The Truth of the North: Winter Blues Denmark January 2025

The Truth of the Crows Under a Late Morning Sky

My husband says my headlines are short and mysterious, don’t work for Google optimization, don’t appeal to the typical click-and-read type, and don’t exactly give a sense of what’s coming next.

But what if?

What if the flow of time and Nordic Now ignited my writing? What happens inside my head? Well, maybe it’s not about me—that much I understand.

So, here’s a new, more specific title: “How the Nordic Winter Both Breaks and Remakes Us, So That We Might Find the Eternal Truth That Only the Present Exists.”

Sounds like a brown file folder in a public office in 1976.

The days drip, flow, crumble, drift away, blow off, crack. I know I’ve written an entire series of journaling posts full of heavy stuff, and here’s yet another one—but give it a read; it ends well. It’s the story of how we’ve spent 23 days in Denmark in the middle of winter and learned what it costs. But also what it is.

The light feels empty, white, heavy. When it’s even there. Most of the light is just darkness—dark mornings, dark afternoons, dark nights. When we drove on the A7 up from Hamburg just after New Year’s, we had big plans to head to Norway, enjoy some quiet and winter together, and then return to Copenhagen in early March to celebrate my father-in-law’s birthday before driving south again in the spring.

That was before we drove under the cloud. The cloud that’s so big and heavy is simply called “winter” in the North. If you go farther north, it splits, and you get blue, blue skies over crisp, white snow—for a few hours a day. But in southern Scandinavia, thick, heavy layers stay most of the winter.

As soon as we passed under the cloud, the suffocation set in.

I knew with every part of me that I couldn’t make it through two months in the darkness.

Before we even crossed the Great Belt Bridge, we had canceled Norway and decided to stick to a max of 28 days in Denmark. No more!

I made it through the first four days on sheer willpower. Then everything inside me started unraveling. I have no idea how I survived 42 winters in this country! Sleep disappears, hunger vanishes but returns maliciously transformed into a monster, muscles ache without being used, the back hurts, the brain stops working, the mood drops and drops, energy is starving, everything feels hard, to-do lists grow longer and longer, and the piles of things to handle grow higher and higher.
I lie on a couch in pitch darkness with electric light, trying to keep everything running, listening to a Range hood hum, thinking about how insane this is. My youngest started to feel it after 16 days, my oldest after 21, my husband on day 22—same deal: the baseline mood is just awful. For no reason, mind you. There’s nothing wrong with our lives.
Our time in Denmark has been wonderful in so many ways. We started by visiting my high school friend—a pit stop along the way. In the crisp winter frost under a starry sky, we had exactly the two hours we needed to connect and listen to each other.

We celebrated both of our sons’ birthdays with our beloved friends and family, people we hadn’t seen in so long.

We’ve walked in frosty weather through beautiful landscapes, discovering stunning works of art and hidden natural gems.

We’ve stayed with our best friends, sharing everything, absolutely everything, in that magical way only a true friendship allows. We celebrated our ten-year friendship anniversary—yay! With hyacinths, hugs, and memories of that time, we got snowed in at their farm and had to stay the night—the beginning of ten incredible years in each other’s circles. And in each other’s hearts.

We’ve had silly, playful moments with my little nieces, visited my in-laws for soup and chats, and gone for lovely walks in the woods.

I spent a bright, frosty afternoon with my best friend, exploring Copenhagen’s beauty, just the two of us.

We’ve seen so many good friends that we’re almost worn out. We had the honor of meeting many of our adult daughter’s wonderful friends at a big dinner filled with knitting, philosophy, herbal tea, and life updates. We even visited my husband’s sister and spent an afternoon laughing together.

What else? We’ve spoken our own language so much that we’ve realized we’re not even that good at it anymore. I’ve laughed so hard at my kids’ antics that I litterally fell off the couch. We’ve played music, written a song about the phenomenon of “green porridge,” learned even more about developments in our culture, recorded podcasts, and started an art study with wonderful friends from the U.S. Together with the girls, I binge-watched a Netflix series—something I’ve never done before, so I suppose that counts as exotic too.

We’ve also lost a family member and will attend the funeral on Friday. I’m so glad we were here! Her only child is one of my dearest people, and for once, it felt good to be present when the family needed us.

There’s such a sharp contrast between how we feel inside—the exhaustion, sluggishness, the feeling of being half-asleep all the time, the overwhelm, irritability, the semi-grumpy, semi-heavy energy—and all the things we’ve actually done and experienced. It’s clear to us that it’s the climate. The winter here is BRUTAL. Four years ago, we spent a short time in Denmark during winter, caught a virus, and had to stay until we recovered. We swore we’d never do it again.

But apparently, you should never say never.

This time, we’ve really learned something. About how it feels. About why it isn’t worth it. But also about pausing to remember why we do what we do. That’s always the core of it. Everything cracks; time is fluid and leaks; the contrasts are intense, and the days are heavy. But we also land in the present, in understanding what makes it worth being—not just here in this space at this time, but here in this life. We grow wiser and stronger and clearer. Suddenly, the present moment takes up so much space. The days are slipping by, and soon, we’ll leave Denmark again. We can manage only a few things before we go—there might even be someone or something we don’t have time to see.

This pressure on our days somehow pushes us into the now, while the internal pressure—the drowning sensation that is the Nordic winter—forces a sense of meaning to the front of the line: Why are we here again? What’s important right now? Can we still feel the energies of the Great Mystery, even under these conditions?

I drove to the vet with both dogs and my daughter at sunrise this morning. Along the way, someone has done something extraordinary in this otherwise hyper-efficient and practical country: they’ve left an entire field of sunflowers unharvested. A flock of crows calls this treasure trove of sunflower seeds home. The sound of their wings and kra-kra cries throws me, tumbling and disoriented, into the Vikings’ reality, into my ancestry as a mead-drinking warrior, with the wisdom of Huginn and Muninn flickering before my eyes. All the birds rise together into the pale, mysterious morning sky, where—for once—there are shades in the gray. A hint of light breaks through the early, slanted sunbeams, creating beauty. A sense of the sun behind the curtain. And then this time capsule, this tangle of symbols: the birds swirl upward like snowflakes caught in a storm—but in reverse. Black and strong, they stay together and land in the tall trees.

Life is truly amazing.

It really is.

Actually.