The Spice of Life

We trekked out of the wilderness with great speed towards our machine that would propel us South. Down through the valley, away from the mountains, passing streams that stain rocks rusty red, birch forests, the odd reindeer and a few professional Swedes.

It was my second time up in Lapland, with a year between seeing the same countryside. When I saw it first, last year, the flora and fauna and the untouched splendour of the arctic circle had a profound effect on me. This time however, it was less so. I was trying to muster as much internal enthusiasm for the same scenery, the wild blueberries everywhere, the lichen on rocks that looked like the map of some strange alien world, the continual sound of water falls and all that they represent. I noticed I took it all for granted, not completely of course, but significantly so.

It's horrifying to witness in myself the easy slip into indifference. I who is so often pushing for the appreciation of these small earthly beauties. How fickle the human mind is, even when we're aware of it, it makes no difference.

I wonder about D. H. Lawrence's love of nature, how he rambles on and on about the minute details of English country life. Did he really feel like that or was he also battling with a secret apathy? How on earth the Morel family, having grown their whole lives surrounded by the same countryside with very little external influence, can still find Daffodils at the bottom of their garden, truly captivating, year in year out.

It could be that we're products of different eras of the industrial revolution, Lawrence in post-dawn, and we in late gloam. Simpler and clearer minds, forged to appreciate the small inconsequentials. Whereas, we, ruined by choice, have no apparatus to deal with such subtleties. Like children shovelling sugar into their mouths because they like sweet things but not spices.