Walking in the great North losing your compass

Like Ulysses, like the Sami of Scandinavia and the Inuit of Greenland. We are eternally men and women, made of hearts and horizons. Walking through woods of Scots pine, fir and birch, carpeted with ferns and blueberry, and discovering that those slow and stingy steps are light on the soul. Walking in silence means discovering wounds, going deep – fatigue strips away flesh – and trying to come back out of the darkness. Franco Michieli, 62 years old, knows this well, a long-time explorer who has made walking a lifestyle, an itinerant psychotherapy because he has understood that the terra più incognita, ultimately, is the man within us. Franco, at the age of 19, made the crossing from Ventimiglia to Trieste with some friends, backpacking for 81 days, amidst furious storms and spectacular sunrises. Already that beginning, ended in beauty The wild embrace of the Alps, marks his life. Michieli goes further. He feels a new vocation, that of losing himself, to find himself. He begins to leave compass and maps at home and relies on the sun, the mountain ridges, the winds, and reading the environment. No GPS. It is a way of going according to nature, like the Sami and the Inuit. Since 1998 his crossings, almost always nights in a tent, have been like this and he talks about them with The invisible ways. Without a trace in the immensity of the North (on the website you can see the images of the Nordic crossings narrated in the book). One step after another into the unknowable, only with the comfort of eyes and mind: the unknowable island and in the void, everything is clearer than here. The silence, gentle and persistent, envelops like fog.

«Norway for the long haul»

Michieli retraces the crossing of Norway, “Norway for the long haul”, as they say in those latitudes. From Cape Lindesnes to North Cape, with five companions who took turns at his side, 150 days of walking and skiing for around 4 thousand kilometres: «the world around us had become immense and uninhabited, as if it existed only for us and the creatures of nature; it poured into the soul the ancient freedom of a young and open Earth, an unconscious memory of prehistoric wild migrations.” Then there are the horizons of Lofoten and the mirages of Iceland, the land of the Sami and the Greenland of the Vikings. Only trains have a marked road, for the rest there is always a way and the landscapes are the soul of the world in which to find oneself without GPS: “the subtraction of artifices made the Earth new.” Just a human being, with his heart and his steps between heaven and earth.

Itinerant philosophy

This new philosophy of going is consolation and has nothing of the sporting feat: «The unbearable beauty of the continuous becoming of the elements invaded us, poured into us. We found ourselves in the secret condition in which the accumulated fatigue does not darken the senses, but frees them from the demands of the mind, making them transparent to the light irradiated by the non-human languages ​​of the infinite creatures”, and feeling the beating of an all-encompassing nature: “we paused contemplating and listening to the mystery of the philosophy of the universe, as if faced with a revelation that we would have liked to perceive forever. A thought tore apart: knowing our human inability to stay in balance with other creatures.”

Walking with the Inuit

Also looking for a bubble is the British writer and singer-songwriter Malachy Tallack. It went around the world traveling along the 60th parallel from the Shetland Islands westward along with the sun and the seasons, crossing Greenland in spring, North America in summer, Russia in autumn and the Scandinavian countries in winter and the he said in his He great North: «For me, going to the North means returning home, and every journey in this direction brings with it the sense of return». She walked and flew: the North is infinite and so is the poetry of these pages, the light becomes a trace and destiny. “Northernness” becomes a state of the soul in which to walk and seek one’s own meaning. The days melt into each other, between myths and legends, feeling a very human closeness with the Inuit encountered and the they, the vital breath, which is also wind, weather and reincarnation in other bodies. Tallack travels through a bright and fragile, frightening and ruthless North, driven by curiosity and nostalgia, he meets serene and satisfied people, and also political and religious exiles, indigenous peoples whose culture is compromised but above all he discovers himself, and every man: «We are restless, looking for peace.”

Franco Michieli, The invisible ways. Without a trace in the immensity of the North, Ponte alle Grazie, pages. 288, €18