The People Holding Up the Stones
King Harald V died on August 28, 2026, at eighty-nine, after thirty-five years as Norway’s monarch. Among the words he leaves behind, I keep returning to a speech about who belongs.
During a garden party at the Royal Palace in 2016, celebrating his and Queen Sonja’s twenty-five years on the throne, Harald described a Norway whose people had many different histories. Some families had lived there for generations. Others had arrived from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Poland, Sweden, Somalia, and Syria. His Norway included the young and the old, the married and divorced, people who believed in God, Allah, everything, and nothing.
And then he said:
“Norwegians are girls who love girls, boys who love boys, and girls and boys who love each other.”
He brought the speech home with a simple declaration:
“In other words: Norway is you. Norway is us.”
Here was a king widening the meaning of nationhood beyond ancestry and sameness. Norway was not an abstraction hovering above its people. The people, in all their differences, were Norway.
Those words did not erase exclusion or make belonging effortless. But they named an obligation: if we are the nation, we must keep asking whom our understanding of us leaves outside.
In Oslo’s Government Quarter, a work of public art offers another way to think about that obligation.
Created by Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh, Grass Roots Square consists of approximately 50,000 small bronze figures, green with patina. From a distance, they can resemble grass growing between paving stones. Up close, they become a multitude: people of different sizes, ages, and genders, gathered above, between, and beneath the granite slabs. Some appear to be holding the stones up.
First installed in 2012 through Norway’s public-art agency, KORO, the work has since been restored and relocated within the rebuilt Government Quarter.
There is no towering leader at its center. To discover the people, you have to lower your eyes, slow your pace, and pay attention.
The sculpture was not Harald’s project. Still, I hear a conversation between its small figures and his words.
The sculpture says: the people hold up the institutions.
The king says: the people are the nation.
I have been thinking about that conversation while watching President Trump’s efforts to remake Washington, D.C., including an enormous White House ballroom and a proposed 250-foot triumphal arch near Arlington National Cemetery.
Their visual language differs sharply from that of Grass Roots Square. The tiny figures invite discovery at the level of the pavement. The Washington projects announce themselves through imposing scale and grandeur.
One directs our attention toward the people beneath the institutions. The others invite us to marvel at the institutions themselves.
That contrast cannot settle every question about what should be built, how it should be funded, or whose history it should commemorate. But it raises a question that belongs to all of us: What relationship between people and power are we being invited to accept?
Buildings tell us where power lives. Monuments tell us what a nation believes deserves to be remembered. Their size, placement, and accessibility help shape how we understand our place in the common life.
Do we enter as participants? Do we remain spectators? Are we encouraged to discover one another, or simply to behold authority?
Harald spoke from a position inherited through bloodline. Yet in that garden-party speech, he offered an understanding of belonging that reached far beyond inheritance. People whose histories, loves, and beliefs differed could still belong to the same us.
That is a legacy people can carry forward in ordinary life.
We carry it when we notice someone whose contribution has gone unrecognized. When we name an injustice others have been forced to carry alone. When we make room for a neighbor whose life does not resemble our own.
We carry it when we ask who is missing from the gathering—and whether we are willing to change the gathering so they can belong.
Grief asks what remains when a person is gone. Sometimes what remains is a sentence that still asks something of us.
Norway is you. Norway is us.
The work of widening us continues.
We can take our small place among the people holding up the stones.