Our final day has sunk
From the sky to the salty main.
That moment will never return
Which once has been.
From ‘Our final day has sunk’ by Halldór Kiljan Laxness,
In the end I left Iceland almost as suddenly as I arrived there. Hard work was pushing my nerves to the hilt and I wanted to bed down for my PhD.
Somehow I missed the homeland, but more than the homeland itself, or friends or even family, I missed the language. I missed the easy way of talking with people, the easy way of laughing.
In the end it was a strangely twisty road that led me to where I am now, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in Cardigan Bay. After two weeks in Manchester I turned down the PhD there and moved to Wales, a place I felt would make me more happy.
I suppose I was following the heart’s way in the hope that like Frost, one day I will be able to claim:
I took the [road] less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.
It feels difficult now for me to distil what exactly I learnt from my brief time in Iceland. In a way it felt like a dream, a kind of Auden-like picaresque. Then there was that magnificent ending, that night of meetings, that made the whole of my future seem to glow.
I suppose I felt ready for the next adventure, to throw myself back into academia and writing. I longed for space to read and think. You can track my progress on my new blog about life in Wales and contemporary nature writing, but I’ll also keep a record here.
Here is something I wrote on the bus back, it completes the circle:
Transformation and change are the essence of life. Every essential thing is a dream as J said. I will meet my dreamer, the one I found in a pile of snow on the edge of the glacier in the middle of the arctic tundra. Onwards, to another new life.
If love is a lie, a fallacy; then one of the basic pillars of existence falls down. We can still be engineers of each others balanced contentments.
A whiteness like the unfolding of a new page birds out upon my brain. Every word is new. Let’s connect new synapses, let’s reshape our realities. Let the car and the leaf hold hands.
833 words a day 