heartland

I just finished a book, “Friheten förde oss hit” by Gunnar Ardelius. It was good. It was about a family that moved down to Liberia in the 1960s, the man has gotten a job in the administration at the Swedish mining company LAMCO and the wife doesn’t want to be there. She doesn’t even know the names of the threatening jungle trees species:

The nameless nature in Liberia made her worried, she missed a connection between language and nature. At home, every plant – trolldruva, nattskratta, besksöta, gullregn, ögontröst, kråkvicker – seemed to say something to her inner reality in the language of the long nights and the large distances. In Liberia she was a flower pulled up by its roots, really she belonged back home on dry slopes, bogs and fens, here she was completely naked and fragile.

There is a concept within geopolitics called heartland. It was first developed at the turn of the last century, and basically captured the idea that some political geographers had of there being regions of the world that are key for world domination. Back then, the most important heartland was identified as East-Central Europe, but the concept has later been used within Latin American geopolitics too.

There was scary authoritarianism in the social sciences in the early 20th century. But if you skip the world domination thing, and instead think about heartland from a more individual perspective. The idea that there are places that have a special significance in a person’s life. A spatial core, if you will. Landscapes, plants, names that pull at our heartstrings. Like a first love – but even more. Places that define us and ground us, however far we’ve journeyed since in our lives.

I love landscapes and I love weathers. From the monsoon rains in coastal Tanzania to the dry desert breeze in the Namib to the thousand shades of green in the temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island, the thunder over the mountain silhouettes at the horizon on the Bolivian altiplano, the otherworldly endurance of the Icelandic hills and rivers, the fragrant post-summer rain air of Sarajevo, the smell of dryness and thyme when the sun goes down behind a Greek island. I love them all and I couldn’t choose where I love it the most.

But in the spring, walking through a typical middle Swedish mixed-old oak forest, the forest floor covered in wood anemones. The afternoon sun so piercingly clear. There is something that falls into place. For a moment, just being is enough. This is where I belong. This is the place I’ll always be pulled back to. This is where things start making sense and where my fragility isn’t a weakness, but a strength. My heartland.