Looking for Romantic spirit in Lapland & elsewhere, also publ. on the 18/08/2026

The first time I ever went to Sápmi, I was 18, and I felt such a magic. It felt like it had always been there for me, it felt like a sense of "ah, so there is a reason why I came here.. why on some level I have wanted to for so long." I fell in love with Sápmi, and I also fell in love with a woman also aged 18 who is from Nordland. I still remember parts of our conversation, as we walked around at 4 AM in her town, and it was light due to the midnight sun. I remember her telling me about her favourite place, a place with old houses with moss on their roofs, a place near a fjord in the nearby county of Troms. 

I fell in love with Sápmi before I met her, and our lives have moved on. But it has never felt the same since. Since meeting her, I have also never experienced that same magic that I felt in Troms, a few days before meeting her. The magic I felt is romantic, but it's also about a sheer and immense love for the place I was in, and a profound sense of its magic. A profound sense of creation, life and spirit that I had never felt before. I can't really put it into words. Again, sometimes it's the things we can't say,, that speak the loudest. (can't say in the sense of not possessing the words to explain them).

The magic is connected to her, and to Sápmi, and to the isles of Barra and Eriskay, and to the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, all of which I also went to that spring and summer. It's about life. A discovery of my spirit. It's about seeing snowdrops growing by a waterfall in western Scotland, and smiling slightly to myself on the Isle of Barra, when the rain came, and the sky became dark, but with an inner golden glow that reflected off the grass and rocks; and a sky full of rainbows.

It's about a place I went to in Finland, called Äkkäsjärvi, the smell of the forest, the way that that place showed me myself in my purest form. The lake, its waves gently touching the rocky shore, and golden light shining almost diagonally through birches and firs, the sun circling in the distance, all a part of the same sacred ring of colour, sky, water. Every living thing in that forest, the spiders on their webs that glistened in the golden light, the howls I heard in the distance, which, probably weren't wolves, but who knows.

Not everything about that summer was happy. In fact, during a lot of what I have described, I didn't think I was happy at the time. And I guess that's because the kind of thing I am speaking about isn't really about happiness at it's core, it's more about truth. It's not a depressing sadness either, but it's not happiness in the sense of the display of happiness. My facial and muscular expressions reflected at the time that I wasn't that happy and in my ways felt unsure of myself. But the magic I recognised in all of that, it felt like freedom. Not a freedom that shouts joyously and loudly. It wasn't loud. That's the thing, in a way, it was so quiet. 

Whilst our modern society displays this idea that being alone and being completely responsible for and in control of absolutely everything, can be a powerful thing, a "modern" thing - I think fundamentally that humans want, and need intimacy. Creation and magic just takes on a whole new sense of real and wonderful when it's shared with another person romantically. But, the flip side of course is that often it doesn't turn out that way. 

I think I also went back to Sápmi, as I did, many many times, and to Scotland, many many times, thinking in some way that that romantic love with another person was the only true way to experience that sense of spirit - that I am attempting to describe. And I think a reason for that is, when we do experience that with another person, it becomes very hard to go back to trying to find it on our own.

I find the concept of polyamory interesting. Not out of a desire for more, but in genuine awe and appreciation of how people can trust and share and experience things together polyamorously. At the same time, for me personally, if the foundation wasn't there with one person, I couldn't do it. Sometimes I have seen polyamory and monogamy as opposites. But actually I don't think they are. But I lean more towards monogamy in a sense, because what I feel with that sometimes, occasionally, is indescribable. It feels kind of like oneness with creation, but that doesn't even quantify it. But again, these things do not often work out. 

When those romantic love and an easily understandable connection with a place are not present, a person is left with the intangible love within themselves and within those things, but it is very hard to understand it, especially if we are distracted, and it is also very hard to trust and believe in it - because it means believing in our own spirit, absolutely, with very few absolutes in our physical world. And it is not easy to understand that nor to trust it, and the more we learn, the more we have to make the effort to reconnect with it; as knowledge fills in the gaps, it leaves less room to flow, less room to break free. 

I am guilty of this, and I guess a lot of other people are - we sometimes want to commit to something. To a connection or relationship. To a particular plan. But when we may not have those things, the only thing we are left to commit to is our spirit. And I think that means, being the version of ourselves who has empathy and love, and being the version of ourselves that doesn't have to try and be anything else. 

These ideas are well known, but they get massively misunderstood. This idea of "be yourself", I would say that a large percentage of the time, including psychologists and media personalities, interpret this idea as acting however a person wants or feels. So for example someone could say "be yourself", and the person spoken to might then be argumentative without a real cause, because it feels like "being themselves". 

But then, I think to truly say this phrase wisely, means not to imply "being" oneself in the sense of "being" whatever a person feels or is experiencing; but rather to "be oneself" is to be that loving version of us that does not change. 

When I first went to Norway, the connection with that person felt so romantic, that it felt life-changing, and it was. But what I am left with is that love, and it's connected to her, and to Norway, and to the beautiful nature and its spiritual essence there, and across Sápmi. I am "over" her now and have been for a long while (with some intermittent periods), and we speak as friends sometimes. And I cannot commit to her of course, nor do I have a wish to. 

But I can commit to the essence of that feeling that is connected to her, Sápmi, Scotland etc. I can commit to that essence, because that essence is me. It's as though our own spirit is not just something inside us, but something we have to recognise in connection to our world and reality. And the same goes for "love". In modern culture, we talk about self love. But love was never intended to be something just about us and our ego. And just as our spirit is within us, so it is outside of us too, because in a sense I believe our spirit is the holiness of everything, or rather, our key to the holiness of everything, and simultaneously that thing itself.  

This energy is both "innocent" but simultaneously (when it occurs in adults) can manifest in a playful eroticness and sexuality, but perhaps the difference between this and "normal" human eroticism and sexuality, is that it has no power or influence over the person; it is a sexuality that can entertain a possibility between myself and a woman for example, but which can with the same level of conviction say "oh well, actually nah". It is a sexuality born from love, a love which is primarily protective and pure, so when this does manifest sexually within adults, it is equally loving, caring and playful. "Detached" is the wrong word, it is not detached, it is just so present that it acknowledges the eternity in all things, and so there is no need to worry, this does not in any sense make it "detached" or "emotioness" however.

This summer in 2011 was the first time I ever discovered the concept of polyamory. At the time I did not understand it or give it much thought. A woman I was seeing that year, when I was 18 and she was, longed for the idea of dating two bisexual men in a "triad" relationship. She wasn't openly interested in entertaining or creating this physically though, and I didn't give it much thought, it was more of a dream that she mentioned once. 

At the time, I suppose that the idea upset my expectations or worldview of what love should be like. I found it hard to comprehend how something like polyamory could not be destructive to, or just a false interpretation of the "universal truth" of romantic love, something sacred precisely because it was shared by only two people, both of them embodying the creative principle and love of creation in a moment beyond time, an eternal realisation. 

But during that summer I also felt feelings that seemed to stand in a place between the holy and the scary, feelings of magic in certain landscapes, of untold things that I wasn't yet ready to understand; things yet to be illuminated by the light of our collective consciousness, their mystery intimidating but seductive; but again, it is also an accepting of that mystery as a part of the mystery of our world, whilst also realising that it doesn't have to have any power over us. And of course since I have discovered polyamory and written about it extensively, including recently in this blog.

There is the phrase, "it is not about the destination, it is about the journey". I think this is also wrong though. I would say it is not about the destination, nor the journey. And if it's not about the destination, nor about the journey/experience, then what is it about? We are left with the eternal Now, that space where we are innocent and caring, and where we are whole.

Primarily I feel that our spiritual purpose is to be playful and explorative with empathy, but simultaneously to protect, guard, and acknowledge the commonalities of innocence within our selves and within all living things. In the philosophy of the Noongar people of Australia, humans were created for this precise latter purpose - we were created to look after, and protect life in this world. We were made to be as kind to animals and trees as we are to people, and like in Hopi belief - animals are innocent, they can do violent things, but they are ultimately innocent and they need our empathy, respect and care. The thing that is different about us is that we are not "innocent", in so far as we have the ability to do ill things through planned and selfish intention. And the only way for us to be free of that is for us to become "innocent" again, and to use our human powers for what they were intended for

I hope that this article/blog post was a curious and beautiful read.