Everything Is A Mirror
What Norway reflected back to me...
Many of us know that relationships, platonic, romantic or otherwise, work as mirrors, allowing us to come into greater self-awareness, making the unconscious conscious, like Carl Jung so famously stated.
Yet, I have discovered that it’s not just people who act like mirrors to us. Everything and anything can be a mirror. Places as well. Anything that is alive can be a tool, reflecting back to us our own truth.
The Mirror Principle
Everything outside of you is alive in its own way. It has its own energy, rhythm, flow. Even a piece of art is alive. It holds wisdom and an expression of something sacred.
If everything is alive, operating in its own energy and essence, then that place or thing can also reflect something back to you about that part of yourself.
This is a fascinating concept!
Norway As A Sacred Mirror
When I relocated to my native Norway last year, I came face to face with what was to become one of my greatest mirrors. I just didn’t know it yet.
What I have discovered in the course of my time here is that everything I didn’t like about my native land, were actually all the things I didn’t like about myself. That’s a wake up call I didn’t know I was finally ready for.
Norway is a beautiful country for sure. Full of light and natural beauty. There are so many things to admire here. Yet it is also a country of extremes.
It has vast contrasts. In the summer it is filled with light. It hardly ever gets dark. Light is everywhere. People have always told me that I have so much light. ‘You exude light!’ That’s what I’ve been told. It’s a lovely thing to hear and it’s something I see reflected here in the long summer nights.
However, Norway also has extreme periods of darkness. In the winter it gets dark early and light is much harder to come by. I’ve always struggled with that darkness as many of us do. I too am a creature of extremes, there’s a lot of light, but also a lot of darkness. This is what makes me a good artist and poet. Without the darkness, there would be no art.
The Dark Wilderness
As I’ve looked out to all the nature that surrounds me here, it hits different than the nature I have found in other places in which I have resided (UK and Spain). There’s a wilderness here. Everything is raw and real. Even the green is a darker shade than what I am used to.
I resented that darker shade of green. It sounds so silly, doesn’t it! In the UK, the nature feels brighter, everything is softer somehow (I do love the English countryside). It feels almost like I could escape those darker aspects of myself whilst not confronted with them in my outside world and the landscape around me.
Not so here. Here there is no escaping what is. Perhaps that’s a good thing. In fact, I know it is. I’m convinced that’s part of the reason I have been brought here at this time. To face my own duality, reflected so neatly in the Norwegian nature; to integrate the darkness with the light and to come back into wholeness.
This has been, and continues to be, a humbling experience filled with awe, respect and wonder, even if at times it has also been a painful awakening.
Too Much Is Just Enough
I’ve rarely felt that I belong in life. I never seem to quite fit somehow. Perhaps I have felt that I was too much, too intense. Yes, I have definitely felt that. That lack of acceptance for my own duality has shown up everywhere: in my relationships, in my music, in my everyday life.
As long as I avoided those darker aspects of myself, I have not been able to feel fully free or to show up authentically.
A music producer (a very wise man!) told me a couple of years ago, that I had not been authentic in my music. Ouch! That stung. Yet I knew he was right. My original music started out as more authentic than what it eventually became. It seemed like with every song, I tried to fit myself more and more into an acceptable standard and mould myself into what I thought I needed to be as an artist to be accepted and palatable. In that process I drifted further and further away from my true essence and artistry.
It’s a good thing to take time out to recalibrate and recapture your essence. Then go again. This time from radical authenticity and self-acceptance. This applies to anything, not just music or art.
“You think you are too much. Too intense. Too intellectual. Not commercial enough. But if you are those things you have to be them, because that’s who you are. Otherwise you’re not authentic”.
Wow! How right he was! Being here in Norway has been my reclamation of all of me. The good, the bad, the ugly, the light, the dark, the intense. I had to come back to where I came from to reclaim that essence. It’s been painful, raw and somehow I don’t think I’m fully done yet. But I am definitely closer than I have ever been. That’s something.
Mirror Mirror
I certainly didn’t expect Norway to be revealing so much back to me when I first got here. It’s been, and continues to be, a true gift. And like some of the best gifts in life, they arrive not wrapped in beautiful ribbons and lace, but rather as invitations to look closer, more deeply into our very essence, uncomfortable as that may be.
I think I am finally ok with being all of me. Intensity, darkness, too muchness and all. Perhaps that’s what makes me interesting and unique. I know it’s what makes me a good artist and coach. I don’t wish to hide those parts of myself any longer. There’s beauty in that darker shade of green. It’s grown on me. I think I just might like it.
If you’re in your own wilderness season ask yourself - what is it that surrounds you right now that can reflect truth back to you? What does your perceptions about what is happening outside of you reveal about your own depths?
Those are questions worth pondering. And maybe, just maybe, in the quest for those answers you’ll come into greater self-awareness, self-acceptance and finally reclaim those lost aspects of self that you deemed too much or not enough? Perhaps they were just right all along?
This could be your season of coming into wholeness.
Will you join me there? ✨
Here’s a piece of classical music from my native country: a bit of Grieg for you
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It is coming full circle with the completeness of the soul, the acceptance, and the authenticity. I know this journey all too well, having chased the illusion of someplace else bringing me the peace that could only be found within myself, and in so doing, awakened to the beauty that was waiting for me all along the way. The good news is that all those places I've lived contributed to the vision and realization of my own becoming. This is that wonderful stage of life when the chasing ends and the full arrival begins.