Off to find sheep again - prelude

When “coming back home” doesn’t quite work out …. when it still just feels like “the place you happen to live ”...

When life throws you a few tough things to chew on - to grow on or to just “get the damn hint!” - and you don’t. Or maybe just don’t dare. When something grabbed your heart and holds on thight and won’t ever let go.

When coming back home is like entering a room, saying something stupid and realising it is all going wrong. When you think “I’ll just go out and come back in again, OK?”

I must have said it out loud and it turned into a plan and suddenly preparations were underway... We are going on holiday! Haven’t done that in years and years! Felt strange - sometimes even wrong...

Going on holiday. Not a journey. Not “just going…”

Going on holiday somewhere where I don’t speak the language; where we can have “adventures”; together; where I can just enjoy the pretty landscape and where I’ll never get to know the place or its people quite well enough - just passing through. Somewhere I haven’t been before so I won’t get lost in memories.

And then: Come back. To the place I happen to live. And see what it feels like then….

phase one

nearly finished

Well,.... holiday….actually what I said out loud was: “What about going to the North Atlantic Native Sheep and Wool Conference?” In Norway, Lofoten.

I know nothing about norwegian native sheep. The website of one of the breed societies said - after being put through google translate: the sheep are small, round and stupid! Wow!

I know nothing about Norway actually. Well, not much. Horribly expensive, people go there for fishing holidays, they won’t allow cars with combustion engines after 2025 or something, norwegians living at the edges of fjords used to tie their children to a tree or the house to make sure they don’t fall down the fjord, tiny islands that would have twentysomething inhabitants in Scotland have a couple of hundred people in Norway. Meat must be very expensive or else there wouldn’t be a limit of 10kg (!) to bring tax free. There. My Norway knowledge.

I have names of shepherds and names of the islands they live on. No adress, no email, no phone number, no idea if they speak english or german. I can picture myself finding John Ingar and trying to explain who I am and what I want - and him just staring…. and for years and years wondering what that weird foreigner was on about…

Well, it’s not really a prelude anymore. I’m on the boat to Bergen. Thinking about getting to know a country through its sheep, its shepherds...

I see the moon over a calm sea. And a first star. And I wish….