from a lighthouse nestled somewhere in northern Norway, as experienced by Veronica Skotnes during her "The Light Alone" project, which we are supporting. Passages from her regular letters have made a deep impression on me, so much so that I would like to share some fragments with you from her latest one.

"...I have found an unexpected community out here. The buildings on the island were vacated twenty years ago, and no one has lived here since, apart from workers who from time-to-time have come to do maintenance on the lighthouse for a few days, but when the last lighthouse keepers moved out in 2006, they left behind large stacks of notebooks, logbooks, letters and notes that have remained untouched for two decades. I have spent months reading thousands of pages while trying to piece together an image of what life could have been like at the lighthouse when it was still manned, and when I am reading through all the correspondence, the random grocery lists, the notes, the weather logs and the recipes that are scribbled next to them, I feel a sense of togethernesswith the previous residents, because their notes look a lot like my letters, my weather observations and my grocery lists. «Eight geese observed today. Overcast, 10 degrees celcius, scattered rain. Remember to ask for garlic the next time a boat comes by». Even though most of the previous lighthouse keepers are dead, they are the only people who can perfectly understand how life is on this particular small island, and therefore, I feel like I’ve found a community in these archives. Between the lines of the official and serious weather logs, there are subtle jokes and irony that I only recently understood, because it is only recently that I was able to contextualize it and truly begin to grasp what life out here is like.

[...]

I still have two months to go until I’ve officially lived on the island for a full year, but the past months have made me realize that there is a lot more to this story than I first thought. One year at a lighthouse turned out to just be a framework for a story that goes much deeper. It’s been a method to discover a story that is actually about connection, heritage and community across time. I was expecting a story about isolation, but uncovered the complete opposite. The lighthouses have always connected the coast, but I didn’t realize that they could also connect the past with the present, and extend beyond country borders. Underneath the layers of storms, ruthless oceans, long winters and an offshore lighthouse, there is a story somewhere that I am still trying to find."

photo: a lighthouse in Cape Cod, USA, from my personal archive