NORDIC GODDESSES, WITCHES & RUNES Guest, Sofia Karin Axelsson

A fun interview with the most charming of hosts
 - talented medium Tracey Lockwood.

Light Play in The Tree House

Photographs by Michael Peter Langevin and Sofia Karin Axelsson

Muddy Business

Michael and I have come to love social media, taking photos and sharing silly stories about ourselves and our lives. The little cabin we live in, and its surroundings, must be one of the most well-photographed little cabins in the world. Neither are we in any way strangers to take snapshots of each other – photos that should not be taken too seriously – and flaunt them all over the place. There are expressions for people like us, but I don’t think they are suitable for print.

It is amazing to me that I, once upon a time, was so camera-shy I often – literally – ran out of a room if someone fished up the devious catching-you-at-your-worst-moment device out of a bag. Additionally, it is not so many years ago I was highly suspicious of anything social media, a terrible photographer, and totally sucked when it came to general technology. (I used to be one of those people who thought my computer would blow up if I pushed the wrong button.)

Now, looking at our self-serving, look-at-me-and-my-life way of moving in the world, I know that it is a modern-world phenomenon to show off the happy-dippy parts of our lives in shining colors and successful light. And the cabin we call “The Tree House” has some great photograph light. But, as for all people, there is another side to the sweet-social-media-story. To live in a small cabin, that is also your office, and publish a magazine, has other sides than sweet, shining and happy-dippy. It has also been messy. Messy and muddy. Sometimes very muddy. Let me share a real-life story.

We have one spot in the cabin that has a clear phone connection. it is on the upper part of the stairs, covering an area of approximately five square feet where we use the banister as our office space. One morning, after a period of heavy rain, our delivery truck came driving in on the rain-soaked road. Now, the driver was new, young and fiery. Before Michael and I had the chance to run out and shout to him NOT to back up on the field – that becomes extremely soggy during rains since we are in a valley – he quickly turned around and backed up in the soaked field. Of course, he got stuck. And being somewhat young and feisty, it took him only about ten minutes to dig the wheels of the truck so deep down in the grass that there was no way of getting out, creating deep muddy tracks in the grass. There was no choice for him but to call for a tow truck.

At the same time the tow truck arrived, neighbors and our neighbor’s friend had gotten involved and there was honking horns, and six guys shouting to each other just down from the stairs. This would not have been a problem at all, had it not been at this exact moment that I had scheduled an interview with someone I admired very much, who happened to be in New Mexico. He was very gracious about the whole thing, and even claimed that there where snowstorms in New Mexico that may disturb the signal. I caught enough of the interview to transcribe it to an article.

The story might have ended there, as a mild inconvenience in the world of publishing from your home, had it not been for the fact that Michael and I decided to go down to the fireplace by the creek to celebrate our latest edition. There was, of course, a fire involved, probably a couple of glasses of wine too much, and very animated discussion. For whatever reason, by the time we were walking back to the cabin it was dark, and I had totally forgot about the incident with the delivery truck. So … I fall, face down, into the water and mud-filled tracks left by the truck. After catching my breath, Michael and I broke down in laughter that lasted all the way up to the cabin, through a very muddy shower and even going to bed. Now this was one day. If I had space, I could tell you the stories about:

When I couldn’t create the upcoming edition while on the road because my lap-top refused to even open to the desktop, and I sat chewing on my hands on the airplane because I left Michael all alone running everything else, and my only real mission for the month was to put the edition together.

When I couldn’t get into my “office’ – aka the cabin - because there was a big snake that had decided to settle in on our doorstep. Michael was gone, and I was too chicken-shit to try to make the snake go away (now that’s a better excuse not to work than “the dog ate my homework”), so I had to wait in the driveway until Michael came home to get back to work.

The time Michael fell down the slippery stairs during hurricane season and cracked three ribs with me gone and him responsible to handle everything (yup, same time as my computer broke down on the road).

I could continue. But I will spare you. Just saying this: to make things look all fun, easy and colorful on social media is easy. Life, however, is much more messy than that. And muddy. I did mention muddy, did I not?

This editorial was first published in the September edition of The Echo World

What Is a Ghost?

I knew the ghost was there - just as I have felt the presence of many ghosts since I moved to Virginia. And I knew what the ghost was going through. She was thinking of her childhood, and the pain it brought.

I always thought that the painful separation from the real world, the fall from grace, and the suffocating roles that followed, only smothered me alone. Others seemed to adapt miraculously. So, I tried to ignore it, almost managed to, numbing myself in all ways I could think of. And dared to. Because, different from this ghost, whose name was Lou-Ann and who killed herself of an overdose of heroin in the seventies, I have always been chicken-shit when it comes to hard drugs, knowing well I would end up in a psychiatric ward just by looking at them. There are many ways to strive towards oblivion, however. Most are sanctioned by society.

To grow up is a hellish thing. If I believed in hell. Which I don't. No other than the man-made one anyway. Sometimes it seems that the loss of innocence is an accepted thing, only seen as a crime if it can be blamed on abuse. As if your free roaming spirit has to be beaten out of your body by angry hands.

I was never abused. I was a loved child in a grand family. Being the youngest I was sometimes almost forgotten, left to my own adventures. Which suited me fine. Sometimes I was also spoiled rotten. I didn’t mind that either. The abuse was the world crashing in, those dark entangled webs created to hold you in place. I fought with all the might my skinny being could muster up. As it turned out, that was not enough.

           

"It's part of growing up," they say.

           

But it shouldn't be.

           

It wasn't only me. It was also her. The ghost whose name is Lou-Ann. Who turned to drugs because growing up was too hard. I'm pretty sure she never meant to die. Her death was a mistake. A horrible moment of misjudgment with lethal consequences.

Me, I can still re-model myself with time. Perhaps have a near-death experience and see it all anew. Something broken, something gained. Lou-Ann never had the time to set things right. Never had the time to reclaim her innocence, her real self, her strength to live the way she wanted to.

What is a ghost, if not an unlived life?

I had to restore her. Give her what she needed. I decided to do a journey to the Underworld. It was a long time ago since I did that. But the Underworld is the place where lost pieces of self can be found. And Lou-Ann needed those pieces right now.

There should be a word when the terrain has changed shape but is emotionally, absolutely familiar. There should be a word for traveling in the world some call the astral but seeing almost the same thing as you do with your physical eyes, only seeing … a bit more. There should be words, and maybe there are, in some language.

I did not know. I dove down in the muddy waters of the creek and followed the roots of the southwest guardian tree - the tree with the giant branch-arm. Here I found a landscape I already knew, though I never saw it like this. There was a river, wide and still, and trees old with wisdom. A canoe was waiting for me: light and smooth. Stepping into it was like stepping into a well-known secret; a secret of soft movements. The canoe glided effortlessly on the water surface.

I looked for a power animal for Lou-Ann, though I had never heard of journeying for a power animal for a ghost. I didn't know what to expect: something wild and strong perhaps, a ferocious protector. Instead I found a hedgehog, the sweetest thing you can imagine, with squinting eyes. He opened and closed his little hands, making me remember the hedgehogs in my childhood, curious but cautious, hiding behind raised spikes if threat was near. I carried him to the canoe and carefully put him in my lap. Then I headed back through the dreamy landscape, that was as real as any landscape, one water-dripping paddle stroke at the time.

Lou-Ann greeted me unexpectedly on the shore. I left her there, hedgehog in arms, with talking trees and healing grounds all around. For a while she would remain at the corner of my unconscious, in the Underworld, where she could grow stronger. I felt her. Part of her wanted to crawl back into the folds of oblivion. But that was not an option anymore.

"Bring them to the light!" they said. "Bring them to heaven." But Lou-Ann didn't want to go to heaven. She wanted to find a dusty ghost truck and drive from state to state, picking up lost-soul-hitchhikers along the way, and to make friends. She wanted to experience the world, on her own terms, and do everything she longed to do when she was still alive, until one day the truck becomes a spaceship ready to fly over the starry skies.

By Sofia Karin Axelsson

           

This story was first published in The October edition of The Echo World. More Ghost stories to come ...            

The First Ghost Named George

Foreword: This story is part of a collection, tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer: Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded in the South.” They were mainly written during my first year in the Appalachian Mountains, having moved from Sweden, living at the end of a road, with no green card to allow me to work and my husband, Michael, working at the Monroe Institute. Being a stranger in a strange land those days, ghosts started to talk to me. I hope you enjoy it. 

It was Michael who found George, but George then found Michael something Michael needed. It was a shell, a great shell: seven inches long, with a cosmic spiral and a generous, oval opening.

Michael had talked to me again over Skype, of the white beaches of Progreso  in Mexico, about our long walks and early swims in warm water: bodies tumbling around each other. And, of course, about shells: shells of all kinds, one more beautiful than the other. We mused over the shell altars we had built in the sand, as well as all over the small rental above the restaurant - sun-feathered, spiky, rosy, bluish, closed, open, round, shining, with stripes and sometimes leopard spots - as pleasurable to look at and touch as our love had been in Progreso.

Now, I was in the considerably colder Sweden, and Michael in the Blue Ridge mountains in the company of bugs and snakes.

           

So, he much needed a shell. But first he had to find George.

           

What he found first was George's cabin, though he didn't know anything about the previous owner of the place at the time. He had followed the creek right into the green forest for thirty minutes when he stumbled over the long-abandoned house. What he saw was a simple, wooden house with cracked windows, so small it made his two-room cabin look like a mansion, nestled in the middle of the greenery, and the remaining boards of a fallen down shed close by. Inside the cabin floor was rotting away, leaving dangerous holes, half covered by falling apart rugs. Michael was mostly curious, but he was also lacking most material things due to the last years of change and travels and thought he might find some treasures. Which he did: some unbroken plates and bowls, and a wooden bar stool with forest green, slender legs. He carried them home, cleaned them up and eventually went to bed.

           

It wasn't exactly a noise that woke him, more a memory of a noise, the fading sound of somebody mumbling in the background. Michael went into the kitchen and drank some milk. The sensation didn't go away though. It was as if something was pushing against his mind, just out of reach for conscious thought to pick up the signal.

           

"Maybe you brought something back with you," I suggested during our Skype session the next day, "or someone."

"Like a ghost?"

"Yes, like a ghost," I said, not totally comfortable with the concept.

"I think you might be right," said Michael, much to my dismay. And then he continued, in the sudden bursts of knowing unseen things that are so typical of him, "He lived there by himself at the end. But there was a woman once, and a child. He is trying to talk to me. I think his name is George."

           

To be separated from the one you love is hard, and the technology we have at hand is both a blessing and a curse. The flat, cold screen sending images of Michael’s face was so insufficient to my needs. The thought of him without me in the cabin, the place filled with bugs and snakes, and now perhaps also a ghost, was worse.

"Just make sure he means no harm," I said cautiously. "If he seems angry you took those things, do bring them back."

           

It took Michael days to hear George's voice, and it seemed muffled and far away.

"It takes great effort for me to keep the connection to you," said George.

"Do you want me to bring your things back?" Michael asked quickly.

"No!" said George with emphasis. "I want to wake up. Please go back to my cabin. I will show you something."

           

So, Michael went back the next day. At the fallen shed he felt George push his arm.

"Down there," said George, as if speaking through a tube. "There is something you will like there."

           

And it was. Under boards and rubble Michael found the perfect shell. A memory of another man's happy times, by another beach, with another love. Michael brought the shell back home, and put it on his cabin altar, and George's voice suddenly became clear. As if the years between the two men were gone. The shell a telephone through time, if not space.

           

First published in September edition of The Echo World.

Photograph: "George's shell," by Sofia Karin Axelsson.

           

Frida Kahlo in My Heart (and on My Porch)

Foreword: This story is part of a collection, tentatively called “Ghost Whisperer: Stories from a Nordic Witch Stranded in the South.” They were mainly written during my first year in the Appalachian Mountains, having moved from Sweden, living at the end of a road, with no green card to allow me to work and my husband, Michael, working at the Monroe Institute. Being a stranger in a strange land those days, ghosts started to talk to me, and so did the spirit of Frida Kahlo. I hope you enjoy it.

I lit candles on the porch, reflecting themselves in the crystal globes hanging in the window, and I was speaking to my Patroness of Protection and Creativity: the spirit of Frida Kahlo.

           

At this point in my life, I listened more to the Earth fairies and the song of the wind than to anything human. It seemed a step in the right direction then, to speak to an unmistakably and very spirited, human voice, even though it belonged to a ghost.

           

In exile from my birth country, out of the inevitable necessity of love, in the land between: in-between nation and nation, lawfully married and not exactly lawfully married, employable but not allowed to work, human and alien; all in the hands of slow-working, bureaucratic U.S. immigration officers.

I was more than this in-between state of nature and civilization, having chosen solitude in spite of the world-renowned southern hospitality.

"We all need people," purred Frida, leaning back on the pillows propped on the second-hand, wooden chair.

           

Virginia, shamelessly claimed by its inhabitants to be the greatest place on earth, ran thick with blood. Maybe that was why the vines grew so fiercely and bugs found their way through every crack in the thin walls. Wars, deportations, accusations, hangings, Native Americans, black slaves, poor people, the wrong-sayers, the truth-sayers - it was a place difficult to take to heart, had it not been for its lavishly, in-your-face beauty, with lifeforce leaking out of the very pours of fast growing plants and the plentiful animal kingdom.

           

"I don't know Miss Kahlo,” I said, already knowing that the woman was right. "People make so much noise and have needs that never seem to end."

           

Frida laughed and opened her colorful skirts, revealing her broken body, sorrowfully patched together with spikes and leather bands.

           

"They will crave more of you than that, little sister," said Frida and shrugged her shoulders. "But that is how art is created."

           

Frida’s gesture made me feel invalid. As if my suffering, a cold on a sunny day, was fake. Insufficient as the basis for creation.

           

"All separation is sufficient," smiled Frida, unexpectedly kind, "If your soul is broken in two in your childhood, when you come of age, to mend it is your creation for life. Just as knowing that all lands run thick with blood - my Mexico, Virginia, even your cold North."

           

This made me feel a bit better, somewhat worthy, but Frida would not give me time for self-celebrating respite. Her delicate face came closer, earrings clanging like windchimes,

"But now," Frida whispered, "you must go further."

First published in the August edition of The Echo World.

Photograph "Frida Kahlo on mural in Tijuana" by Sofia Karin Axelsson.

Thank You Powers - or Green Prayer

The green heals me and nourishes me,

and from the green, and the heart, stems the whole rainbow.

Freja protect me, Sunna shine on me, and ancient Skadi

lend me the teeth and bone of Thurisaz.

Odin give me of your wisdom,

Loki lend me your cunning,

So, I may shapeshift through the day.

Sweet Idun, goddess of youth,

grant me of your golden apples,

So I may live as long as I choose.

Powers of old, powers of new,

together we can sail right through.

And with that I wish you the most prosperous August.

First published in the August edition of The Echo World