Leave-taking: Embracing a New Chapter

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,

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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.

 

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Summertime: Sitting on a blanket outside Talknafjörður playground

The Playground

I want this weekend to last forever. The word’s from Guðmundur Böðvarsson’s poem float seem to float about in the windless air:

One summer’s day

One summer’s day more.

This is the kind of summer day that Icelanders dream about in long, cold winters. This is the kind of summer’s day that they compose poems about. The chuckling of the brook washing down the mountainside, the soft pash of sunlight swamping my breast and face with light. The grass is lush, its leaves are rubbery and strong. Each cell is tough with life.

The sky is a pate of blue, the mountains are no longer the ice-violet I had come to find normal but a soft green-grey. The veins of snow are receding every day – they are just lacings now. The absolute clarity of the air, the purity of the sunshine the chill, naked view: it is something to strike wonder deep within.

This weekend has been a kind of gift from God, a gift after the later part of last week which was lacerated with sadness and tension. From out of that hell a heaven has miraculously appeared as abruptly as the dormant heads of Icelandic flowers in the botanical garden. The pastoral atmosphere that now surrounds me is the symbol of this metamorphosis, the long winter of the heart is over and now it is time to play.

For the past few days I have been chauffeured around the Westfjords from hotpot to hotpot, sinking into deep bubbling lagoons of bliss, fed, watered and looked after. It is enough to make me laugh a thousand times over. Out of the icy shame of last week, this flower has budded. I see blessings everywhere. The birds chirrup in the trees, the roads are clear and safe and possibilities for exploration seem endless. I am coming to really know this region. Yesterday, surfing along the road on the way to Isafjörður and watching the wavelets scissoring the coastline, I suddenly felt awash with great rippling sensations of happiness. I was completely sober. This was genuine euphoria: my whole body was alive and pulsing with happiness. Andrea was coming, I was going to meet Valentine, it was Saturday night, we were all going to go to the hot pot together. Everything was potential, fun, and full of the heady reckless abandon of summer frolicking. I was free and at liberty to enjoy nature’s bounty in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  The midnight sun did not set for me that night, light and life and were everywhere.