Category: Arctic

Arctic, Art, Beauty, Culture, Dharma, DIY, Dzogchen, Everyday life, Genealogy, Indigenous, People, Photography, Photoshoot, Saami, Sámi, Sápmi, Sewing, Spirituality, Uralic, Vajrayana

Things that are yours to keep

Ask the Mountains
Traditional headdress by me, shawl hand-me-down. Photo by Sebastian Wilches 2020.

Some things I truly believe are yours to keep, that no one can take from you:

Your spiritual practice. In my case, it is vajrayana buddhism. It has saved my life in many ways – both in dealing with chronic illness, but also the normal existential stuff like finding purpose and joy 🙂🙏🏼📿

Your ambitions and dreams (if they come from a place of pure motivation and love). In my case now, it has been starting a little family with children 💜🤱

Your ethnicity and ancestry, no matter how lost or scattered it is in this modern world. In my case from my personal experience, I feel very connected to my home in the Arctic and being uralic/finno-ugric. I didn’t as a kid and teenager, at all, but now as I am older, I feel like I can “own” it more. I don’t speak any of the uralic languages, and feel a sadness about this. A disconnection from my own culture. And a feeling of not belonging to a community, when they can’t speak to me. I hope my son will not feel as disconnected. But I have found other ways to express this – primarily through art and duodji. Not all languages are of verbal nature, but are equally important, I think. 🎨

Your creativity. Not necessarily arts, but anything you find a solution to that involves stepping out of the habitual intellectual mind and into a state of spontaneity and flow.🌊

Your struggles. This sounds negative, but for me I mean that my struggles are valid. I have a body that has its big share of physical problems, and I don’t mean to whine. At all! 🙂 Just to express that this is my reality, and that chronic (perhaps invisible to others) illness can happen to anyone, any time in life.💙

Your love. This one sounds cheesy but I think we all can feel love and that we have love as a basic human need. To receive it and give it. And we all have different ways of showing it. I like giving gifts for example.. but am not so good verbally expressing how I feel. I like receiving kind loving deeds, but not to be smothered. So understanding how we show it differently is important too. I also believe that as humans we have the capacity to love many at the same time. Whether it is friends or partners, plural. Romantic, familial or platonic.❤

Arctic, Art, Beauty, DIY, Indigenous, Landscape, Outfit, People, Photography

Complementary colours

Ask the Mountains

Did you know there is a reason why orange+blue and yellow+purple work together so well? 🧡💙💛💜 They are considered complementary colours! “Complementary colours are pairs of colours which, when combined or mixed, cancel each other out by producing a grayscale colour like white or black. When placed next to each other, they create the strongest contrast for those two colors. Complementary colours may also be called ‘opposite colours’.”

Arctic, Awareness, Beauty, Culture, Dharma, Dzogchen, Indigenous, Meditation, Spirituality, Vajrayana, Yoga

Gold hidden in its matrix

Ask the Mountains
“You might ask, ‟If I have Buddha nature, why can’t I perceive it right now?”
It is because, like gold hidden in its matrix, that nature is hidden by our habits that we have accumulated since beginningless time. These habits have been created by our disturbing emotions and then reinforced by the actions that those disturbances have produced.”

~ Shechen Gyaltsab
Animals, Arctic, Art, DIY, Landscape

Hibernation

Ask the Mountains
32 x 24 cm, acrylic on multimedia paper
“Dvale”. Means hibernation. Only pregnant polar bears hibernate 💙 was hard to paint her intirely inside the den, so she is just laying at the entrance waiting for her cubs.

“During the fall, if a polar bear is pregnant, she digs a den into a snow drift. She then climbs into the hole and stays there to give birth and care for her cubs for the first few months of their life. She and her cubs will not emerge from the den until the spring. Male bears and non-pregnant females continue to roam and feed throughout the winter.”

One of the absolute top animals on my list I wish to see in my lifetime.. Guess I need to head up to Svalbard for that!

Arctic, Art, DIY, Everyday life, Jewellery

Mandag

Ask the Mountains
Ramma inn dette bladet jeg malte for litt siden 🍁🎨
Plantene mine ☺
Kunst.
Gjorde en giveaway i påska, her er det lille maleriet mitt (til høyre) i sitt nye hjem ☺
Fikk en fin håndlagd gave!✨
Dagboka mi 🦄 Elsker å skrive og føler det hjelper mye å få ting ned på papir. Også er det er pluss om den er søt.
Arctic, Beauty, Culture, DIY, Hair, Indigenous, Outfit, Photography, Photoshoot, Saami, Sámi, Sápmi, Sewing

Feeling most like myself

Ask the Mountains
Always feel the most beautiful in my own handmade clothing and/or traditional clothing. Woolhat and skirt made by me 🙂
Photos by Sebastian Wilches, edit by me.
Not sure what I am doing with my hands, I never know how to hold them…(:
Photo and edit by Sebastian Wilches (@wilchesfotografia)
Kofte and wool hat made by me
Mittens by my ‘mother-in-law’ Kristin (@dachsedilla)
Photo by Sebastian Wilches, edit by me.