A Journey Out of Darkness

Sometimes we need someone to step into our lives, as a guide who takes us on a journey.  With courage, with hard work, and with a heart that gradually opens, we become a better person in a better world.

Michael, a disillusioned young man from Florida, moves to Norway to begin a new life.  With a teaching job at the college in Bodø, he rents an old two-story log house in a tiny village on the shore of the fjord . . . and soon discovers that the upper floor is inhabited by the spirit of a young woman who died of tuberculosis in 1917.  Because Michael, a photographer, is so excited to live at the edge of mountain wilderness, in the country of his Norwegian ancestors, his energy enables Anna Sofia to return to the world that she once loved . . . as a visible spirit.

Anna Sofia agrees to guide Michael, who has never seen snow in flat Florida, into the mountains which she loved, and lost, when she died so young.  Thus from the very beginning, they help each other.  As they camp on a finger of stone that reaches into a lake, as they climb high above the timberline into the realm of eagles, as they skate at night on the lake beneath the northern lights, and as they ski near a herd of reindeer, Anna Sofia leads Michael deeper into wilderness, and deeper into himself.  The bitter boy is left behind; the clear-eyed man is emerging.

Anna Sofia tells Michael that her dream is to stand on a mountain peak at midnight in June, when she can look north at the sun that conquers the darkness.  But at that moment, she must leave him.  He will lose the woman whom he deeply loves, and he will have to climb down the mountain alone.

The turning point in this unique story comes when they travel together on a jet to spend Christmas in Oslo, which Anna Sofia calls Kristiania.

Read a full description of A Journey Out of Darkness here.

Read the first chapter of A Journey Out of Darkness here.