SHETLAND: ARCTIC ARCHIPELAGO

Friendship confirms us that the world is as we see it, letting our "dark side" bring up the true spirit of life to achieve wholeness.
Sometimes you can feel you're not your own self. Society teaches you to be ashamed of your true self. But being conscious of your "repressed self" might help you achieve an inner balance to better understand yourself. Share your thoughts!

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That on the right is "Juanma". I met him 7 years ago in Barcelona, Spain. We met at a metal concert. The second time we met, we were on a plane to travel around Norway.

From that trip on, we've been in many adventures together. 
​It's strange the cirumstances how people are brought together and why are some people meant to meet. It's like electricity moving, trying to find a way to connect so that it can expand further more and beyond. Everything's connected.

"If someone can understand your silence, they can never misunderstand your words" - Anonymous.

5 flights, 1 bus, 1 ferry after...
Juanma lives in London, so I decided to pay him a visit, though we decided to meet in Shetland Islands. It was quite a trip to get there, but we finally met at a ferry leaving from Scotland.

Once in Shetland, we decided the best way to travel was renting a car, that way we could cover more land, so we just picked a car and started driving to places in the map that sounded right.

​I don't usually do much planing for a trip. I pick places by what I think they might bestow to my own fulfillment. My main drive in life is meaning and most of the times these quests obliges us to become aware of freedom, but also of our own mortality, leading to get to know oneself better.

"The sky was brooding and beautiful" - Warrell Dane

"The dark side of [the] being, [the] sinister shadow...represents the true spirit of life...” - Carl Jung

​Carl Jung’s “Shadow” refers to the “repressed self” or to that reproach from society of our impulses and emotions that we hide every day to “fit in” in a society that teaches us to be ashamed of our own self. 

Being conscious of our “shadow” helps us see who we really are, and I think friendship holds part of that wisdom that aids bringing the Shadow to the light.

​Juanma and I arrived to a deserted house where we heard you were able to spend the night. No one was home, yet the doors were open and the beds were made.
I guess you can tell the quality of Shetland’s people when trust is the basis of their lives.
We stayed for a while, waiting for someone to come. Later we met a guy who was camping in the house garden and he explianed to us that there was no one around, yet we could stay for as long as we wanted, we just had to leave the money for every night inside a box that was next to the kitchen’s fridge.

“A man is happy if he has merely encountered the shadow of a friend.” - Menander

Knowing and being friends with some one who is close to you and understands you, is somewhat a validation of our sense of who we are.  
We feel safer and we start allowing our shadowed personality into an awarness state, making us feel reassured of who we are.

This friendship is confirming us that the world is as we see it.

​We tried to go out at night, see if we could see any northern lights. It was freezing cold with strong winds, the sky was clear and starry, as there were no artificial light around. I was feeling sick with a terrible cough and maybe even fever, so we went back to the house.

Next day I was even worse, I started to have asthma and felt very tired, but still, we kept our trip going!
We were already at the farthest northern island, so we decided to go back a bit, as west as possible (northern lights are best seen to the north west direction) and try our luck in another town.

We stopped for snacks, cough syrup and energy drinks at a supermarket, for me to get a second breath.

“Your thoughts become your actions and your actions create the circumstances in your life” - Philosophy of Hinduism

​When you find liberty of being yourself, you begin to learn more about you, until you become aware of your thought processes and thus, your actions. This is the point where you achieve wholeness and finally learn how to change the conditions of your life.

Everything's connected and that peculiar way that life brought you together with someone, fits in place, for that electricity flow is part of a greater whole.

“What you do today is important because you’re exchanging a day of your life for it.” - Anonymous 

We didn’t know if there was somewhere we could sleep, but we had snacks and the car heater in case we couldn’t find a place to crash. Finally we made it to another town on a western island. We stopped at a gas station and ask for a place to sleep. We managed to get to an old small hotel, very nice though. We had a couple of beers and ask the bartender about northern lights.

“I’ve been living here my whole life and it’s almost impossible to see them this time of the year...but you might be lucky, according to the weather forecast, you might see some action after midnight.”

I took my compass out and called directions towards the north west. Juanma drove through dirt roads, lochs and maybe even ancient monsters hidding in that darkest night, but our adrenaline was at it’s highest! We needed to see some northern lights on our last day in the islands.

​I was inside the car, trying not to die of fever and lung infection (as I’ll discover 3 weeks later that  that was what I had) When I heard Juanma calling me...

Finally there they where! We were lucky indeed!

Not the strongest aurora borealis, but our first! And it was a hell of a ride to capture this single image that Juanma was able to freeze.
(see next slide)

Friendship is a connecting force that searches it’s missing link between beings and just like polar lights, once they come across each other, they emit the most powerful beautiful light.

Previous Quest: Danish Shores