Spinning Yarns

It’s funny how people find you, when you think you’re just quietly getting on with life in a small place, then something you are doing inspires someone else to write about it. I was selling second hand Icelandic jumpers in England the run up to Christmas, as I’d had the opportunity to amass a collection whilst living in Iceland, and wanted to share the goodness of Icelandic wool with these poor Brits who are always a little bit cold.

At one of the craft fairs, a lady I met said she knew a writer for an online magazine who’d love the story. She got in touch and here is the result! And there are a few jumpers left if anyone’s interested -  Ebay auction ending Sunday.

I am writing from a place between Britain and Iceland…the Shetland Islands, where I am showing a film on Sunday, and where I have just been privileged to see Europe’s biggest festival of fire, Up Helly Aaa. And, incidentally, where they know about their functional and beautiful knitwear!  But more on that later…

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A Midsummer Tale for the Midwinter Night

Happy Solstice all! And may this turning point blow in the winds of positive change for all things. In the midst of the darkness, I bring you light and colour – a tale of summer.

Like a film flickering in a cinema hall, the bright images of my summer perforate the darkness as the winter evenings draw ever closer, infiltrating the deeper places as I take the time to sit. So as we gather round our hearths in the northern hemisphere, here I shall share some of the colour painted into my evenings. This, like the last post, was also written a while ago in Iceland.

~  ~  ~

As always, my Icelandic summer was a period of hyperactivity. This year it was especially so as, on 23rd June (Midsummer’s Night, or Jónsmessunott as it is called in Iceland), I gladly wed my man Orri. And what a festival it was! Months of planning and dreaming were woven with the many journeys taken by our dear ones from all over the world to converge in something that shall stay with us forever.

Years ago, when we first met and were beginning our relationship across the seas, I made him this collage. I have always collected images and textures that interest me, and sporadically they make themselves into something, especially when there is love flowing through it.

“It lingers in the heart like a piece of haunting music”.

This one certainly made itself, and little did I know back then just how much like my wedding day this would look. It is as if, with every cut and laying down, I was creating a blueprint for a future time. I was reminded of this beautiful quote:

When the soul wishes to experience something

she throws an image of the experience out before her

and enters into her own image.

~ Meister Eckhart ~

Photo: Roman Garba

It was at once the most exciting and challenging creative act I have ever pulled off, to make a myriad of threads come together in a foreign culture. It is a culturally accepted norm that Icelanders can be incredibly last minute about everything. But they are fortunately also some of the most resourceful people I know. Added to that, there is a different take on commitment to arrangements. Somebody may agree to something, but if circumstances change, that agreement is not necessarily honoured, or an alternative found. It is deemed that the circumstance having changed is a sufficient excuse. So ‘believe it when you see it’ is the basis on which you make ‘plans’.  Or, as the Icelanders put  it, “Þetta reddast” (that will work itself out). I hate to generalise about entire cultures but ask anyone who lives there, and that will be quoted as one of the most often used phrases! I have become used to this in the day to day, but for a wedding it was a little more precarious!

My now husband and I live our lives frugally and with respect to the earth – reusing, inventing, creating as we go – and this wedding was the ultimate expression of our DIY/low impact values: we did almost everything ourselves, off grid, and managed to leave a very light footprint. Partly so that we could afford to live our dream with integrity but also because I don’t know who else could make those many particular threads come together. And it was a very rich experience to have such beautiful canvas to plant our ideas in, once the snow had melted.

The house where Orri’s father was born. Photo: Norbert Pilters

The place we chose was the land where my man Orri’s father grew up. It lies along the black sandy shore of a long fjord in the Westfjords of Iceland. On it is the house were he was born which Orri’s parents transformed into a ‘guesthouse’ and campsite for our guests. About a kilometre down the shore, a summerhouse (with a very special history which I wrote about way back when) became the kitchen, bridal suite and site of the festivities.

What to do when your man is jewellery phobic.

Non weather dependent preparations started months beforehand. My man feels claustrophobic in rings or any sort of jewellery, so I had the idea that the act of wrapping him in a shawl and fastening it with a bespoke hand wrought brooch would be an appropriate symbol for a life cycle of care and companionship. Luckily there is a self-taught blacksmith in a neighbouring village who expertly translated my design, loosely based on Jörmungandr and The Ouruboros , using an iron rod and an old nail.

Important things like Norse pagan officiants (of which there are only three in Iceland that can conduct marriages) were booked, a rather unusual form of bridal transport (a Viking ship) found, and a wedding outfit hunt spanning several countries embarked upon. Not to mention renovating a guestroom, kitchen, living room and sleeping loft ourselves, suitable for all the guests that would be staying at our house!

But there were many things that just had to wait until the snow had melted, and the ground had thawed. This doesn’t happen until May this far north. We wanted an entirely outdoor wedding, but with the weather being as changeable as it can be we knew we would need some sort of shelter. Rental marquees were rather unattractive, expensive and had to be brought up from the capital, Reykjavik. So my man decided to build one. Finding long wooden poles in a largely treeless land is no mean feat. But, in a stroke of genius and foresight, back on January 6th 2012 when Christmas was danced to its close by elves, my father-in-law to be laid claim to the town’s two Christmas trees – a good five metres of pole each. And the rest were found here and there in the town refuse dump and the scout hut, and retrieved from an avalanche guard construction site.  Orri’s brilliant design had a roll up tarpaulin roof, open to the skies if the weather was good, but creating shelter if the wind or rain came. We of course had all weathers, except (thankfully) snow.

Dancing in the end of Christmas: there’s our tree at the back.

Stock piling long wooden things – a rare commodity in Iceland!

Wedding tent under construction

Wedding tent – the aftermath! Photo: Col Atkinson
(sometime after 2am on Midsummer’s Night)

Portaloos are also ugly and expensive, and full of chemicals. No thank you! So we built luxury compost toilets with vanity area (!) from reclaimed wood…

Friends helped us paint signs onto wood we found hiding in the corner of a charity shop…

Photo: Roman Garba

And the stage was made with discarded palettes.

Photo: Roman Garba

The table flowers were beautifully arranged by my friend Alyssa using wildflowers from our garden, which seem to sing loudest on Midsummer’s day…

Photos: Roman Garba

The bouquet and ornamental flowers were grown in a geothermal greenhouse in the south of Iceland, where one of Orri’s many aunties works. I was stunned by the variety and freshness of them. I had asked her to bring rejects from the ‘not straight enough for sale’ pile, but she ended up bringing the best of exactly what I had dreamed of!

Photo: Col Atkinson

The wedding feast was supplied by various friends and relatives, who reared, slaughtered and prepared it themselves. We were given two lambs by one of Orri’s aunties, a whole lamb by family friend, and two extra emergency mutton thighs by a friend when, rather disconcertingly, a lamb was lost in a chaotic cold store 3 days before the wedding. It emerged in the nick of time, to defrost before being spit roasted. Needless to say we had enough for the feast and many many meals afterwards.

Photos: Roman Garba

Monkfish was caught by Orri during his days at sea. Lake trout was caught by Orri’s cousin on the farm where Orri’s mother grew up. We were given 2

two wild geese to make into canapes by a chef friend who, in yet another classic Icelandic moment, turned up with them whole, frozen solid, with the feathers still on, in a supermarket shopping bag! Wild sorrel and dandelion leaf salads were gathered from the hillsides and prepared by Orri’s mum and aunty.

And on a rare moment of calm togetherness in the days before the wedding, Orri and I gathered some wild mountain thyme from above our house to use in the lamb marinade. By chance, when I asked my cousin and uncle to sing a song during the ceremony, Wild Mountain Thyme was exactly the song they had up their sleeve!

Making cake plates

Photo: Norbert Pilters

Three different flavours of wedding cakes loosely symbolising Yggdrasil , the Norse Pagan world tree, were baked by yet another of Orri’s aunties, and stunningly decorated at the very last minute by my hugely talented aunty Pauline Thomas .  The bottom layer – chocolate and beetroot – referred to its roots; the middle layer – black forest gateau – to its fruits; and the top – lemon and birch polenta cake – to its leaves and the life inhabiting its branches.  These were all laid out on cake plates we made by sawing up unusually large tree trunks a neighbor had cut down.

Photo: Roman Garba

The festivities were deeply rooted in various elements of Icelandic ‘tradition’, though very few Icelanders have a wedding like this one. But I also wanted to express some of my own journey which includes being English and having grown up and lived in equatorial climes. My parents (who still live in Kenya) cut out and stitched many many metres of bunting (an unmistakeably English addition!) from kangas and kikois which are both typically East African fabrics. Kangas are brightly coloured printed cotton cloths worn by women which always include in their design a Kiswahili saying. These are a woman’s means of expressing (often very obliquely and through metaphor) how they are feeling to the rest of the community. My mother chose such classic sayings as Our marriage is a light that shines and everyone sees it and  I love you truly. The world is witness!

Photo: Ed Aldcroft

And, in a delightfully serendipitous chance encounter in southern Iceland many months ago, we found an Ethiopian restaurant in a place that is effectively The Middle of Nowhere. It is known mainly for the geothermal greenhouses where we had been looking at the flowers that were available. We had a delicious meal cooked by the lovely Azeb, and the most gentle, strong coffee I have had in a long time. We thought it would be lovely to have her and her coffee at our wedding. She had never been to the Westfjords before, and was game for an adventure!

She kept the coffee flowing all night and created a lovely coffee ceremony space in the ruins of an old stone boat shed.

Another magical lady who is always up for an adventure, was film maker Alba Sotorra Clua, who I met at the Worldfilm Festival in Estonia. At the closing party, she said “I want to come to your wedding”. After considering her rather direct request for a while, I thought it might be fun to have someone film the wedding, given everything that had gone into it. She went one step further and came a week before to film the final preparations. This would have been fun if it didn’t involve a death in the family, a chef cancelling last minute, a lost sheep and 2 sleepless nights. All great material for a documentary, but a little more challenging when it is your life and you have a house full of guests! I was interested to experience how it feels to be filmed. But I had no idea what a week was in store for us. I only hope it’s entertaining now the storm has passed! There certainly were many beautiful moments, which we shall now have the opportunity to appreciate.

There was one truly indulgent part to the proceedings: my arrival in a replica Viking longboat! A carpenter in a neighbouring village spent many days making this beauty which sadly doesn’t get used enough. As I am an útlendingar (outlander) I thought it would be fitting to arrive from across the seas with my family. He and his wife liked our idea and agreed to make the three day round voyage it would entail. That’s one of the things I love most about Icelanders…they are ready to try anything!

Photo: Norbert Pilters

Photos: Roman Garba

It all felt otherworldly, and yet perfectly natural. The magic of the day was heightened perhaps by it being Midsummer’s night – the date when the sun never sets, when the cows are said to speak, and the seals are said to remove their skins to reveal their true human form.

My experience of our wedding was as if it was a strange and magical beast that we had been leading around for many months. When the day came, we were finally able to mount its back and view the landscape we had traversed and the gardens we had planted, as a whole. I felt suspended in a dream. You see before you all your dearest people, in this wild place in the middle of nowhere. It does not seem possible. It seems even less possible to put any of it into words, and nor do you want to try. Perhaps that’s why I haven’t, for so long.

It just is, and you drink it in. Days later you wake from the dream and remember that this friend and that relative was right here in this spot with you. You wish that they still were, now that your mouth is able to form words again. But, as my dear friend and ‘best man’ Aitan so beautifully put it, in this age where friends are scattered far and wide, and many relationships are largely sustained remotely, “There is something very strengthening about spending time in three dimensions.”

Photo: Norbert Pilters

On this day, the opposite of the day these words were written about, it is the time to gestate these images, this intensity of feeling, and retreat into the embrace of the darkness as it tips its balance.

This winter, though, we have decided to make our boundaries clear to the darkness. I have spent two winters feeling what it really is to be an extension of the landscape. And when the landscape is frozen and dark, it means your energy also slugs into submission. As beasts, we should be hibernating and attempting to carry on as normal feels absurd. I do not want to do as many do: take pills and sit in front of an SAD lamp at the hospital.  I have decided that the darkness may not creep all the way into the middle of my day anymore. We cannot stop the darkness doing its wild thing, and nor do we want to. Like the birds, we can only move our bodies to where it cannot touch us for so long. A lot has brought us to this decision, and we do not know yet what it will yield. But often, committing to change what you do not want is enough to begin with. There are many many ways in which this landscape and culture have shaped me, but that will have to be another story.

 
In the midst of the darkness this year, there is promised to be many spectacular dances of light -  the aurora borealis being at their most intense in fifty years. There is even a great website where you can check what they’re up to, though my advice would be to just go. If there’s a clear night they’ll likely make an appearance at some point. We have been busy making our handmade, heart-loved home into a guesthouse/ home stay. It is now ready to welcome guests and we have had some very happy ones already. If the thought of a Nordic winter journey, with aurora in the skies and the crunch of snow at your feet, is something that rings bells in your heart, we welcome you to base yourselves within the lamp glowed reindeer skins of our Little Icelandic House. Please spread the word…quietly!

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The Round Up

I must confess, this post was written several moons ago, as part of a much longer one. The view from my window now is a very different one indeed. This year seems to have been one of Big Things, and sometimes they have become too overwhelming to deal with, let alone to write about. So in the spirit of making my way through one small piece at a time, I shall in time reveal the gems in the rubble, and in longer time hopefully the rubble itself. There are many shifts occurring, and us sensitive types are quite taken up by it. Making the space to feel is a bigger challenge than we might imagine. For now, I shall leave you with the colours of an Icelandic autumn, which filled my senses before I migrated southwards – a refugee of the darkness. This was written in late September from our home in the Westfjords.

It is that time of year again when the mountains outside my window become enshrouded in mist, and, clinging to their slopes the birch, berries and rowan trees ignite in a riotous palette of fire. The ravens have restored their positions as kings of sky and lamp post. They never went away in summer, but they seemed to take a background position – high, high in the sky – to the gulls and the arctic terns, who are now making their way to the southern hemisphere. It is a season that turns you to introspection; taking stock of the many stories of summer.

And it is time for the annual sheep round up. The sheep have been languishing in three months of sunshine up in the mountains, and now the winds are changing and it is time to come back to their birthplace. This year I have been involved with two gatherings and a lambing season, as the farmers of those flocks are part of a film that I’m making. Not to mention being an integral part of my inherited family’s, and now my circle here. The gatherings can be quite an event, involving a good part of the community of any given sveit (area of countryside) and their friends and extended family. It is a two day affair that requires stamina and hardship for the men and women on the mountain top, patience for the children who are sent up ravines and down to the shore to bring in stragglers, and an abundance of  restorative coffee, cake and meat soup to be served at the end of the day. This year there has been too much sun and too little rain. The majority of Westfjordian farmers have struggled to make enough hay to feed their flocks through the winter, so they are being forced to slaughter more sheep than usual.

Those who help with the gathering are usually given some meat once the chosen ones have been slaughtered, which usually happens a week or two later. I have to have a reality check sometimes when sights, such as my man coming home with a shoulder of lamb that he’s just cut from a whole one hanging in his parents’ garage, become normal. Though I much prefer this level of involvement in what I eat to shopping in a bland supermarket for meat wrapped in plastic – its story untold, its true origins unknown. Now begins again the season of eating meat, and sleeping long.

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The Yellowing and the Greening

Our first rays of yellow this year came to us at the end of January. They crept cautiously over a mountain top as we wended our way southwards for a journey out of the frozen-ness of winter energy, and into the warmth of friends, time and tales shared and the kaleidoscope of other cultures. Once you leave this snow blanketed island in winter, everywhere seems close and accessible, and when you know you won’t step over its threshold again for a while the tendency is to do a Grand Tour of friends – wherever they may be. It feels like exchanging a pure white down duvet for a crocheted patchwork blanket, with many threads converging in a riot of colour!

January

This kind of ‘all in one’ travel inevitably involves becoming almost dizzy with all the new sounds, sights and smells. But, as you gather them up in your pouch and head home they provide a necessary pantry to carry you through to the time when the snow finally leaves for good, which in the northwest of Iceland where we live, only happened a few weeks ago. Living on an island in the Arctic, I am always torn between this personal priority of mine to spend good time with loved ones, physically rather than virtually, and the amount of travel necessary to do this. But as we spend most of the year barely leaving this fjord it seems fair to my soul to give it some food in times of want.

After tasting a woodsmoked winterscape in Norway, we landed in Barcelona where we have a good many friends. Some of them were new friends who had paid us a visit last summer in Iceland and we shared such good times we were curious to continue the tale. They summed it up, as we appeared in our Icelandic jumpers: “You are the same, but here!”. They live in a wonderful social project on the outskirts of the city called Can Masdeu – an 17th centrury former nunnery then leper hospital, that sits atop a canya filled forested valley with the barrios just a stone’s throw away. They and many other dedicated folk have occupied and renovated this abandoned building and started a community gardening scheme with the residents of the local barrios, among many other projects. It was quite wondrous to arrive in the dark and wake up to this view, knowing that we were still actually in the city.

Finding myself in a place where several of my close girlfriends lived, it seemed like an ideal location to have my Women’s Gathering (I am loathed to say hen party…I’m not much of a bunny ears kind of girl), though our marriage was still some months away at that point. It was appropriate to begin with a ritual, and so we gathered in a Moroccan hammam and got properly scrubbed down and our pores opened wide. Out from the steamy darkness of the hammam into the sunlit evening streets, we felt like new, and headed off for an evening chasing giant puppets, drinking Cava in the street, eating Catalan food and dancing the night away to Ska in an amazing little Senegalese bar. A highlight of the evening was when a kora player walked in with his instrument, fresh from a rehearsal, and he graciously agreed to my request to play my man to be.

Back in England, on our way back to Lancaster, some more rays of sunshine were to be had in the form of dancing with friends in my heart home, Lancaster, to the fantastic Eastern European folk band The Balkanics, who shall soon be joining us in Iceland to come and play at our wedding! It struck me how important movement is in long, hard winters. Movement to other places, movement of your body. I danced more in that trip than I had in months. It’s either that or sleep like a bear!

After all the fun and frolics, I carried my pouch of colours back to the still white snowscape, thankfully now tinged with yellow and pink, to face the hardest challenge yet: Orri being at sea for six weeks. I knew I wasn’t going to like it but thought I would be sufficiently occupied with life and organising our wedding. It is a strange and complex emotional beast, absence. And I’m aware in my life I’ve usually been the one going off somewhere rather than being left behind. I still cannot fathom the reality that a great proportion of Icelandic families live this way: the wife spending months without her husband, and just getting on with everything, with children. The readjustment upon return is almost harder than the absence: you have each got into your own rhythms in that time and you almost have to start from scratch finding a harmonious one. It is like retuning instruments which sounded alright on their own but when played together again appear to have gone out of key.

This situation, and my perspective on it, was happily interrupted by my getting funding to attend a screening of my last documentary, Earth to Earth…in Tartu, Estonia. I cannot recommend the unique Worldfilm Festival enough. For a start it is in Tartu – the most delightfully wonky, wooden, woodsmoke – filled university ‘city’ I have ever been to. Really it is quite small and has a river snaking through its middle, making it feel open and not far from the countryside. The houses are all painted in my favourite autumnal colours and the streets in the old town ‘Soup Town’, are named after soup ingredients!

The junction of Pea Street and Berry Street.

The festival takes place in a beautiful old cinema – all red velour seats and relief sculptures on the walls. Up in the loft, for those who do not feel like watching films upright, there is a mattress-covered cinema which screened films simultaneously with the main hall. Adequate time is given to the Q&A sessions for meaningful discussion. The whole event feels like a room full of friends you have not met yet, and soon will, rather than the arduous ‘network- fests’ I am so poor at. We were well fed and taken to cosy coffeehouses and bars in the evening.

And best of all, the closing party was like a dream. Imagine an old but modest manor house on the outskirts of the city. Inside its walls was a flint and brick kitchen with a wooden table laden with berry cake, artisanal sausages, and ales. In the pit beside the open fireplace, musicians gathered with bodrans, accordions, spoons and jew’s harps, and best of all…their voices. There is an ancient singing tradition in Estonia called regilaul. When folks, young and old, gather – sometimes to get a bit tipsy, they will start to sing these chants.

Regilaul

Through a little door, in true Estonian tradition, was a sauna where another group of bodies gathered and were transformed by the heat. Coming from this back into the chanting was magical. It took me to a place of suspended time – that evening could have gone on forever. The stretchiness of time was further complicated by the clocks going forward to Summertime in the middle of the party – the wrong way for our mood unfortunately!

I also had to wake early as I had been serendipitously offered a ride back to Talinn, via a visit to a fascinating old man called Tomu Tamm – my host’s old friend. Tomu is someone who has dreams and lives them. He once dreamed to play an organ in the forest. He was not rich, but came up with a plan to save money for the best organ he could buy. One day, he played it in the forest. His dream to combine nature and music has reached new heights over the years, as he has restored some land he bought (almost single-handedly) from bog to its original habitat of lakes and forests. Now, each summer he holds a music festival on one of the lakes, on a floating stage. It is called Leigo and it is now one of my dreams to go. We gathered around his huge fireplace and he served us homemade seabuckthorn juice as he told tales of his creative life. He is living evidence that creativity is not something you do, it is something you are. It seeps into the fibres of everything you touch and think and this way it touches others, so everything in your orbit becomes a creative act.

Leigo music festival by day…

…and by night.

Talking to people at this film festival made me see anew how unusual my life is, and how interesting. So many times I heard, “Oh that would make a great film!” When you are in it so far, sometimes you cannot see it for what it is. It just becomes your day to day. But with some distance I came back full of ideas and inspiration, and with a handful of great films and film makers’ contacts. Back at home, I felt I had had en intensely emotional experience that I needed to digest and cradle. I began painting the walls of our house in strong colours – painting the light into my days. And each day a few more fingers of light crept further and further into our kitchen, illuminating my colours, in a dance with my brushstrokes.

March

And now all of a sudden, summer is here! The seeds that were planted long ago have woken up and grown some….so much so that everyday has a different view. A myriad of wild flowers scatter the landscape nowadays.The snow has only been gone a month, but Nature catches up so quickly that you cannot afford to sleep! We had some guests recently who were rather amused at how excited we were to see flowers and grass. It might seem strange to those who have had Spring already for a few months and who indeed may not have had any snow, but when your world has been white for so long, it truly is a wonder to see yellow and green, and all the colours in between…even when it rains.

A seed that was planted at the closing party of the Estonian film festival has also come into bloom. One of the fantastic film makers there expressed how much she’d like to come to Iceland, and tomorrow she arrives to make a film about our wedding. I’m not sure what I said to her to make her so sure she wanted to do this, but it was something that felt good between two people that believe that life is a story to tell, and you should tell it colourfully.

We have had almost endless sunny days, and it is fast approaching the day when the sun shall never set…which by chance is our wedding day! Preparations have been in full swing for over a month now, as we are building an off grid wedding from scratch using materials we have been collecting from nature and the town refuse dump for many months. The central pole of our wedding tent is the town’s Christmas tree from last year! We feel in pace with the hyperactivity of the flowers and the bees, and our world is an expanse of colour. We are grateful.

Wedding tent making.

The place we shall be wed.

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The Colours of Winter – Part I, II & III

* * * Part I: Blue * * *

There is an Icelandic expression, “Það kemur í ljós”, which is the equivalent of the English “time will tell”. Though it means something rather different which I find appropriate and telling as to how one interacts with one’s realities in Iceland:  “that will come into the light”. Time passing might change nothing at all about a situation, but the light shining on it allows you to see it differently, in a different colour, and thereby it is revealed.

The winter before this one was my first in this land, and some might say I was a fool to come at the beginning of one. I might say that myself. But, in my stronger moments, I like the idea of putting myself through experiences, good and bad, to really taste life in all of its extremes. The biggest surprise last winter was not the coldness or the dark; it was what happened to my energy, and the energy of everything around me. It froze.

I suppose this might be an obvious effect of deep winter, but I have never been in a situation or place where I felt it so directly, so physically. There were few distractions, even less motivation, and being new here I was not integrated. I kept active as I always do, but I was unable to acknowledge that I had achieved anything.

The following summer we had several visitors and they could not believe how much I had achieved. One said, “If this is you in the dark, I’m not sure I want to see you in the light!”.  Achievement can of course be measured in much more subtle and beautiful ways than career, money, property – a lot of which is based on an illusory linear life course. Some people choose a life course that is like a branching tree, and see uncertainty not as insecurity but as the cherished anticipation of what is around the next bend. I am one of these, but one who has been raised in the linear worldview, so when stepping off the highway onto the bumpy winding side track that is this life, it is nurturing to have reassurances from others that you are doing well.

As I hunkered down for this past winter, I knew that this time around, I would have to change my point of view, and sometimes my view as well: I would have to leave this fjord sometimes. But what I did notice particularly this winter, was how often the same view changed day to day, and even during the day. I never cease to marvel at what lies beyond our window panes. I am always stopped in my tracks on my way out of the front door and often turn on my heel to get my camera.

A friend pointed out that Isafjordur (‘Ice Fjord’) – both the name of the town we live in and the name of the fjord system that contains it – contains the ‘Isa’ rune, which is described thus:

The Isa rune

Meaning
Ice, cold, freezing. Lack of change. Stagnation. Lack of emotion. Storing binding. Bridge across danger.

Characteristics
Isa means ice. Although ice can be beautiful, it is also dangerous. It can be slippery or treacherously thin, or block your progress. Isa means that you may have to delay your plans until a more favourable season. But it can take the heat out of a confrontation, or protect against magical attack. Emotionally, Isa implies a cooling of affection, or frigidity. It has a freezing, delaying, or preserving effect on other runes around it.

Personal Interpretation
A period of non-action is indicated. Do not let yourself get into a rut. Do not take anyone for granted. Be not afraid to show your feelings. Crossing water will be beneficial. Things appear to be at a standstill and this is not a time to try to force movement. Patience and wisdom are called for. This is not the time to abandon goals, but an opportunity to reaffirm them. This is a time for contemplation and preparation, not despondency or regrets. Things will change as surely as winter changes to spring and then summer.

Source

This description resonated remarkably with my experience here, and it is not unlikely that it resonated with that of the settler who gave it this name. Whatever the connections are, I found it incredibly helpful to see my situation in this different light, and knew that this time around I would do some things differently – primarily to have different expectations of myself and to ‘cross water’.

January is usually the most difficult time. It is the darkest time of the year (especially once all the Christmas lights have come down), and the festive spirit of Yule gives way into the long hard wait until spring, which is only just beginning for us now. So this January, to ‘change my view’ I fulfilled a several year-long dream. We headed to Norway for the incredible Ice Music Festival in Geilo. It might seem perverse to escape winter stagnation by going to an even colder place, but only in cold climes do you find and ancient ice, and only in very cold climes does it SING!

First we drove south amid avalanche and gale warnings, which curiously seemed to avoid our path. With reports of evacuations in our village on the radio, we meandered through the greyscale landscape until we met the sun up on a mountain pass – the first time it had touched our skin in many months.

We looked as if we were waking from a deep deep slumber, and as it warmed our skin, our life force began to flow, and the light changed everything. Even though everything was still mostly white, it was tinged with colours! Blues, greens, yellows…and shadows.

* * * Part II: Red and Yellow  * * *

We passed through the UK to have a wedding dress fitting, visit family and to collect our friends Kate and Jedrek, who live on a canal boat in London (when not doing research in Zanzibar!).  Staying in the secret, brightly coloured, slow paced world just below street level was the most relaxing way I have ever met with the city. Days were spent cycling along the towpath, discovering such delights as The Book Barge, and that everything seems much closer than it does on public transport. Evenings were spent at their hearth meeting fellow boat dwellers, sharing tales smoking shisha pipes, and very excitingly once going on a voyage to collect water and empty the toilet!

And mornings were spent having very springlike red and yellow breakfasts out on the ‘terrace’. The white landscapes of home seemed a million miles away, not to mention the proximity of their winter mooring to London zoo meaning that some nights they heard the lion roar!

Secret London…shhhh!

And finally we bundled up every Icelandic jumper we had, along with mulled wine and food, and headed off to the higgledy piggledy streets of Bergen to catch a train into the mountains, where the ice likes to sing the most.

Bergen

* * * Part III: Back to Blue * * *

From the roaring of lions to the singing of ice…the Ice Music Festival did not disappoint. It is exactly what it says on the tin.

The venue is made of ice…

The signs are made of ice…

The percussion section is made of ice…

The horns are made of ice…

And this year there was even an ice cello….

It is a magical experience sitting on a reindeer skin full of hot chocolate in a snow amphitheatre under the open skies, listening to the sound that 1000 year old ice makes. It really makes you think about how much beauty and potential there is held inside so many things that often go unnoticed. I am heartened that there are people in this world who take the time to unleash it. I urge you to take a listen!

The view from our Norwegian wooden house window

It was a blessed journey from the start. Months back last summer, I heard a Radio 4 documentary about the festival which prompted me to act on this long held dream and make it a reality. We bought the tickets and resigned to figuring out the details later (like accommodation and travel with very little money). A few days later, a couple walked into the shop where I was covering for a day, and they turned out not only to be from Norway, but from a small village near the festival! The man, Lars, is a musician and had made an ice harp for the festival some years back. We were invited to stay at their beautiful wooden house on the shores of a frozen lake, neigboured by old timber barns with turf roofs and mushroom shaped feet to keep the mice out. Around them were pine and birch forests and towering icicle cathedrals with stained glass windows of yellow and blue (to give an idea of scale, note the small black form at the bottom – it is Kate!).

I am always astounded by the hospitality of strangers though I think there is, beyond the fear mongering and the ‘social norms’,  a deep human instinct to open one’s door to some colour that comes in from the cold. I am glad to be able to extend the same welcome. So far it has only been wonderful and two of those colourful folk we had opened our door to last summer were the next stop on our Winter Whirlwind Tour….!

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Stitching Stories and The Changing Colours

In Iceland the colours and my feelings are constantly changing, but this past month or so since I returned from my trip abroad, the sky, the walls, the ground, the tomatoes on the windowsill, indeed my life has changed colour more than usual.

When I first returned it was ‘unusually warm’ (5 degrees C!) and the snow had not yet settled. Now it well and truly has, and the nights seem to be creeping up our front steps and tapping on the back window all at the same time. The daylight hours are almost an immediate transition from sunrise to sunset making for some very striking pink light on the clouds and the mountains. Around the time the nights started coming to visit early, our tomatoes – which had waited small and green for many weeks as if waiting for something to show them what to do next – expanded and reddened, asking to be plucked. How sweet and intense months of care and anticipation tastes! It was a strange thing to see red tomatoes with a snowy white backdrop – Christmassy in a bizarre way – but we very proud to have produced these homegrown wonders in such a place!

And while it has been a time for wrapping up warm (more on that later!) and wrapping up presents, we finally could not resist the temptation to unwrap our little Icelandic house, and see what lay beneath our wall paper. Our fingers had traced ridges that felt like old wooden panel and what started with a curious peek turned into a total wall make over that ended in a unexpected find.

We made our way through several layers of wall paper from various eras…

…finding it all lined with hessian nailed into the wood, and old Icelandic newspapers.

And there on the right, for the keen of sight, is what lined most of the walls in our bedroom: A copy of The Weekly Scotsman from June 19th 1909! And in it were fashion adverts for ladies’ skirts and hats…

…delicious articles that speak so strongly of the time as to conjure up whole stories in the imagination:

“The Mauretania carried recently to New York a consignment of twenty tons of Ostrich feathers valued at more than £100,000.“

And sound advice, in the twentieth century and always:

“Don’t worry children. Don’t worry about them. Guardian Angels still exist, even in the twentieth century.”

All of this wrapped up in our walls and stitched in to the story of our house! We have kept all the best bits to be made into goodness-knows-what, some already made into Christmas cards, but you cannot throw away stories like these.

Our open house and Christmas sale before the house got so full I couldn’t take pictures! The kitchen was full of men clutching mugs of home made hot chocolate and listening to my boyfriend’s father telling tales, while all the women huddled around my jewellery picking out Christmas gifts.

And underneath it all, the wooden panel that we’d dreamed of, but even better. Wooden, unpainted from 1902, matured to a lovely deep honey colour that has transformed the feeling of our house into a cosy wooden cabin in the winterscape. It has made the perfect backdrop to lantern lit evenings doing wintry things, Christmas sales and cocoa tales, and lastly but not leastly…

Our end of year Icelandic Jumper Extravaganza!!! Roll up, roll up! We have decided to put some second hand Icelandic jumpers up for auction on Ebay to raise money for our upcoming marriage. I cannot recommend Icelandic jumpers highly enough. In fact I am wearing one right now. They are 100% pure Icelandic hand knitted wool, which is excellent quality and keeps you at a perfect temperature, both inside and outside. They are a very beautiful and practical thing to have that will keep you toasty for years to come. And very fashionable at the moment so I hear!

A small selection of the delights up for sale over here and here!

If the idea of wrapping one of these around yourself, your loved ones or your children warms your heart, or you’d just like to help us along on our journey, please do pop in and say Hello! and Hi! The auction ends Sunday and Monday nights; all being well just in time to get them to you for Christmas!

It is Icelandic tradition at Christmas to give family members a new item of clothing, lest they get eaten by the Jólakötturin (Yule Cat). This was to encourage folk to work hard to use up the Autumn wool before Christmas, which still happens to this day. You cannot find many women here who do not knit of an evening between the autumn sheep gathering and Christmas, and this is how they were made. Enjoy the stories in each stitch!

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Of Moving Pictures & Wedding Dress Quests

Sometimes an idea, a dream, floats around in your head and heart for a long time and you know and feel it will happen, but it takes a small gust of autumn wind to come along one day to blow the pieces into place, so that the path is cleared before you and you know the time is *now*.

Going South in Autumn

I was told many months ago that my film Earth To Earth: Natural Burial and The Church of England had been accepted in The 20th International Festival of Ethnological film in Belgrade, Serbia. It has also been in festivals in UK, Italy, Iceland and soon to be in Montreal, but I had never been able to attend. I love film festivals just for the fact that they take you to places you may not otherwise have gone, and take you there with a unique objective that allows you to meet interesting people and get beneath the surface of the place.

Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

At around the same time, my dear man and I decided to marry next year! Excitement abounds and quite a party is in the making. In time my thoughts turned to the dress I would wear. There was a picture I stumbled upon months ago on the web of an 18th century hand embroidered coat – wool on linen – which I had metaphorically clutched in my hand for months. The source described it as ‘French’, but it reminded me of Eastern European folk embroidery. Wherever it was from didn’t really matter. All I knew was that I wanted a dress that had lived some generations and was hand embroidered; imbued with that inimitable earthiness that old handmade objects have. A dress with a story.

And so I asked the organisers of the film festival in Serbia if I might find such a dress if I were to come to Belgrade. “Why don’t you come and we’ll find out?”, was the reply. The prospect was too tempting and so I emptied my pockets and did any odd jobs I could before leaving. As it happened I was headed south anyway (anywhere in the world involves going south from here, unless I was taking a boat to Greenland!) for the annual Reykjavik International Film Festival, where I was participating in the Talent Lab for young directors and competing for the Golden Egg Award. It is a rare opportunity in this land to feast on films from all over the world and Iceland in a discursive setting, and the Talentlab was wall to wall workshops with directors, producers and actors.

It was all quite intense for me actually, coming from my slow paced Arctic Circular lifestyle to a place where you are supposed to ‘network’ relentlessly and people are beavering away on their Macbook Pros editing films whilst participating in a workshop. I sometimes looked around and thought, ” This is not me”, but as my good friend reminded me, there are many ways to be a film maker.

My way is to inhabit a space where I feel there is a story, and to live it for some time making mind sketches, understanding the shapes and patterns in that life or theme. Then the moment comes when something that is both me and something outside of me says “it’s time to begin”, and then the film starts to sort of make itself. It is a largely penniless existence, but one in which I can be fully present, and fully myself. One aspect of the festival totally resonated and shall stay with me: the films and words of the festival’s honoured guest and recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Béla Tarr. If you have not seen his films I urge you to.

“Be yourself; find your style, your way; find the border and cross it, or else you may be lost or, even worse, boring. Don’t forget what you really want to say; there is no recipe. The recipe is you.”

Wise and beautiful words from a very rare kind of being, especially in the film world. He has uncompromisingly followed his vision and has made his last film because he “has said all he wants to say”. He is planning to spend his time now being a producer for talented but shy directors, and founding a film school in Croatia which creates a space with in which creation is favoured over education.

I also had the pleasure of finally meeting Icelandic director Rúnar Rúnarsson (also brilliant) whose short film The Last Farm is one of my favourites. He was premiering in Iceland his first feature film Volcano. It turns out he once tried to buy the house we live in and knows it and our view very well. So that was cosy. I usually find the prospect of meeting Important People rather intimidating, but he was lovely so I invited him to pop in for a cup of tea next time he’s up this way.

And we were invited to the President of Iceland’s house and allowed to snoop around. No bag searches there, and we had to queue so he could shake each of our hands individually. It might sound like a big deal to foreigners but he’s in the phone book, and besides, life’s a bit different over here.

But I digress. When I’m in Reykjavik, because the international airport is there I feel a lot closer to the rest of the world than where we live, which isn’t really close to anywhere. Is just is what it is. So the Reykjavik Film Festival was an ideal stepping stone for this deliciously nose-led adventure to Europe to find my dress. My heartstrings tugged me to make my first stop my best friend up north in England, and then on to London to begin my quest.

My cousin, who’s a costume maker for the BBC among other things, took me to Goldhawk Road in Shepherds Bush (aka fabric shops galore) to look at what fabrics were available were we to make something from scratch. It was quite a marvel and reminded me of souks in Morocco and India, where there are clusters of shops in one area of town selling similar things. In fact, the whole wedding dress mission took me on a journey through many corners of the world…

I started with a couple of flea markets in South London, as you never know where you might pick up an old embroidered panel. No luck with that, but I did buy a most lovely and engaging Wayang golek puppet from a man in a pirate hat, who proceeded to help me with my search (the puppet, not the man). In fact my ‘up-do’ for the wedding may well be inspired by her elegant coiffure.

Then I saw a girl in a tube station with a beautiful cardigan and thought she might just know where I might find the kind of thing I was looking for, and she pointed me to a woman at Portobello Market. The woman was not there, but I got talking to another woman who, on my casually mentioning that I was also looking for a pair of Tibetan felt boots responded, “I’ve got a pair of those…they’ve been sitting in my garage for years!” and arranged to meet me with them another day. Potential footwear – sorted.

The London suzani treasure trove

A suzani merchant in Samarkand, Uzbekistan

I also found an Afghanistani shop, and one that was refreshingly unboutiquified. At the back was pile upon pile of large rectangular hand embroidered wall hangings (suzani) which I worked my way through to see if one might make an interesting dress. The term suzani is derived from the Persian suzan, meaning “needle”,  and variations of these decorative and colourful embroideries are made across Central Asia including in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan where traditionally they have formed the main ornament of a house interior.

The myriad symbolic designs are embroidered onto velvet, silk or cotton, and the piece would form a part of a bride’s dowry. A mother might begin planning the design of the embroidery upon the birth of a daughter, or at least long before her marriageable age. The work is executed by the bride to be to demonstrate her stitching prowess, often helped by experienced female family members and friends  shortly before her marriage. Most often suzani designs comprise symbolic representations of a blossoming garden. In the midst of the rich decorative patterns one can make out talismanic symbols: a pomegranate for fertility, knives for protection from an evil eye, a pepper so that evil spirits will pass you by, a lamp for purification from evil, a bird for luck. Legend has it that all authentic suzanis have an intentional mistake in them, as a reminder of human imperfection.

In the end I didn’t find one suitable for a dress (not to mention I began struggling with the idea of cutting one up) but did buy three with which to decorate our wedding tent. According to the wealth of information at Pomegranate Textiles,  Eastern suzanis, (which I believe the ones I selected are):

“… are much closer to the traditional nomad designs of the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks, who in pre-Islamic times worshiped the sun, the moon and the stars. These are bold designs, with an archaic symbolism centered on a circular motif, whose exact meaning is debated by specialists: Does it represent the sun, the moon, the heavens, a flower—or an open pomegranate, a symbol of fertility from the Mediterranean to China? It is clearly a positive image of continuity and survival, and it appears over and over again in the life of the region: It is painted or incised on the walls of houses, stamped onto bread, sewn into other embroideries used for everyday tableware, and even echoed in the brickwork of the domes of mosques and madrasas (religious schools). It often employs powerful contrasts, as if to distinguish dark and light, good and evil, life and death, and strong colors such as red for blood, brown for the earth and blue-black for the sky.”

A fine backdrop to a celebration of your commitment to each other then.

Sun, moon, heavens or open pomegranate?

I was rather touched by the shop keeper’s patience (letting me stay some time after closing) and enthusiasm to share some details of Afghanistani wedding customs with me, inlcuding pictures from his own brother’s wedding on his iphone. Apparently the groom wears the dowry suzani on his shoulder during the wedding.

I was eager to return also to the wonderful Rau Antiques in Islington, where I had bought a very special dress some years ago. The owner, Pip Rau, is a delightfully eccentric lady who travelled extensively in Central Asia in the 1970s and was taken by the incredible handwork in the embroidered textiles and Ikats she found there. She had a natural eye for the best pieces and started collecting, and is now one of the foremost collectors of Afghan and Central Asian textiles and jewellery in the UK, if not the world. Her collection of Ikats was shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2008, and she has authored and contributed to several books on the subject.

In her shop, I didn’t find a dress but I did find an antique hand embroidered Tajik headdress which I’ll give you a peek of below. The shop is almost bursting with beautiful textiles, but fortunately for me she said, “I’ve got much more at home, you know”. And so I spent an enjoyable morning at her jaw-droppingly beautiful house (which is also a labour of love and many years), my eyes flitting all around at the wonders she has collected and salvaged, including an old hand carved wooden Nuristani house inlaid with glittering mica, which inhabits her back garden.

I picked through the dresses and tried on my favourites. After not very long there was one that made us both say “Aha!”. It is as if it was tailor made for me, in autumnal colours that I love – deep reds, oranges and even pale duck egg blue, and a skirt with a trim of almost every colour embroidered onto a black cotton ground. The colour may be slightly unconventional for a wedding, but my influences are many, and as it will be an outdoor wedding in the wilds of Iceland, anything light coloured would just get dirty in seconds.

It is actually a dress Pip got at an auction rather than one of her travels to Central Asia, so we are unsure of the provenance. There is another adventure to be had in finding that out. I wish I could put a call out to my readers for ideas but alas, for the moment, as the dress must remain concealed from my man it must remain concealed from everyone! But if anyone does have any ideas as to the origins of this dress just from the embroidery and rik rak trim, please do send me your thoughts! (N.B. the colourful embroidered flowers are a separate head dress with a different provenance).  I was surprised, excited and also secretly slightly disappointed to have found something even before going to Serbia, but I wasn’t going to let that stop me from continuing a ‘search’ of kinds, as I was enjoying the ride too much!

A tiny detail from the head dress and skirt

And so on I went to Serbia, where the folks at the Ethnographic Museum (the site of the film festival and also home to a fine collection of traditional dress from the Balkans) had been busy doing research for me, bless their hearts!

From the collection:

Peacock feathers in a marriage headdress are said to ward off the evil eye, and the coins constitute part of the dowry as well as being for decorative purposes.

A black felt hand embroidered zubun

After looking at their collection I was allocated two anthropology students to take me on an adventure into the hills around Belgrade to find the man, Kiri, who makes replicas of all the museum’s pieces.

We got a little lost…

…but eventually we found it tucked down a lane.

After a good rummage through their beautiful collection of embroidered felt Zubun (sleeveless jackets of various lengths) I settled on one that I thought Orri might like to wear. If he doesn’t end up wearing it, it’s still a beautiful piece and anything made of wool will be well used by us. It is completely handmade (the felt and the embroidery) and it’s a replica of a piece from Bosnia. Here’s a little detail of it:

The museum’s ‘little black book’ of grannies was searched for people who had been in previously trying to sell traditional clothing but the museum had not needed them. One lady came in with a lovely zubun and embroidered apron (and an old black and white picture of her mother wearing it) and as tempting as it was, it wasn’t quite ‘it’ enough to warrant changing my whole outfit.

A national newspaper, Blic, got wind of my story and came to interview me about my search, and what a wedding might look like for someone who is English, grew up in Kenya, and now lives in Iceland! I was also interviewed about my background, my film and the film festival by the national TV broadcaster for a culture programme, in amongst the traditional dress collection in the Ethnographic museum.

I was amused that the newspaper at least was more interested in the wedding dress story than my role in the film festival! But I suppose that is what drew me on the adventure in the first place: I had no idea what would come out of it, but whatever did would make a good story. And that is what life is: a story that we write for ourselves; a dress that we wear and adapt to our needs. So it better be a colourful one!

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The picturebook of autumn

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I went out for a walk…

I went out for a walk this Summer and found in it so many places and so many things: I found my garden and its unfolding. Small islands across the sea that all winter had lain unknown to me. I found England again and train journeys across new terrain. And Spain: friends and endless roaming through labyrinthine streets and flea markets. I found Kenya: a journey of the heart and feet. The midnight sun, many moons (one eclipsed), snow, rain, birth, death, marriage, reunion, equators, arctic circles, seas, deserts, journeying far and being still. Summer. Such a simple name for so many things, and yet, it is that simple. At any given moment across the earth manifold stories are telling themselves, and mine is but one. It has been a particularly eventful year for the earth as a whole, too, and I am feeling it. Feeling something shifting. It is time to empty the contents of my pockets onto the table and see what my walk yielded.

A summer in Iceland feels like you are living a whole year in three months. The rush of adrenaline and motivation that comes with having hours of daylight sees you sometimes living your days in your nights and your nights in your days, and sometimes the gossamer thread that holds them together and apart unravels. Sleep when you’re tired and eat when you’re hungry: that’s the only guideline.

11pm Early August

It is a season of limitless possibility and activity, and the plants, birds and animals all feel it too.

Surprisingly, my sleep has been just as deep as in winter, but with a tiredness borne of the fullness of my days rather than wool-lined lethargy.

My light-emotions were rather confused by a hop, skip and jump to Kenya in late May. Here in Iceland it had finally begun to feel like summer was in sight, after all these months of waiting. And despite my much brighter destination, I felt like I was missing the very thing I had so anticipated. But a grandmother’s 90th birthday and good friends’ weddings and birth-givings should not be missed, so off I went.

Tragically my grandmother’s birthday celebrations became her funeral, and as prepared as you may think you are for a dear one’s death, the act itself and everything that comes with it takes many moons to process. I found that my experience of working with death and grief in my last film, helped me enormously.

Thankfully, inspiration and support can tumble into your path when you really need it. I came across a post on this fascinating blog written by Daniela Othieno, who, following the death of her mother, has come to perceive life as The Great Compost Heap. She is, as I have been, greatly inspired by David Abram’s book The Spell of The Sensuous. It is a clarion call for us to actively engage with the more-than-human world that we live in, and are part of, and not to view nature as something separate from ourselves. I have never been so physically affected by my surroundings as here in Iceland, and it is a dance that I must continually improvise. There is so little development here that your experience of nature is direct; immediate. It is awe-inspiring but can also be brutal, as you are tossed around in its changeable winds. A passage from the book echoes this sentiment beautifully:

My life and the world’s life are deeply intertwined; when I wake up one morning to find that a week-long illness has subsided and that my strength has returned, the world, when I step outside, fairly crackles with energy and activity: swallows are swooping by in vivid flight; waves of heat rise from the newly paved road smelling strongly of tar; the old red barn across the field juts into the sky at an intense angle. Likewise, when a haze descends upon the valley in which I dwell, it descends upon my awareness as well, muddling my thoughts, making my muscles yearn for sleep. The world and I reciprocate one another. The landscape as I directly experience it is hardly a determinate object; it is an ambiguous realm that responds to my emotions and calls forth feelings from me in turn.
p. 33

It is a precious handbook for a fuller experience of our lives, which I have delved into and come out of so many times, as each chapter, each paragraph is a reawakening of a sense you always knew but didn’t realise you had forgotten. It compels you to lay down the book and go and walk in life with this fresh reimagining of place and our place in it.

Iceland

Kenya

England

I have been inspired lately also by the doings of the Dark Mountain folk, who have just published their second book (of which David Abrams is a contributor) of stories, essays, poems, images, conversations and recipes all urging us to stop pretending. These times may be confusing; frightening even. But we can still find and create beauty and hope when we look it plainly in the face. We humans have proved ourselves to be excellent adaptors but we must adapt to an honest vision of what our reality is. The book, so I hear, is a kind of inspiration-toolbox filled with reflections on how we might live in, and through, these times. I await the arrival of my copy in the hands of some visitors like I look forward to my man coming back from the sea. I look forward to sitting in bed with both of them.

There was also a Dark Mountain festival a couple of weekends ago where interesting and interested folk gathered to discuss, play and dance with ideas for a possible future. What makes it unique is that it is a stimulating environment within which it is alright to be confused and challenged. A space is created to ask questions without the agenda necessarily being to find answers. Reading some reports, it seemed to be an indescribable experience where many went through a kind of limen and will be putting the pieces of themselves back together for months to come. We all need to do that. It is the way of nature, which is also us: cycles. I only wish I had not been so many miles away from it!

The first thing that resonates with me about their philosophy is the notion of acceptance of death and decay (of individuals, systems, economies) and moving on in that reality rather than one of denial. It is an obvious and simple thing which is overlooked by the majority, and one of the fundamental reasons why I left London just over two years ago to dive into an uncertain, but honest, life on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Of course, London has its magic and there are many very interesting things going on there that can only emerge from the melting pot of ideas and backgrounds that a nexus like London accommodates. But on a quotidian level, I felt the immediately visible layer of society was careering around (pun not intended but apt all the same) arranging their priorities to a very different list than mine, because they are trying to create a security that doesn’t exist. I also found the lack of time distinctly uncomfortable, and the knock-on effect that has on one’s attentiveness, pace, abilities and resourcefulness.

I am reminded of this everywhere. This I found written in a puppet museum on my way south at the beginning of Summer.

I never thought it would be easy in Iceland, and I am by no means saying it holds all the answers.  Everything remains an experiment here, but I am certainly more aware of myself and my relationship to nature. It is an experience that sees me ride the highs and lows of my possibilities, all the time knowing that however it feels in the moment it is an invaluable layer to my skin. I shall leave for another post my reflections on where I feel I am and how this experience has shaped me. At the moment I am still processing it, and phases of that processing seem to align with the shifting seasons: as Summer turns to Autumn I am still ‘outside’ and beginning to turn in.

Beans in progress and our shiny new roof.

This year (while I was away thankfully) it snowed in June so it was hardly a ‘typical’ set of conditions for our outdoor doings, on garden and house. Poor Orri was left with a roofless house in the snow after he had removed the old corrugated iron to replace it, thinking June was safe. We pressed ahead with our vegetable growing experiments nonetheless to see what would happen. The green sea of indoor propagated seedlings become a rather less numerous variety of earth dwelling beings: from straggly otherworldly spinach (the likes of which I have never seen) to butternut squash plants that flowered happily indoors then resented leaving the warmth of our bathroom windowsill, to beans that nearly died but had a second try at life and now wonder whether it is worth climbing the pole any further now that they can feel Autumn in the wind. But there is still hope for potatoes, carrots and brocolli. We were not scientific in our approach, and knew that much of it would die, but adopted the characteristically Icelandic approach of “bara prófa” (just try).

The vegetable adventures have been joined by feathered ones: we have acquired four ‘rescue hens’. They were unwanted by a previous owner as  their egg laying was halted by their distress following a dog attack. It has been a wonder to see them grow calmer, day by day, and start to lay. Yesterday I got four eggs which is a miracle from these girls!

Adopting an entwined birch and a pine who were meant to be together, and remain so.

Another corner of our garden has had some trees walk into it, thanks to another twist of fate. Large trees take many years to grow in these climes, and due to a classic Icelandic omission of long term planning, a one time reforestation programme is to become an avalanche guard zone resulting in all the trees needing to be dug up and re-homed. I feel much happier having some shelter against the northwest wind, and the possibility to listen to the sound of wind on leaves.

I have been working as a guide for French- and  English-speaking visitors to this corner of the world. I rather like the Icelandic term for this role, leiðsögumaður, which literally means ‘way-storyteller’. At first I felt that I didn’t know enough ‘facts’ about the region to tell others about it, as life is not lived through facts but through experience. So I talked about my experience and they all seemed to find that much more interesting. Doing this reminded me of how story telling cuts across boundaries. A group of initially stiff retirees would be warmed by tales of my coming here and the love I found, and genuinely wish me well on my adventure as they left the bus, pressing some coins into my hand as if to be part of it and telling me I should write a book.

With the tourists in town almost doubling the population and the locals being in a summer head space, there are a lot more festivities and goings on and opportunities to sell our wares. I had made a new selection of jewellery inspired by Iceland to go alongside my more equatorial curiosities, and Orri had been busy whittling some weird and wonderful sculptures from wood, stone and cement.

And of course, with the many hours of sun to shine on our faces, we have been outside a lot living the summer life. With the head fog of winter cleared firmly away, thoughts and ideas flow like the snow-melt rivers.

I went out for a walk…to a tucked away lighthouse where no road goes, where artists had created an exhibition.

I saw cloud shadowed valleys gouged out by glaciers….

and otherworldly roots that crept off the pages of a fairytale…

and what happens in nature when no humans or sheep live there…

I went out for a walk…along a road that an isolated farmer, tired of being cut off from the world, dug by himself out of the rocky cliffs.

Later, it seems, he left to join the rest of the world anyway…

…but, as if to remain rooted in that place, he left his shoes behind him.

And now, we (and most of the community it seems) are going for a walk to pick bilberries, for this is the season. Our raven has just returned from his summer’s wayfaring. He is dancing on the fence asking why we haven’t left him any food on his rock, and meanwhile trying to pick apart the compost bin with his beak. Autumn has come. Where did your walks bring you to this summer?

I went out for a walk and stayed out til sundown, for going out I found I was really going in.  – John Muir -

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The Things Spring Brings

Living as we do, teetering on the edge of the Arctic Circle, it has struck me in this liminal phase of Winter-Spring how every few days there is a different rhythm to adjust to. It seems only days ago I was wading through the treacle-gloom of January, knowing it would end some day but not being able to imagine what that might look like. Now the low yellow sun wakes me at 6am and at 10pm it’s still not dark. Suddenly the darkness has become something to be cherished, as daylight nibbles at its edges.

Six o’clock in the morning sun, reincarnating the window sill into a shadow puppet theatre.

There are many confusing aspects about ‘Spring’ in Iceland for an English woman. For me Spring has always been a time of buds bursting forth, eggs hatching, the greening. Here, we are a few days away from an unusually late Easter and there is still a thick layer of snow on the ground. It has teased us many times by melting – the last time almost completely – but no sooner do the green shoots dare to emerge from the sodden flattened yellow grasses of last year, it snows again.

And yet as the sun streams in our windows, reflected in manifold journeys by the snow’s sparkling crystals, it feels hot. Some days we have to open the windows! The long hours of daylight have brought with them a buzz of activity and creativity, and most happily, my man back from the sea.

The shore where he came in

A few of the fish he brought with him…our freezer is full to the brimming!

…and some sea snails that came with them.

As friends started talking about allotments and bluebells in England, and apparent rustlings of vegetable growing started here, our thoughts turned to the exciting prospect of having a vegetable garden. This is the first time I’ve had a garden big enough to dream those dreams, and it is all the more delicious a prospect here as the quality of vegetables available in the shop is often terrible.

We actually have a quite enormous (by our standards) bit of land that we can make use of out behind the house. It is not ours: it is earmarked for future house building which, thanks to the recession, will not happen any time soon. In the meantime it is a sort of every man’s land – children play there, our old neighbour mends things there, and hopefully with our growing efforts we can encourage the village to use it as a community garden.

Almost as if my imaginings were allowed to fill the space we can potentially use, my seed planting was perhaps a little overenthusiastic. I am not an experienced gardener, and I didn’t expect almost ALL the seeds to germinate! Now most of our horizontal surfaces are taken up with propagation operations and Orri has even had to build shelves in the window. It feels like we’re starting a small farm! Ironically, the growing experience I do have is from volunteering at farms or small holdings such as The Lammas Project in Wales and The Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Centre in USA, so perhaps I could not visualise a small scale operation! Still, growing anything here is always going to be an experiment, and so the more seedlings we have the better. It is so exciting looking at them each morning to see how they are coming on. I can only imagine how much more significant a meal is when you know you have grown it yourself.

Perhaps a little late in the day, we realised that a compost bin would be a good thing. It is too late to have any compost for this year, but somehow last Autumn when we arrived, the many inches of snow did not make it the first thing to spring to mind! And so we set to making one from reclaimed bits of wood and I decided a Spring painting was in order – if not to reflect my current environs, at least what they shall be soon. And of course the ever present raven had to make an appearance. Icelandic wild flowers and plants featured (left to right are) Hrafnaklukka (literally The Raven’s Clock/ English = Lady Smock), Melasól (Arctic poppy), Geldingahnappur (literally Eunuch’s Button/ English = Sea Pink), Fífill (Dandelion), and Hvönn (Angelica).

The impulse to create has been infectious and I have been busy working on some films, photography and jewellery-making. I am currently putting the final touches to a film to accompany a live gig recording by my dear friend Orla Wren, and our delicious little bundle is intended for release in unique handmade fashion by the talented Dan and Jess of the beautiful FACTURE label. Here’s a sneak peek…

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And some unexpected visitors to our small town were a story that had to be told, so a fellow film maker and I duly took up our cameras. Mohammed and Nael are two Red Crescent volunteers from Palestine, and happen also to have trained as professional clowns. Through their clownery they bring laughter to children in Palestine, who otherwise are lacking in many of the freedoms other children take for granted. In other countries, they are able to use their clown personas to make children laugh and make them aware at least that Palestine does exist, despite being erased from world maps. Travelling around the region with these two was a unique way to see it.  Their generosity of spirit was inspiring and I hope to make a short film that does their story justice.

Orri has also been busy working his magic in wood. These characters all look as if they have so many stories inside them, as indeed the wood does. Orri’s working method is to sometimes have an idea in mind, but to let the wood tell him what the final result will be. I am always amazed at how full of personality his pieces are – often of the peripheral kind.

After a long slow winter, our remote hometown will soon become abuzz with tourists and Icelanders coming home for the summer and we hope to take the opportunity to sell our wares. We shall in the future have an online shop, but until then if you see anything you like here (my photography or Orri’s sculptures), please do get in touch via this blog.

In the meantime, there is a big trip coming up for me that involves equatorial adventure, weddings, births and 90th birthday parties which I shall tell of as it unfolds. And so it is back to the Spring business and a happy Easter and Springtime to all of you!

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