We have reached a first little milestone on our trip; time to launch the homepage of “The Path” and write the first blog on the journey!

It definitely feels exciting, but also very peaceful and safe. One little step, one of many.

How many times have I not heard the question lately: “Why do you do this, what’s the purpose?”

A bit jokingly I usually reply that you can’t know that until afterwards, can you? You walk to find out more of why you walk. And there is some truth in that, it is the way that is the goal. We don’t call it “The Path” for nothing.

When we have done our previous walks, “Sång & Gång, we have never had a banner, literally or figuratively, to walk under. Everyone is walking for his own reason, his own cause. There are thousand and one good reasons to walk. But the wonderful paradox is that just because of the lack of a common motto we discover that we have everything in common! We are all one on the path, on the same path towards the same goal! To see and experience our unity despite cultural, ethnical, religious, class and gender-labels is the ultimate purpose of the path.

But we have defined three guiding words on our journey that will run as themes through our concerts and seminars, they are even laid out “geographically”. We start with environment, our relationship to the planet we inhabit. Then comes integration, our relationship to each other. Last comes existence, our relationship to our own selves and the unnameable. Body, soul, spirit. Trinity if you like; the Creator, the Integrator and the Animator.

When Peter and I were scouting on the pilgrim-paths around Trondheim we discovered that they were all well provided with signs but all the signs were turned for those walking to Trondheim. If you walk the other way you have no signs showing your way.

Maybe the biggest symbolic move we are going to do is the one we do just before starting the first leg. We are turned towards the cathedral of Nidaros and turn around 180 degrees. Towards the future. Without banners or signs. For thousand years people have walked to Nidaros, the physical goal being a collection of relics, old skeletal parts in a sarcophagus. Now we turn around 180 degrees and in walk, talk and song we search paths towards life and future!

We are living in a time of change where “conversion” is a totally necessary concept in all our three “spheres”. Without a radical conversion in terms of our environmental footprints we are walking out the plank, on a planetary scale.  The ethnical tensions in our Nordic countries, not to speak of globally, is on the rise and we have been very painfully alerted to how the lack of integration is one of the biggest threats towards peace and stability in our societies. But even on the existential plane we are at a crossroads where I believe we have to go, not a thousand, but two thousand years back to find a similar scenario.

To care for the existential dialogue and encounter is not a philosophical or privately religious subtlety but something as fundamental as caring for our environment and the human values. To care for our existence is to care for our survival.

But if Peter and I should be totally honest and scrutinize our motives for the walk we would probably land in the end in the music. We are musicians first and foremost and all these other things we do, we most likely do just to create good opportunities for music-making in a real and relevant way. Music that moves us. Deep down within so as to transform far far away. Music that unites beyond all words and manifestos. But at the same time lands in a concrete dance-step, creates a movement in time and space. Song and walk. Sång & gång!

But you can’t sit and write about these things, you just have to experience it!

Join the chorus! And hit the road with us!

We are all one

We are all on -

The Path