man popped his head into our bedroom out in the old military hangar about 50 yards from the house. Wearing a little less than our pajamas, I thrust my hand out from under the covers and introduced myself. He said "yeah, I heard I could find you guys out here and wanted to meet you. I'm Yandi, the national WWOOF coordinator of Sweden." I almost burst out laughing and somehow was able to hold it back until the interaction had ended-- there we were, half naked and sleeping, not such great exemplaries of hard-working volunteers at that moment. Over the weekend we had the chance to get to know Yandi much better, despite our hilarious first introduction.
Other friends turned up throughout the evening and we all sat down together for dinner before moving on to various activities. Billy and Andrew played chess for hours, Artur practiced DJing on the turntables he'd rented for the weekend, and we had no idea when we hit the sack at 2 or 3 am that the folks who arrived at that hour would stay up until 7 or 8 dancing and partying. When we finally dragged ourselves from the hangar to the house for breakfast sometime in the early afternoon, we were greeted by others in the kitchen "Good morning." We felt embarrassed until realiying only half of the guests were up yet, and those in the kitchen had just arisen and were eating breakfast.
A lazy afternoon was followed by an evening simliar to the previous night, but this time more people, more food, and more drinks. Dinner began with a hearty toast, and echoes of "SKOL!" around the table, and was several times interrupted by rousing traditional drinking songs. People spread jarred fish in various garlic or mustard sauces onto crackers and bread as part of the traditional fare. Soon dancing and chess again ensued. Our friend Andrew had again attended the party and offered that perhaps we might visit his family's land, 40 minutes south. We were sad to leave Kulturstationen the next day, but were excited for a little change of scenery and another glimpse into life in Värmland...
Minna's Fashion studio
The next Bobby Fisher
This is how we get down (that´s the head of WWOOF Sweden in the middle)...
Ummm... doesn't get much cuter.
Myra Station with the erected midsummer pole
The revived outdoor toilet; one of our proud wwoofing accomplishments
Poetry while you p...
1 comment:
Wow you guys! It brought forth such a flood of memories to look at your pics! And the text is excellent, too.
Yeah, I guess we were more ideologically minded in those days. Everything has grown since and the house, of course, is quite different now. Doesn't smell of urine, for one.
In a way, I miss having to scheme and squander just to put food on the table, as that keeps you on your toes. But I sure don't miss worrying endlessly about how to make ends meet, how to afford laying a new roof on the house, a knot in my stomach while I listened to that persistent drip every time it rained.
Life goes on and it's always about NOW, isn't it? Reading your text makes 2007 feel awfully far away and yet I feel this strange longing for the life style we led then.
Btw, your insightful texts were correct on all points except for one: the may pole (word "may" is old Norse for "adorn") was never secular, it just wasn't Christian.
As you point out, the pole is phallic, an ancient pagan fertility symbol. The raising of the pole was an early form of sexual magick. The division of genders is my personal variation on the ritual, although it's how I imagine things took place long, long ago:
The men bring forth the tree from the forest. The women adorn it with their hands and transform it into a pole. The men erect it and plunge it into the ground. The women circle around it, holding hands. Symbolism is pretty clear, I guess...;)
It was good to see you guys again, if ever so briefly. I hope it won't be long until next time!
Love,
A, M, J
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