Hiding from the Sun

Perth has had funny temperatures this year. 

Day after day of temperatures in the mid 30c's ( thats between 86f and 100f for my friends in other locals). 

Not super hot (as in low 40c's) but at night we only dip to around 18c. 

The constancy of the heat is wearing. 

Taxing. 

You function. You perform. 

But you don't really rest well. 

Air conditioning is helpful, but drying too.

In these times I think of the north. 

The heat leaves me feeling like a stranger in my own land.

I long for something I can't quite put my finger on.

It is the shadow in the corner, the shudder if the curtains, the train just missed,

it is the north.

Canada, Scandinavia, 

Not only for a blessed relief from the heat, 

but from all it entails in its history, its poetry, its art, its spaciousness, its mystery, its solitude.

Like many, C.S. Lewis' words echo deep within me:

“Pure “Northernness” engulfed me: a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight of Northern summer, remoteness, severity… and almost at the same moment I knew that I had met this before, long, long ago (it hardly seems longer now) in Tegner’s Drapa, that Siegfried (whatever it might be) belonged to the same world as Balder and the sunward-sailing cranes. And with that plunge back into my own past there arose at once, almost like heart-break, the memory of Joy itself, the knowledge that I had once had what I had now lacked for years, that I was returning at last from exile and desert lands to my own country; and the distance of the Twilight of the Gods, and the distance of my own past Joy, both unattainable, flowed together in a single, unendurable sense of desire and loss, which suddenly became one with the loss of the whole experience, which, as I now stared round that dusty schoolroom like a man recovering from unconsciousness, had already vanished, had eluded me at the very moment when I could first say It is. And at once I knew (with fatal knowledge) that to “have it again” was the supreme and only important object of desire.

Something within me finds in this "Northernness"a  connection with the divine, with the mystery. A way of being which echos deep in my soul.  Check out these few resources: 

Reading  Travel  Winter