Haydo

My dear Friends
I hope the group of Swedish people I met the other day will forgive me if the above spelling of their word for 'Goodbye' is incorrect. Ashamed to say it is the only word I now know in Swedish, despite its being my maternal grandmother's tongue. My mother, who lived until 97, but was not well travelled, remembered her childhood trips to Sweden, often across the Sound from Denmark, until just before she died.

She was taken to Joteboy (the Swedish name for Gothenberg) by my grandmother, whose Swedish Jewish family lived in Karlstadt, in the middle of Sweden on a lake, until the end of the Second World War, when we lose trace of them, at least on a family tree. We know that Henri Bergson, philosopher in Paris in the 1930's, and winner of the Nobel prize for literature, came from this part of our family, of which we are very proud. I have since learned that his philosophy of the 'elan vitale', the life force or principle, spans the divide between Judaism and Catholicism.

But it was on a different theme that I wanted to talk about the Swedish connection, and, indeed, the Scandinavian countries as a whole. Including Iceland. Iceland may have gone bankrupt in the world's eyes, but it has not seemed to need Peace and Reconciliation. Why? I have asked myself on several occasions.

The Swedes gave me the clue. SILENCE. Scandinavian countries have a landscape and way of being which invites silence more than most other countries. We have to work at it here. I am not yet in Canada for good, but it seems that that silence is in the blood of those who live in cold countries-silence bred of beautiful landscapes, woods and water. When a friend of mine moved to Iceland, he showed me photos the like of which I had never seen equalled in beauty, I could only think of Paradise.

There are many kinds of silence. The silence which sometimes surrounds me where I live on the estate is an unnatural one, and usually precedes some kind of human storm. I have cultivated an inner silence and solitude through prayer, but which I am not very good at extending to the outside world in Cambridge. That must surely be my task if I am going to have patience to wait it out, before moving to Canada. and even there it will have to remain, cultivating silence.

Silence, in the sense of non-retaliation, can be a good weapon against violence, verbal or otherwise. I have always been one to intervene. For the sake of my sanity and my long term aims, I am going to invoke the help of a wise silence to attain an inner and outer peace.

Haydo!
Sister Gila
Does not a wise silence go with a still or deep JOY?