meta: ghosts, statues, old friend, fireworks
When Char asked me to shoot her wedding in Edinburgh, I knew this was a special opportunity to expand the trip into something more than just a working vacation.
I had a lot on my mind: promises to keep, ghosts to commune with, and an old friend to visit.
Edinburgh: document my dear friend’s union
Berlin: techno clubs and past-life echoes
Hamburg: Steven Wilson in concert
Prague: finish writing the damn book
Copenhagen: visit Esther in the land of my ancestors
OLD FRIENDS
Esther and I go back nineteen years. We met through her best friend at the time. Most of our friendship has unfolded across states and continents: Utah to Arizona, then, twelve years ago, Copenhagen, where she got married, became a mother, and divorced. We’ve seen each other from afar through marriages, babies, heartbreaks, degrees, breakdowns, breakthroughs.
For years, she told me, “You would love Denmark. You should come see me.”
She was right.
From the moment I stepped into her neighborhood, I felt it: the quiet, cooperative hum of a city that isn’t trying to impress you. Copenhagen doesn’t shout. It doesn’t demand attention. It just works. And in its calm, it whispers: “By cooperating, we can all live better, together.”
In Denmark, beverage bottles come with a small recycling deposit built into the price. (used to be a common practice in the US). Some poor people will collect cans & bottles for recycling. In order to give them dignity and prevent them from having to dig through garbage cans, public trash bins have this bar attached to them that is meant to hold empty bottles, making retrieval easy, clean and dignified. You don’t throw your empty bottle away, you stick it in the holder.
We walked through Assistens Cemetery, a lush garden containing the graves of Hans Christian Andersen, Niels Bohr, and Søren Kierkegaard, bathed in that Nordic solstice sunset that hangs on forever, keeping the sky lit until 11:30pm.
I asked Esther if there were any traditional Danish dishes we should try. She gagged theatrically.
“Boiled pork and fried potatoes. Fried pork and boiled potatoes. Just… pork and potatoes.”
We reconnected over a dinner of oysters, ceviche, and sipped champagne at a local spot with no fuss and astonishing food, face to face for the first time in more years than either of us care to admit.
AMERIKA PLADS
On Friday, we rode bikes to Amerika Plads—the harbor where thousands of Danish immigrants boarded ships bound for America.
On the water’s edge stands a bronze statue of a Mormon girl named Kristina—
Her hair and dress are blown back in the wind. She stands resolutely, her eyes cast thousands of miles westward. Even in the bronze, you can see the vision of a new heaven on earth in her eyes.
The cobblestones beneath her are inlaid with the names of real people who began their pilgrimage there. People who crossed oceans because they found God in a book that beckoned them westward.
My ancestry is thick with names ending in -sen and -son.
(For those who don’t know, my full name is Paul Duane Jensen — Duane being my father’s first name. I simply go by my first and middle in the art world, as a tribute to him and for simplicity’s sake.)
I grew up in a house built by those Danish immigrant hands.
I was raised in a town they carved out of desert stone because of that book. I inherited their stories, their stubbornness, their spiritual obsession.
There was something sacred about standing on the literal soil—at the commencement of their sacrifice, the fork in the road they took, that led to reality as I know it. The echoes from the ground and in my own blood moved me emotionally, physically, spiritually.
It was one of those rare moments when myth, memory, and reality collapse into each other, and I realized I’m standing in a hinge point between worlds—past, present, and future—all watching me at once.
They gave up everything for what they believed was holy. Now I must decide what I will build with that same fire in my bones. What will my great-great-grandchildren say of me? I say a little prayer that the book I wrote in Prague will still exist, and have some relevance to them someday.
Back to that business of every city whispering something: Copenhagen’s whisper suddenly made sense:
“It all looks familiar, doesn’t it?” Esther called back to me as we pedaled.“These buildings look just like the ones at Utah State University!”
It all clicked:
The architecture. The rooflines. Their method of masonry. The faces on the street—those cheekbones, those eyes, those statures. Everyone here looks like everyone from Utah, because everyone from Utah is from here. My hometown looks like this place because it was built by people who built this place, and then got on that boat.
THAT OTHER STATUE
Later, we saw the original Kristus—the iconic sculpture of Jesus that loomed so large in my Mormon childhood. As a kid, I thought the Salt Lake City version was the original, hand-carved by some holy Mormon artisan. But the original lives here, in a Lutheran church in Copenhagen.
There was something oddly anticlimactic about seeing the original Christus here in its place of origin—like hearing street bagpipers in Edinburgh playing old Scottish folk tunes that I only knew as Mormon hymns.
We visited the Thorvaldsen Museum and found a staggering number of his other works—equally magnificent. But my favorite was the original plaster cast of the Kristus. It wasn’t glowing white. It wasn’t pristine. It bore the tarnish of a working foundry.
As if it had been out among the people for a short eternity.
This “dirty” Kristus is, in my eyes, more Christ-like than the one I grew up worshiping under as a Mormon kid. It’s not the Christ people expect to see—which is exactly why, in the original story, they rejected him. He didn’t match the mold they believed he should come from.
While I do not believe in a God that requires a savior for us, I have a profound admiration for Jesus Christ the teacher and exemplar. His teachings are pristine—delicately compassionate of human nature. They speak not just to where we are, but what we are capable of.
The actual historicity of Jesus is irrelevant to me. At the risk of being a bit sacrilegious to some of my faithful friends — I quote Jesus like I quote Yoda:
What he said is true.
It doesn’t matter whether he actually lived a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
Same with Lao Tzu and the Taoists.
The point isn’t the man—it’s the message.
We must never worship the messenger—only the message.
SHE IS A SOUL ANARCHIST:
SOUL ANARCHY:
SOUL ANARCHY:
LIVING LIFE ON YOUR OWN TERMS
AND THEN HELPING OTHERS DO THE SAME
That night, we had dinner in a small café in a quiet corner of Copenhagen. Ours were the only American accents in the air.
Esther has always been beautiful, but that night, something in her face changed. Just in the past several months, her life has changed—going from a woman who once needed help to get through a difficult time, to one who now is that woman.
She’s earned her Master’s degree, has made a beautiful home in the city for her daughter, is surrounded by great people, has a great career, and now helps women who are a few steps behind her on the same path. – that’s Soul Anarchy, my friends.
She went from beautiful to magnificent.
You cannot buy that kind of radiance from the MAC counter, nor inject it at the beauty med-spa, or earn it at the gym.
It is the radiance of someone who has paid the price and is now living fully in their purpose. I’ve seen her whole adult journey.
It’s an honor to be her friend.
DO I HAVE TO?
Esther curated the weekend masterfully, and surprised me with something especially Danish: a Saunagus—a ritual / party of sorts, involving rounds of sauna, cold plunge, deep breathing, and dance… all soundtracked by a live tech-house DJ.
I’ll be honest:
I was dreading it.
Despite what my heels and hosiery may suggest, I’m a comfort creature. A lazy lion. I love to stay in my cave.
The idea of being near-naked, dancing, doing breath work, and putting myself into extreme temperature swings with a bunch of young, beautiful Danes, sounded like my personal hell.
There’s another layer to this:
How do you know someone cold plunges?
They’ll tell you.
All the cool kids are doing it, and I naturally resist whatever the cool kids do because they are usually wrong, and if not wrong – just stupid.
My reluctance to Saunagus was rooted, at least partially, in my lone wolf instinct to be suspicious of trendy things.
But… I’ve learned something:
Some of the greatest experiences of my life have been on the other side of my resistance.
And most of all: I didn’t come all the way here to say no just because it seemed a bit uncomfortable.
I bought a swimsuit and said yes.
We biked to a courtyard filled with impossibly attractive, health-conscious Danish twenty-somethings. I was the oldest person there by at least a decade. A small bar served up non-alcoholic canned cocktails and water.
That’s it.
A huge metallic sign proclaimed: “THIS IS THE NEW NORMAL.”
The sauna sessions were intense—70 people packed into a room pulsing with tech-house, drenched in heat and Palo Santo smoke., led by a brilliant guy that might become a new-age-hippie-Tony Robbins some day when he grows up.
No talking allowed. Just breath, movement, surrender.
The cold plunge was a shock to the system. I submerged up to my chin.
“Control your breathing. Slow your breathing down,”
Esther coached me through the initial shock.
I found a way to co-exist with the cold.
By the third round, I wasn’t just surviving:
I welcomed the heat into my body and felt truly alive while triumphing over the confrontation with the cold.
I’M JUST GOING TO STAY HERE OKAY?
For our last night out, we met up with her friends, Francis and Marjung—brilliant, hilarious, open-hearted people.
I immediately felt like we were best friends.
We made our way to Tivoli Gardens in the middle of Copenhagen: Walt Disney’s original inspiration for Disneyland.
We found a restaurant and feasted on pots of mussels in white wine cream sauce while an R&B band took the stage under another gorgeous, slowly dimming summer night that didn’t want to go to bed.
And then—fireworks.
Yeah.
This mythic European experience ended with FIREWORKS.
You can’t even write movie scripts this good.
A final benediction to this trip that has been magical at every turn.
Europe’s perfect farewell kiss of fire and light.
If you enjoyed that – you’ll happy to know that I’m releasing a book soon.
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