I’ve heard people talking about their bad past life experiences with a sense of loss, like there is nothing left to do, since you cannot alter the past. Something happened and “I feel damaged“, thus, unable to recover completely ever. It is strange how this things works because I never heard anyone saying “I was so happy, I will never be able to escape this feeling of constant happiness. I am damaged forever“. It seems to me that we are very unbalanced, not by nature but by education, and we like more to pity ourselves than to be open to possible happiness. Even worse, when we see people happy around us, people who are able to keep a balance between sufferance and happiness, we tend to despise them, to think about them of being superficial and senseless.
Being in Sweden is such a complete experience. You learn how to live, how to exist in a way that feels so natural, so smooth. Nothing is forced, nothing is compressed between strange unwritten behavioral rules and misconceptions. These people LIVE. They manage somehow to keep an fine tuned balance between self-indulgence and respect for others. It is a normal way to be, THE normal way to exist in a social group.
Midsummer is probably the best example of how these remarkable society is actually thriving. It is not because of how the foreigners tend to describe the Swedish society like a sort of an isolated group that “most of the time they prefer to keep to themselves.” except for this specific day. It is because they are happy. Swedes are just a bunch of happy people, with a highly trained sense of community, common sense and civic spirit. Even when they are drunk.
I have seen so many happy people on this midsummer day. Imagine a bunch of individuals of all ages dancing around a symbol that is older than anyone knows, feeling naturally happy. Nobody is passing judgments, nobody is “observing” the others . And you can see that in my pictures. You can see how these people LOVE to celebrate life, and all that is good in life. They love to be happy. Sex, love and rock-n-roll! It is pagan, but so damn natural, totally unruled by promises of pain for misbehavior. I feel ten thousand times more open to jump around an “EXPLICIT” represenation of a falus, to celebrate fertility and the wonder of life, than to bow to a cross that represents pain, sufferance, human misery and all our human weaknesses.
So yes, I felt a lot of happiness again despite my current professional shity state, despite the weather and despite my inability do drink due to the necessity of being the driver. I woke up this morning so damn depressed, with a sense of dread, again, with the image of my father hanging from a tree and I realized how happy I was, how full of life and hope I have managed to be between those people, between friends… We came from a world where balance is seen as weakness, where the more you suffer and you make other people suffer, the more respect you get. A world still governed by fear and deadly misconceptions. A world where you can only be happy if you are an ignorant.
You may think that I judge this people around me with exaggerated enthusiasm, and that may actually be truth. But, what if I am right? What if such a balanced world can actually exist? What if we could all jump once a year around a falic pole, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, black, whites, yellow, Europeans, Chinese, Americans, gypsies, EVERYONE and feel HAPPY to celebrate LIFE and HUMANITY?!
Happiness is the most powerful force in the Univers because it is the only feeling that connects more people than LOVE. So, please, stay open to it! It will give you wings.
This is how we have spent our Midsommer in Sweden, at Lackö, starting from 2012 until 2015.