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Welcome to Quo Vadis — a podcast about following your calling into a magical hero’s journey, in order to find your way home.

This is the first episode in a new English cycle. In my earlier Danish series, I told the story of thruhiking the Pacific Crest Trail through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Now a new threshold is approaching: the Continental Divide Trail — a 5,000-kilometre remote route from Mexico to Canada, high, exposed, lonely, and often not a trail at all.

In this episode, I explore a paradox:
Why are we sometimes drawn toward something that genuinely scares us? Why does the call to adventure so often arrive wrapped in fear?

To answer that, I move through two stories.

The first is Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace — a Nordic classic in which a child walks alone into a frozen labyrinth of dangerous beauty, as if compelled by a secret inner pull.

The second is my own childhood story from a Greenlandic village in the 1970s: The Fish Crate — a memory of stepping into a fragile little vessel and drifting toward the pack ice, seduced by its glittering promise, until the moment the ice moves and the world shifts into terror.

Together, these stories point to the same experience: the mixture of fear and longing that philosophers call the Sublime — the confrontation with something overwhelmingly vast, powerful, and real.

This episode is the beginning of my new journey toward the CDT — and an attempt to name the feeling at its root: the dangerous longing.