500 Miles from the North Pole by Sally Linder Journal Entry: June 22, 2013, Crossing into the Arctic Circle toward Svalbard.
I sense something buried inside me drawing me in, tugging at me like an undertow. I want to
give in to it – be seized by it. Give up my bearings, slip out of who I am. Shed this skin and don
the polar bear’s fur and beating heart.
I come to bear witness.
Departing from the dock and venturing out into the Arctic Ocean you immediately find yourself whispering. Time and location dissolve because of Fog. A fog weightless yet so dense one cannot identify up or down, left or right. This is not an ‘experience’ – for that statement would designate you are here and that is out there. Boundaries dissipate, lose relevance, and a state of permeability wraps around you. Unable to locate yourself in relationship to a vanishing point on the horizon linear time loses its weighty significance and you fall out of time. You whisper in a state of startled awareness of unrivaled spaciousness and grandness of soul. Svalbard is the quintessential Arctic wilderness, an archipelago of islands, islets and skerries in the Arctic Ocean ranging from 74 – 81 degrees north latitude and from 10 – 35 degrees east longitude within the Arctic Circle. Glaciation covers 60% of the archipelago. Norway claims ownership and it is the northernmost place in the world with a permanent population, with all 2500 people living in its only town, Longyearbyen on the island of Spitsbergen. There is one airstrip, no roads and a barely functioning coalmine. Two thirds of Svalbard is a nature reserve. Feeling safe aboard a double-­‐hulled grade two icebreaker I willingly release myself, returning to an unfettered self observing genesis unfold. In the beginning there was darkness. Fog cleaves, opening into a lozenge shape and Light makes its grand entrance. At first the light is intensely active, a bombardment of golden luminosity. At this latitude light is either turned on or off for six months of the year for this is the Land of the Midnight Sun and Polar Night. In June the sun never drops lower than 25 degrees above the horizon. Fog manipulates the coming and going of the light providing a theater of dancing shapes across the 1 land and sea with undulating bands of yellow, pink and blue across the sky. Sally Linder, Fog Lifting, 2013-­‐14. Oil on canvas. 38 x 70 inches As the fog lifts higher there is Water, gloriously abundant and stretching like a smile clear across the rounded planet. Colored with long horizontal strokes of indigo, ultramarine, cerulean and aquamarine as if the painter cannot choose just one hue. At moments the sea feels ominous and threatening – the light condensing the surface into the depths and birthing a slumbering animal of unimaginable mass. Or light spills across the waters’ quiet surface and thousands of Tinkerbelles pirouette and leap in a dazzling dance performance. Controlling the unfolding drama is Fog, the grandmaster of the chessboard. Fog retreats further and there is Land. Purple mountains with summits shrouded in the ascending grayness. Deeply incised vertical ridges filled with snow create a grand design of upright mauve druids and inverted white pyramids. Glaciers twist and writhe out of the mountains searching for the sea forming zigzagging fjords when the ice retreats. Into the belly of the fjords spill icebergs breaking off from the glaciers with tremendous booms. Roiling bits of ice often choke the fjords as if frustrated children have knocked over and spilled their building blocks. Land and waterway sculpted in Nature’s workshop over millions of years. 2 Sally Linder, Grand Design, 2013-­‐2014. Oil on canvas. 40 x 66 inches Amidst this birthing the elements command center stage, not regulated to the back bleachers overlooked and underappreciated. Does it take traveling to the top of the world to discover anew life’s sustaining cadence? Immersed in this primeval soup of energy a new song arises; a lullaby of love. Notes of peace, chords of life as imagined in the beginning. As wished for now in the lower latitudes. Into this symphony flies bird, swims seal, lumbers polar bear. Survival at its most primal. It is forecast that within the next five years there will be no summer ice in the Arctic, opening up the region for grandiose shipping opportunities. Cut into wedges like a golden apple pie, the Arctic from the North Pole outward rests under siege by its coastal countries: Russia, the United States (the two countries whose Arctic lands and waters presumably hold the most natural resources), Denmark (Greenland), Norway and Canada. With the majority of land-­‐sea boundaries determined and agreed upon and contracts drawn up by readied corporations to begin extracting oil, natural gas, valuable minerals and water, the Arctic as it is now will be drastically altered. Do the gains outweigh the losses? With diminished ice can the Arctic perform its vital role for every being, from regulating the planet’s 3 climate by reflecting harmful radiation into space, to providing a home for countless species without a voice, to controlling air and water currents whose paths determine a liveable Earth? The immensity of the Arctic Sweep humbles me as it enacts a story with a different ending from the Bible’s Genesis. Humanity is momentarily afforded a life changing choice. The Arctic gifted me a vision of a land/seascape undamaged, untrodden, untruncated by human dominance. This is the treasure I took back to the studio to paint. Wilderness takes your breath away, and unselfishly gives it back. Devoid of pollution, water quenches thirst, air quenches breath, land quenches hunger and unspoiled beauty quenches longing. All of life’s requirements. Frances Beinecke, President of Natural Resource Defense Council writes: “This isn’t a refuge to see; it is a refuge to keep. To save for wildlife, for stillness and for the very idea that humans can leave something alone.” Sally Linder, Bestowed Upon, 2013. Oil on drafting film. 19 x 35 inches Journal Entry: July 1, 2013, 81 degrees north latitude.
Somewhere between the heavens and Earth …. Loveliness so pure and profound
It cracks open the heart and I fall to my knees
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