Winter, suspended I

It has been a long time.

Here I sit, once again, looking out at the sea and mountains in our little corner of Iceland just below the Arctic Circle. I look upon them with fresh eyes, having been away awhile and returned. They are so familiar and yet ever-changing, unfathomable, with the light play and fickle weather that tends to exist on the edges of things.

This winter, like birds, we migrated southwards. Perhaps not as far as most birds might go: we went to my home country of England, and this was one of many views out of my floating windows, taken on a particularly glorious February day. I can hardly believe how different that February looks to the ones I’d had to adapt to in northern Iceland. There I spent my two winters suspended in a lethargy-limbo, curled up inside the darkness. It was time to stretch our legs and wings and try a different pattern. In England we ended up suspended, literally – on the Lancaster canal, as we serendipitously found our winter home in the form of a canal boat.

This was a fitting abode for someone who loves to travel and to be at home. Living on it brought us closer to nature, away from the cacophany and concrete and proved a heartwarming nest to ride out the storm of difficult times. We woke to the sound of ducks pecking at the algae stuck to the hull, and in the deepest winter when the canal froze over, to the eerie sound of the ice cracking as it thawed, heard from underneath as we lived suspended in the water!

 

It was a raw kind of life, with all its joys and difficulties. Everything we take for granted in houses (water, gas, wood, diesel) must be put on the boat, and waste taken off. The creation of warmth was an eternal concern. There was a lovely wood burner, but supplies dwindle quickly in the icy weather. I soon realised that cycling to the nearby estuary with a big back pack to collect driftwood wasn’t going to cut it. Fortunately I met a kindly farmer who had an excess of wood, and who also wanted to come to Iceland. And so we swapped a stay in our house for a winter’s supply of firewood! There is nothing more heartwarming than an evening by a crackling wood burner, and we were toasty compared to our house dwelling friends. People thought we were hardcore living on a boat in winter, but in truth we were not. The only hard part was deciding who gets up first to light the wood burner when there was frost on the inside of the skylight! But then, you can have your morning brew suspended on an aqueduct that flows over a river. An exhilarating experience to float on something suspended in mid air, over water!

Space and electricity was also a challenge for two creative people trying to do what they love. Orri managed a few sculptures out behind the engine room, which are going to be exhibited by our friends in Lancaster. I was editing a film I had shot just before leaving Iceland, but the leisure batteries were not powerful enough for me to take the time I needed. I didn’t want to disturb the ducks with a generator hum, so I cycled often to where I could find a plug socket or two. A different way of working, but sadly not one that helps the electricity dependent creative flow. I wished at times that I was a painter, so I could immerse myself fully in the boat life, rather than being dependent on the one thing it couldn’t offer me!

Cold weather also means that the outdoors are less likely to be the extension of your living space that they can be in warmer months, so life must downscale, and chattels be kept tidy – easier said than done!

 

More recently when the sun came out, unhesitatingly (we thought) declaring the True Arrival of Spring, we decided to celebrate our imminent departure northwards again to our Iceland nest, with a floating gathering and a week of cruising before giving up the boat. At the gathering we were blessed with sun which meant our first outdoor cooking adventure of the year. And we enacted a Polish Winter’s End tradition, ‘Drowning Marzanna’, with a twist of our Scottish friend accompanying proceedings on her bagpipes! Marzanna is a winter witch and the end of winter is marked by drowning an effigy in a symbol of death and renewal. We were about a month late to do it, but so was the Spring’s arrival.

On our journey, we went all the way to a village twelve miles down the road, and back again! The difference in the flavour of boat life was incredible. The boat became our reference point, but not where we spent most time. At least not in it. On top of it, beside it, exploring the paths and wooded hollows in its vicinity, cycling into the nearest village to see what local produce was on offer, having friends for dinner and sitting out front as we cruised in the evening sun, a heron our advance party.

 

Our voyage, though short in miles, was filled to brimming with opening buds, new landscapes, animals recently born into this world or not yet hatched, and a different perspective on our home terrain. A canal is the secret energy channel running through the landscape, known only by boat dwellers, dog walkers and those who know the hedgerows.

A slower paced and a freer life abounds there, and help and shared local knowledge is always close at hand. You witness beauty you might miss living a ‘normal’ life: the midnight mist rising off the water on a full moon, a swan using its wings as a sail – being blown along by an aft wind. I remember thinking that had I lived in former times, witnessing these phenomena would not be such a rare treat. It would have been an integral part of my existence and I would have been far more intuitively knowledgeable about the natural world as a result.

 

We returned to town in the most magical way, accompanied by a couple of friends. After dinner on the roof at twilight, there came a time when all at once the moorhens climbed into the trees to sleep. Only they know what time this is: the time when the evening whispered “Now!”. We chugged on as the blue turned to inky black and the stars pierced their light pricks in the sky. Orri drove and we lay on the roof, singing to the night, through tunnels and under tree canopies and clear open skies.

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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 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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In the Light of Darkness

Wading sleepily through the thick grey-blue half-light of Icelandic winter, one can begin to believe that it is here to stay, and has left an irrevocable mark on the psyche. Some claim to be unaffected, while those who are may not have much to say. I am one of the latter and to lose my sense of motivation, to forget what my ideas were, or worse still convince myself I did not have any, was a struggle indeed. But somehow I knew that feeling would come to an end, and there was little to do but wait patiently for that moment. It is like a tree whose sap is frozen, suspended in its potential. Without the feeling of liquid coarsing through its fibres it could believe itself an empty vessel. But it waits solidly, patiently for The Shift.

The dark nights do have their own wonder (though the dark-light days less so!) and lend themselves to curling up with films and books. We have a lovely cinema in town but unfortunately its programme is rather lacking in appeal. And so we decided to make our own at home. A while ago on our wanders last year, we heard rumours that a projector could be rustled up with little more than a cardboard box, a fresnel lens (the plastic sheet lens that your grandma uses to read with) and an upside down television. And true to form our local skips came up with the goods…a colour TV not only in working order, but the perfect size for the lens we bought. Total cost of cinema creation:£3.49 (for fresnel lens)!

A couple of friends and bowls of popcorn later, we were ready for the screening of our first ‘cardboard’ film…the excellent “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” – one of the first (1926) feature length stop motion animations, by Lotte Reiniger. This is both a film I urge you to watch, and a toy I urge you to create…it is so easy, and seeing a film flickering large on your living room wall is so much more of an experience than huddling around a laptop. Here are some easy-to-follow instructions if the thought of it tickles you.

The cardboard box projector…a bit of a flimsy prototype at this stage!

And here it is…the film on the wall!…

The film features silhouette animated characters, in a technique similar to Javanese shadow puppet shows, and the simplicity of the darks and lights was perfectly suited to our lo-fi technology.

And on the subject of shadows…what a delight it is to see your own when you had forgotten that you ‘normally’ had one! One day I woke to sense a different kind of light peering through the crack in the curtains. Upon throwing them open, I spied a tongue of sun licking the shore below us, where our house has sat in the shaded valley waiting patiently for it to extend its generosity.

And since that day the sun has been creeping closer towards our house, both from in front and behind us: arms of light approaching as if in a cautious embrace. Finally it has arrived, and tomorrow it might even come in through the window! And I am full to brimming…with joy, with ideas, with motivation. The sap is thawing and the flow has begun again.

The moon is full too. She has worked tirelessly for several cycles to cast some compensatory light upon us, and yesterday, as if feeling slightly put out by the sun’s dramatic return, rose large and yellow and lit the valley so brightly I had to go a-night walking.

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Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn

“Neyðin kennir naktri konu að spinna”.  So the Icelandic saying goes.

With the bustle of Christmas and the explosions in the sky that illuminated the changing of the year now all but disappeared, my thoughts and energies are turned towards discovering how a non-indigenous settler here goes about sustaining momentum through the winter months.

Þorri is upon us: a midwinter month from late January to late February according to the Old Icelandic Calendar, the name of which is believed to be the personification of frost. Days are extremely short, and have felt so since the Winter Solstice. Even though they are supposed to get longer from that point on, it has not felt like it, for here we are nestled deep within a steep sided valley. For a few weeks now that so cherished uplifting kiss of pink has not even graced the mountain top as it used to at just-after-lunch. Until today. And I tell you it made me gasp!

The darker-lighter

We have had regular snowfall and many days of its bright blanket settling in for a while. This makes a huge transformation to the landscape, as any light that exists – day or night –  is thrown around for all to share. Sometimes the mountains out across the sea seem to emit the light, and sometimes (and I still cannot fathom this ) as the day gets darker it gets brighter. But sometimes there are just incessant snowstorms and winds and the desire to venture even into the garden vanishes!

A Þorrablót

A feast to break the long winter days – Þorrablót – has begun, with gatherings happening over the next couple of weeks in people’s homes, at village halls and hotels. These gatherings involve eating a selection of Icelandic ‘delicacies’ such as sviðasulta (svið = singed boiled sheep’s head, sulta = jam), hangikjöt (smoked lamb) and súrsaðir hrútspungar (pickled ram’s testicles), and music and dancing. We went to a feast this weekend where the Ásatrúarfélag (‘ the company of Norse pagans’) priestess conducted a ceremony, passing a carved cow horn round in a circle from which each guest drank and hailed Þorri and/or whosoever they wished to hail!

Hangikjöt (literally ‘hung meat’) hanging in a smoke house

Back in December, the Winter Solstice was a special occasion also celebrated with members of the Ásatrúarfélag and participating in a ceremony, or blót. As Christmas is considered a time for winding down and turning in, and receiving guests and visiting others, the ceremony reflected on what being being a good host and a good guest really meant, and together with the priestess we chanted passages from the Hávamál. The purpose of the Ásatrúarfélag, though pagan in its inspiration, is to gather those with a belief to live in harmony with nature and the seasons, so that they can acknowledge and celebrate it together.

The duration of Advent saw all houses, buildings, boats and…tractors (!) bedecked with Christmas lights, turning the town- and village-scapes into Las Vegas abstracts. The dead did not miss out on the fun either…all cemeteries became alight with multi-coloured crosses! Christmas lights are serious business here. When we were trying to find a way to plug in the lights that coiled up our front steps, we realised the previous owner of our house had made a hole in her window frame specifically for this purpose, that was plugged for the rest of the year!

A week before Christmas we made a day trip to a small pine forest a few fjords away to gather Christmas trees for the family. Though it seems strange to chop down some of the very few trees in this country, they were planted intentionally close together to shelter each other and need occasional thinning. And so the deal was struck with the farmer and it has become a yearly tradition. It was almost like a pilgrimage and to travel so far for our tree made the occasion all the more special. It marked the start of the Christmas feeling. For Christmas my parents came from Kenya and my brother from England and squeezed into our little house and sat in hotpots in the snow and ate foods and experienced life a way they had never done before and may never do again! Coming to northern Iceland from Kenya must be akin to interplanetary travel and there’s not many that make it here in winter, let alone equatorial beings.

In the run up to New Year’s Eve, our village hall became a firework supermarket – trolleys and all! The proceeds made from fireworks in Iceland go directly to the mountain rescue service, which is a volunteer-led organisation, and so, in charitable spirit Icelanders stock-pile fireworks and set them off with reckless abandon. Some are named after characters from Icelandic sagas. I remember two years ago, in the midst of ‘the crisis’ I saw some repackaged to be called The Bankers – ideal for those wanting to metaphorically vent their frustration at the collapse of the economy.

The New Year’s celebrations involve all towns and villages first having an impossibly large bonfire stacked high with pallets and other burnable fishing community detritus. Ours was the size of a house, and (a popular trick in these parts) made more exciting by having buckets of petrol thrown on it (!). Then the official fireworks were let off, and in our valley they were as delicious to listen to as to see, as each crackle echoed between the  valley walls tenfold.

At midnight the anarchy began. Outside nearly every house and building, people brought their stash of charity-fireworks and lit them simultaneously.  They were in front of you, behind you, above you and either side, careering in all directions! It was a far cry from the roped-off affairs I have become used to in Britain. The ships in the harbour sounded their horns and torch bearers climbed the mountainside to light a figure of 2011.

And as it all fizzed and flickered to darkness again we looked up to see a black mountain silhouetted by a bright green sky. The aurora borealis had come to join in. According to folklore, the Northern Lights are elves dancing in the sky and you will never see them on New Year´s Eve because on that day the elves move house and come down to the ground to do so. They had obviously got settled in to their new house quickly this year as they were dancing again by a quarter past midnight. We bundled into the car and drove off to a disused road near our house that has no light pollution, and of course it was far more spectacular than any number of fireworks could be.

Our village with yonder mountains glowing blue

With celebrations over and visitors departed, this is perhaps the hardest time of year. There is not the feeling of Spring being around the corner, rather a knowledge that this freezing and melting cycle that is winter will continue for several more months and all there is to do is hunker down and get on with it. I have been impressed at how my neighbours in this village seem to use the cycle/walking paths in all weathers and sometimes you catch somebody walking backwards, their backs braced against the strong winds. I try to get out into the daylight hours whenever the weather is a little more still, to stretch my creaking limbs.

The gradual transformation of our house continues slowly – not aided much by the fact that the town’s only paint mixing machine has been broken for a week with no signs of recovery just yet! It is a strange season this Icelandic winter, as of course now is the time to be indoors and getting on with creative projects,  yet I find the dearth of  light cumulatively demotivating. For me, winter has always felt like a time when the year is holding its breath. The first phase is spent nesting and feeding, and sitting on creative ideas to see which feel good. And then begins the waiting. Waiting for a warmer breeze to come and blow the stillness away. Waiting for ideas to push up into the light and germinate. But of course here, you cannot just wait. It cannot be a breath holding exercise. I must learn to ‘be’ differently here for this part of the year that is much longer than the others.

But of course this adaptation cannot, will not, happen overnight. My mind and body seems to have gone into ‘sleep’ mode, where I can function when necessary but I must set myself goals and write them down lest I forget and wake up in a month’s time! My man Orri has gone to sea and so now I find myself the ultimate Icelandic cliché – the fisherman’s woman! To my surprise, for a few days at a time at least, I do not mind his absence, as I am forced to look at who I am here, and what I need to do to become part of this place, and to make it my own. And in this quite extreme environment, it acts like a magnifying glass, and lets me inspect the image so that in it I can find my own rhythm.

And sometimes, I forget about rhythm and I am taken by a moment where I see something I have never seen before because the right ingredients have come together at the right time to make something truly beautiful. Like ice forming suddenly  in a bay where the sea meets a river’s flow, in shapes I never could have dreamed existed. And that feeds me for days.

Need teaches a naked woman to spin yarn. I get it now.

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Upside Down Seasons

Since I last appeared here, which seems now like many moons ago, we have spread our wings and made our way to the Southern Hemisphere. It is a strange thing, to have had our seasons in reverse. I left you with tales of the gathering of sheep in October, and the sprinkling of snow and the feeling that winter had arrived. This sprinkling was followed by a rather more thorough carpeting, more deep than I have experienced since childhood.  I enjoyed the crunch underfoot of my meanderings and the way  forms were rendered in ‘absence’, with just a hint of a house or a wheel and the world became a black and white photograph. There were also some incredible icicles rooted like fangs to cliffs as the still falling spring water bubbled away inside them.

But, as is typical in Iceland, the weather changed from day to day, and we still enjoyed sunshiney visits to farms and shores and abandoned houses. It was a busy time as some of the sheep that had been gathered were slaughtered by the extended family and prepared in various ways, and everyone who had helped with the gathering and the slaughter was rewarded with a share of the meat. Kitchens were full of activity and smoke houses gently billowed their birch smoke. At the same time we were readying our little red van Mariubjalla for her imminent departure to Reykjavik, which involved finding a new set of tyres for a rare diameter size. I had started to worry, as there was no way we could drive south on snowy roads with the tyres that we had – bald as they were through to the wire mesh! But as with the majority of ‘problems’ in Iceland, we were provided for through a passing comment to a family friend.

I had been missing my friends terribly so was ready to leave for a while. We had planned a month long stop over in England specifically to spend some good times visiting people, and also to try and raise some pennies towards our onwards leg by doing some Christmas sales with my Cabinet of Curiosities from all over the world, and some hand made jewellery of mine. This is something I have been doing for many years now, in various forms. I have sold my wares on street corners and beaches, school halls, and church halls. A few years ago I discovered that some people, especially around Christmas time, liked me bringing my treasures to their house and transforming their living rooms into Aladdin’s caves. They could invite their friends and everyone had basketfulls of Interesting and Beautiful Things to peruse over a mince pie or two. I like this better than being out on the street as it feels more like a cosy gathering and I can tell the stories of where I found those objects. I managed to do a couple of these while back and through doing so had some surprise visits from friends.

We were ultimately heading to Kenya, where I spent my teenage years and where my parents and grandmother still live. I have not been home for Christmas in many years, and felt it was time. So Orri and I decided to make a trip of it and see out the worst of winter here. And so in a few blinks of an eye we went from vast shin deep Icelandic snowscapes to the damp and sunny orange leafed Autumn of England, and now we find ourselves sitting in the shade of trees and porches, and glad to be dry, even though it is the ‘rainy season’ here! It is strange to have my year this way round, but then there has been nothing ‘regular’ about this year, and I like it that way.

Tomorrow is an exciting day as we are heading to the north of Kenya to a region called Samburuland where I made a documentary in 2006, called After The Rains Came. I am going to visit all the people I spent the summer with that year, and to take a wedding video I have made to someone who married while I was there. This is no ordinary wedding video, mind you! The wedding lasted three days, involved a slaughter of a bull, highly decorated warriors leaping into the air and a lot of singing and dancing. Fortunately there have been rains up there recently. When I shot the film there had been a long drought, the end of which thankfully coincided with my arrival, but as a result I was given the Samburu name Nashangai, which means ‘The one who came with rain’. So there’s a bit of a pressure to deliver on subsequent visits…fingers crossed! I shall bring tales of that journey on my return.

In the meantime I would just like to say how touched I was by the number of people who have read this blog and loved it. When I was out in the wilds of Iceland wondering how many more hundred kilometers it would be until I found internet access, I sometimes wondered why I was doing this. ‘Was anybody actually reading it?’ I wondered. It turns out you were, and it suddenly felt like I had so much company on the ups and downs of this rolling road and people knew where I was at. Please do feel free to leave comments here to keep the connection going. It is most lovely to hear real comments straight from the horse’s mouth, but the fact is I am Here now… wherever There was, and the land of blog is a rock we can all stand on.

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