Since when did we actually start talking about the Far North and the Deep South? And what’s the connection with the Near East and the Wild West? Without doubt, somewhere in their midst you will find the navel of the world.

By the way, here above you can see, for the first time, a photo – the sort that invariably kicks off the 8>1000 posts – that wasn’t taken in good old Dalfsen. It’s been a tough pill to swallow, having to leave behind the Salland landscape of green meadows and oak trees. An uprooting in slow motion. The good news is that, after a few weeks in Portugal, the first signs of new rootlets are already visible.

More about that cutting, from a mulberry tree, in a future post.

Now that I live in the Deep South, what would be a fitting next step in my writing, a logical new topic to explore from here, from Europe’s south? The north, perhaps? Boa ideia, vamos a isso!

In one of Nazaré’s small squares, a life-size mosaic of a compass has been incorporated into the paving. Judging by the positioning of the initial letters of the four cardinal directions, north forms the top of the compass. This is entirely in line with the social consensus that the top position is, after all, the place rightfully due to the North.

The vast majority of modern maps are oriented towards the north: the top edge of the map points in that direction.

‘Hang on, what’s that all about?’ I can hear you thinking. ‘Orient – wasn’t that just the name for the East?’

Good point: ‘north-oriented’ is a contradiction in terms. A map like that would be aligned both to the north and to the east at the same time. That’s obviously impossible.

The earliest maps, at least in Europe, were drawn ‘facing east’ – towards the rising sun, in the direction of Jerusalem, or towards where the Garden of Eden must once have been.

Even later, when maps were oriented as desired towards the west, north, or south, ‘orientation’ became a generic term.

From an etymological point of view, the most contradictory orientation is that towards the north, given the meaning of ‘nakara’, from which ‘north’ is derived, and which in Sanskrit means ‘underworld’. The related Greek ‘nérteros’ denotes ‘deeper’ and ‘lower’ . Plenty of reasons, one might say, to have the north arrow pointing downwards.

In the Ba Gua, which in a certain sense also indicates the points of the compass, north (yes, it’s those clever Chinese again) is placed at the bottom. That is the location of Water, one of the eight trigrams. Didn’t Lao Zi write that water always seeks the lowest place? Water was called ‘the unfathomable’, because light cannot penetrate its depths. As you can see, the bottom of the Ba Gua is therefore coloured dark blue or black here.

The main associations are with shadow, with the back, and with a spine. After all, when you face the sun, looking south, the freezing north is behind you.

Béi 北, north. Left: in modern script. Right: in jinwen or ‘bronze script’, which was in use during the Zhou dynasty. Two people sitting with their backs to each other; the rear, the north. For example, as in 北京 Bei Jing, the northern (capital) city.

The image of Chapter 29. Dark consists of a doubling of the Water trigram. These evoke the image of an abyss, a pit, a ravine, a grave, a well, a cellar, a ditch – something unfathomable, instilling fear, yet where, at the same time, the ultimate connection and freedom can be found.

Back to the photo of the compass rose mosaic in Sousa Oliveira Square in Nazaré. It is by no means the only one of its kind. Take, for example, the compass mosaic in São Jorge in the Azores.

Or the colossal wind rose in Belém, near Lisbon.

The four cardinal points of the compass point to where you might go, away from here. The promise of the distant unknown seems to demand all our attention. Human beings are, after all, extremely curious about what lies over there, beyond the horizon – to the north, west, east or south. And so it is easy to forget the central ground, which lies between the four main directions. When you’re not going anywhere, you’re still somewhere. Four plus one makes five: five elements, five phases, five movements, 五行. Four directions take you to ‘there’. The fifth ‘direction’ on the compass is ‘here’.

A unique and somewhat unconventional insight into stillness can be found in the Nei Jing Tu, ‘The Map of the Inner Landscape’. Roughly in the center of it, you can see a boy, an ox-herder. In his hand, he holds something unusual: the constellation of the Great Dipper. This is situated directly next to the North Star, which lies in line with the Earth’s axis. Whilst the rotation of the Earth causes all the stars, planets, and the moon to trace circular paths across the firmament, Polaris remains stationary. The boy and the Great Dipper represent the axis around which our lives revolve, the hub of the Great Wheel.

And finally, a truly remarkable illustration of star trails by the Japanese scientist and painter Tsuneo Iwasaki. The trails consist of the text of the Heart Sutra, rendered in delicate brushstrokes. ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form.’

Iwasaki Tsuneo (1917-2002) was a Japanese scientist, teacher, and painter. He developed a practice that embeds calligraphy of the Buddhist Heart Sutra into visual compositions, often drawing on his scientific background.