Nordic Nature Quotes

I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Viking berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary, great minds with the ordinary

So chalk up one plus for Nordic weather: It helped you get where you were going a whole lot faster.

[The Brothers Grimm] made a brotherly pact to remain and work together for the rest of their lives, and together they cultivated a passion for recovering the “true”nature of the German people through their so-called natural Poesie, the term that the Grimms often used to describe the formidable ancient Germanic and Nordic literature. (An introduction: rediscovering the original tales of the Brothers Grimm, by Jack Zipes)

To the Finnish, being outdoors in nature isn't about paying homage to nature or to ourselves, the way it tends to be for Americans. We fetishize are life lists, catalog peaks bagged and capture pristine scenes of grand wilderness It is largely an individual experience. For the Finnish, though, nature is about expressing a close-knit identity. Nature is where they can exult in their nationalistic obsessions of berry-picking, mushrooming, fishing, lake swimming and Nordic skiing.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document's word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word "play" thirteen times, "language" twelve times, "nature" six times, and "math" five times. But there is not a single mention of "literacy" or "writing." Instead, two of the most frequently used words are "learning" (with forty-eight appearances) and "development" (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn't start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because "their monolithic culture values reading.

Summary: Wheat Belly Detox Supplements Look for the supplements we use in the Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox in health food stores. Because of regional variation in brands, the reputable brands that are available to you may differ from the ones I list below. Where national brands are widely distributed, I will specify a few quality representative ones. High-potency probiotic supplement: 30 billion to 50 billion CFUs per day for 6 to 8 weeks. My favorite brands include Garden of Life, Renew Life, and VSL#3, all of which contain a long list of preferred bacterial species, as well as high CFU counts. Vitamin D: 4,000 to 8,000 IUs per day to start for adults, as gelcaps or drops; long-term dose adjusted to achieve a 25-hydroxy vitamin D blood level of 60 to 70 ng/mL. Excellent vitamin D preparations are widely available in many brands and surprisingly low in cost. Look for oil-based gelcaps (that look like little fish oil capsules) or liquid drops, but not tablets. Even the big-box stores like Costco and Sam’s Club have excellent preparations. Magnesium: Preferably magnesium malate, 1,200 mg two or three times per day, or magnesium glycinate, 400 mg two or three times per day; or magnesium citrate, 400 mg two or three times per day. (If elemental magnesium—i.e., magnesium without the weight of malate, glycinate, or citrate—is specified on your supplement, aim for around 400 mg magnesium per day.) Source Naturals, NOW, and KAL are excellent brands. Fish oil: 3,000 to 3,600 mg per day of EPA and DHA, divided into two doses. Among my preferred brands are Nordic Naturals, Ascenta Nutra-Sea, and Carlson. Iodine: 500 to 1,000 mcg per day as potassium iodide drops or kelp tablets. Like vitamin D, there are many excellent preparations available at low cost. Iron: Look for supplements in the ferrous form and take only if low ferritin levels or iron deficiency anemia is identified; the dose depends on the severity of anemia and the form chosen. Sundown Naturals, Feosol, and Pure Encapsulations are among preferred brands. Zinc: 10 to 15 mg per day of (elemental) zinc as gluconate, sulfate, or acetate. Twinlab, Thorne, and NOW provide great choices.

Kennewick Man is a skeleton discovered in Washington State in 1996, carbon-dated to older than 9,000 years. Anthropologists were intrigued by anatomical suggestions that he might be unrelated to typical Native Americans, and therefore might represent a separate early migration across what is now the Bering Strait, or even from Iceland. They were preparing to do all-important DNA tests when the legal authorities seized the skeleton, intending to hand it over to representatives of local Indian tribes, who proposed to bury it and forbid all further study. Naturally there was widespread opposition from the scientific and archaeological community. Even if Kennewick Man is an American Indian of some kind, it is highly unlikely that his affinities lie with whichever particular tribe happens to live in the same area 9,000 years later. Native Americans have impressive legal muscle, and ‘The Ancient One’ might have been handed over to the tribes, but for a bizarre twist. The Asatru Folk Assembly, a group of worshippers of the Norse gods Thor and Odin, filed an independent legal claim that Kennewick Man was actually a Viking. This Nordic sect, whose views you may follow in the Summer 1997 issue of The Runestone, were actually allowed to hold a religious service over the bones. This upset the Yakama Indian community, whose spokesman feared that the Viking ceremony could be ‘keeping Kennewick Man’s spirit from finding his body’. The dispute between Indians and Norsemen could well be settled by DNA comparison, and the Norsemen are quite keen to be put to this test. Scientific study of the remains would certainly cast fascinating light on the question of when humans first arrived in America. But Indian leaders resent the very idea of studying this question, because they believe their ancestors have been in America since the creation. As Armand Minthorn, religious leader of the Umatilla tribe, put it: ‘From our oral histories, we know that our people have been part of this land since the beginning of time. We do not believe our people migrated here from another continent, as the scientists do.’ Perhaps the best policy for the archaeologists would be to declare themselves a religion, with DNA fingerprints their sacramental totem. Facetious but, such is the climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth century, it is possibly the only recourse that would work.

Between 2003 and 2008, Iceland’s three main banks, Glitnir, Kaupthing and Landsbanki, borrowed over $140 billion, a figure equal to ten times the country’s GDP, dwarfing its central bank’s $2.5 billion reserves. A handful of entrepreneurs, egged on by their then government, embarked on an unprecedented international spending binge, buying everything from Danish department stores to West Ham Football Club, while a sizeable proportion of the rest of the adult population enthusiastically embraced the kind of cockamamie financial strategies usually only mooted in Nigerian spam emails – taking out loans in Japanese Yen, for example, or mortgaging their houses in Swiss francs. One minute the Icelanders were up to their waists in fish guts, the next they they were weighing up the options lists on their new Porsche Cayennes. The tales of un-Nordic excess are legion: Elton John was flown in to sing one song at a birthday party; private jets were booked like they were taxis; people thought nothing of spending £5,000 on bottles of single malt whisky, or £100,000 on hunting weekends in the English countryside. The chief executive of the London arm of Kaupthing hired the Natural History Museum for a party, with Tom Jones providing the entertainment, and, by all accounts, Reykjavik’s actual snow was augmented by a blizzard of the Colombian variety. The collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008 exposed Iceland’s debts which, at one point, were said to be around 850 per cent of GDP (compared with the US’s 350 per cent), and set off a chain reaction which resulted in the krona plummeting to almost half its value. By this stage Iceland’s banks were lending money to their own shareholders so that they could buy shares in . . . those very same Icelandic banks. I am no Paul Krugman, but even I can see that this was hardly a sustainable business model. The government didn’t have the money to cover its banks’ debts. It was forced to withdraw the krona from currency markets and accept loans totalling £4 billion from the IMF, and from other countries. Even the little Faroe Islands forked out £33 million, which must have been especially humiliating for the Icelanders. Interest rates peaked at 18 per cent. The stock market dropped 77 per cent; inflation hit 20 per cent; and the krona dropped 80 per cent. Depending who you listen to, the country’s total debt ended up somewhere between £13 billion and £63 billion, or, to put it another way, anything from £38,000 to £210,000 for each and every Icelander.

Let us now assume that under truly extraordinary circumstances, the daimon nevertheless breaks through in the individual, so to speak, and is this able to let its destructive transcendence be felt: then one would have a kind of active experience of death. Thereupon the second connection becomes clear: why the figure of the daimon or doppelgänger in the ancient myths could be melded with the deity of death. In the Nordic tradition the warrior sees his Valkyrie precisely at the moment of death or mortal danger. In religious asceticism, mortification, self-renunciation, and the impulse of devotion to God are the preferred methods of provoking and successfully overcoming the crisis I have just mentioned. Everyone knows the expressions which refer to these states, such as the 'mystical death' or 'dark night of the soul', etc. In contrast to this, within the framework of a heroic tradition, the path to the same goal is the active rapture, the Dionysian unleashing of the active element. At its lower levels, we find phenomenons such as the use of dance as a sacred technique for achieving an ecstasy of the soul that summons and uses profound energies. While the individual’s life is surrendered to Dionysian rhythm, another life sinks into it, as if it where his abyssal roots surfacing. The 'wild host' Furies, Erinyes, and suchlike spiritual natures are symbolic picturings of this energy, thus corresponding to a manifestation of the daimon in its terrifying and active transcendence. At a higher level we find sacred war-games; higher still, war itself. And this brings us back to the ancient Aryan concept of battle and the warrior ascetic. At the climax of danger and heroic battle, the possibility for such an extraordinary experience was recognized. The Lating ludere, meaning both 'to play' and 'to fight', seems to contain the idea of release. This is one of the many allusions to the inherent ability of battle to release deeply-buried powers from individual limitations and let them freely emerge. Hence the third comparison: the daimon, the Lar, the individualizing I, etc., are not only identical with the Furies, Erinyes, and other unleashed Dionysian natures, which themselves have many traits similar to the goddess of death — they are also synonymous with the storm maidens of battle, the Valkyries and Fravartis. In the texts, for example, the Fravartis are called 'the terrible, the all-powerful', 'those who attack in storm and bestow victory upon those who conjure them', or, more precisely, those who conjure them up in themselves. From there to the final comparison is only a short step. In the Aryan tradition the same martial beings eventually take on the form of victory-goddesses, a transformation which denotes the happy completion of the inner experience in question. Just as the daimon or doppelgänger signifies a deep, supra-individual power in its latent condition as compared to ordinary consciousness; just as the Furies and Erinyes reflect a particular manifestation of daimonic rages and eruptions (and the goddesses of death, Valkyries, Fravartis, etc., refer to the same conditions, as long as these are facilitated by battle and heroism) — in the same way the goddess of victory is the expression of the triumph of the I over this power. She signifies the victorious ascent to a state unendangered by ecstasies and sub-personal forms of disintegration, a danger that always lurks behind the frenetic moment of Dionysian and even heroic action. The ascent to a spiritual, truly supra-personal condition that makes one free, immortal, and internally indestructible, when the 'Two becomes One', expresses itself in this image of mythical consciousness.

ما يفترض أن يفعل المرء بالكلمات وسط عاصفة ثلجية على أي حال، وهو في مرج جبلي تنسفه الرياح، والاتجاهات كلها معدومة؟ وعندما يقول أنه متجمد وملتصق بالحصان، فهو يعني ما يقوله؛ حينها تكون الكلمات في منتهى الشفافية ولا تخفي أي معان، ولا ظلال، كما تميل الكلمات إلى أن تفعل.

Ascenta NutraSea and Nordic Naturals.

And it was the fair-haired Vikings from Norway who, coming to the pleasant island west of Britain, explored its natural harbours and, converting its Celtic name—Eriu, which they pronounced Eire—into their own tongue, first gave the place the Nordic name of Ire-land.

freedom, slow living, and good health.

The Germanic race, to which we ourselves belong, in prehistoric times constituted the - northernmost part of the great Nordic race whose original home was apart from Scandinavia and Northern Germany, large parts of Central and Southern Germany, the areas of Eastern Europe which today constitutes Poland, certain parts of Russia. In this primeval world, the Nordic race has lived ever since the last ice age. In these areas, close to the great glacier and under the harsh climatic and natural conditions that then prevailed in these areas, it has gradually acquired, through hard selection, the distinct racial characteristics that characterize the Nordic-Germanic race. From this center of radiation, over the course of millennia, wave after wave of Nordic-Germanic conquerors pushed eastwards, southwards and westwards, thousands of years before the last great wave which we know as the great Germanic migrations at the beginning of our known historical era.

[The Brothers Grimm] made a brotherly pact to remain and work together for the rest of their lives, and together they cultivated a passion for recovering the “true”nature of the German people through their so-called natural Poesie, the term that the Grimms often used to describe the formidable ancient Germanic and Nordic literature. (The Complete First Edition of The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, An introduction: rediscovering the original tales of the Brothers Grimm)

For some, this idea was a shade too close to the lifestyles our Nordic cousins. Hygge and lagom, the Danish and Swedish movements of living well. But while these movements laid the groundwork for a similar trend to emerge in Scotland, coorie has some obvious differences. Where hygge is concerned with the pursuit of happiness through candles, coffee and togetherness, coorie seeks to make the most of what comes from Scotland to feel satisfied. Lagom is the art of balancing frugality and fairness to create a balanced existence. Coorie takes into account being kind to the earth and our wallets, but can also extend to premium experiences once in a while. Crucially, neither of these Scandinavian lifestyle approaches took their starting point from what is dug out of the earth. Coorie is more than simply being cosy. Sure, it is linked, but more importantly it focuses on working out how to be in tune with our surroundings to evoke that feeling.

Just as Grant borrowed heavily from Houston Chamberlain, so did Stoddard borrow heavily from Grant in The Revolt Against Civilization, adding generous doses of Lombrosian-style statistical surveys to prove that the new immigrants were systematically undermining the racial future of America.* Stoddard’s Nordic type exhibited a remarkable fusion of neo-Gobinian and specifically American virtues. Nordic man was “at once democratic and aristocratic…. Profoundly individualistic and touchy about his personal rights, neither he nor his fellows will tolerate tyranny.” He was naturally averse to degeneration: “He requires healthful living conditions, and pines when deprived of good food, fresh air, and exercise.” His racial purity becomes the key to progress as well, since “our modern scientific age is mainly a product of Nordic genius.” All the nations with high infusions of Nordic blood were, according to Stoddard, “the most progressive as well as the most energetic and politically able.89 But Stoddard also dared to confront the paradox that underlay the Gobinian confrontation between cultural vitality and civilization. Even as a healthy racial stock generates society’s material wealth and cultural attainments, Gobineau had claimed, its openness to change and diversity sows the seeds of its own destruction. Ultimately the people discover that “their social environment has outrun inherited capacity.” The Anglo-Saxon heritage cannot sustain itself in the future without its racial stock. (Grant was also a keen eugenicist.) “The more complex the society and the more differentiated the stock,” Stoddard insisted, “the graver the liability of irreparable disaster.

the “noble heathen” is a stock character. All that conversion required, according to this theory of natural religion, was for Icelanders to regain sight of God. Unlike the pagans whom Icelanders learned about when they translated and read the lives of the early saints of the Christian church, Nordic pagans were not doomed souls in league with Satan. They were merely sheep who had lost their way.

Clearly, our immigration policies should be reexamined. A convincing case can be made on environmental grounds alone that a nation of 300,000,000 needs no more people, especially since it would enjoy natural growth if the borders were closed tomorrow. How can we possibly claim to be fighting environmental degradation or hope for energy independence when we import a million or more people every year? How can we claim to be fighting poverty, crime, school failure, or disease when we import people who are more likely than natives to be poor, criminals, school failures, and to suffer from strange diseases? Immigration is even harder to justify when many newcomers speak no English, maintain foreign loyalties, or practice disconcerting religions. It is profoundly unwise to add yet more disparate elements to a population already divided by diversity. [D]emographers and economists are making dire projections based on the lower likelihood of blacks and Hispanics to become productive workers. These people go on to insist that the solution is to improve education for blacks and Hispanics, but the United States has already made enormous efforts to that end. There is no reason to think some kind of breakthrough is imminent. Clearly, the solution to the problems posed by an increasing Hispanic population is to stop Hispanic immigration. However, [...], our policy-makers are too afraid of accusations of racism to draw such an obvious conclusion. Americans must open their eyes to the fact that a changing population could change everything in America. The United States could come to resemble the developing world rather than Europe—in some places it already does. One recent book on immigration to Europe sounded a similar alarm when the author asked: “Can you have the same Europe with different people?” His answer was a forthright “no.” It should be clear from the changes that have already taken place in the United States that we cannot have the same America with different people, either. Different populations build different societies. The principles of European and European-derived societies—freedom of speech, the rule of law, respect for women, representative government, low levels of corruption—do not easily take root elsewhere. They were born out of centuries of struggle, false starts, and setbacks, and cannot be taken for granted. A poorer, more desperate America, one riven with racial rivalries, one increasingly populated by people who come from non-Western traditions could turn its back on those principles. Many people assert that all people can understand and assimilate Western thinking—and yet cultures are very different. Can you, the reader, imagine emigrating to Cambodia or Saudi Arabia or Tanzania and assimilating perfectly? Probably not; yet everyone in the world is thought to be a potential American. Even if there is only a small chance that non-Western immigrants will establish alien and unsettling practices, why take this risk? Immigration to the United States, like immigration to any nation, is a favor granted by citizens to foreigners. It is not a right. Immigration advocates often point to the objections Anglo-Americans made to turn-of-the-century immigrants from Italy, Ireland, Hungary, and other “non-Nordic” countries. They point out that these immigrants assimilated, and insist that Mexicans and Haitians will do the same. Those advocates overlook the fundamental importance of race. They forget that the United States already had two ill assimilated racial groups long before the arrival of European ethnics—blacks and American Indians—and that those groups are still uncomfortably distinct elements in American society. Different European groups assimilated across ethnic lines after a few generations because they were of the same race. There are many societal fault lines in “diverse” societies—language, religion, ethnicity—but the fault line of race is deepest.

The national curriculum for the Swedish preschool is twenty pages long and goes on at length about things like fostering respect for one another, human rights, and democratic values, as well as a lifelong desire to learn. The document’s word choices are a pretty good clue to what Swedish society wants and expects from toddlers and preschoolers. The curriculum features the word play thirteen times, language twelve times, nature six times, and math five times. But there is not a single mention of literacy or writing. Instead, two of the most frequently used words are learning (with forty-eight appearances) and development (forty-seven). The other Scandinavian countries have similar early childhood education traditions. In Finland, formal teaching of reading doesn’t start until the child begins first grade, at age seven, and in the Finnish equivalent of kindergarten, which children enroll in the year they turn six, teachers will only teach reading if a child is showing an interest in it. Despite this lack of emphasis on early literacy, Finland is considered the most literate country in the world, with Norway coming in second, and Iceland, Denmark, and Sweden rounding out the top five, according to a 2016 study by Central Connecticut State University. John Miller, who conducted the study, noted that the five Nordic countries scored so well because “their monolithic culture values reading.” They have something else in common: their commitment to play in the early years.