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.