Still a small world even when you're on the edge of it.

beachcombing

collecting spiders

primrose (I think)

Akureyri

Warsaw Pact

midnight sun

And just like that, eight days have slipped by in this delerious place of eternal daylight. Just as subtly, we've slipped too into our own new rhythms, and I am reminded again of just how flexible people, especially little people, can be in the face of change. It's encouraging considering the panic I felt when I realized we'd be all sharing the floor of one bedroom for four weeks and we would be putting kiddos to bed in broad daylight, amid the dinner conversations of fifteen other people wafting in through paper-thin walls at the SAME TIME in the SAME ROOM. All of this new to them. And I'd be lying if I said it didn't melt into pandemonium the first couple of days. "Sleep", like "nighttime", was a very fluid concept around here for a stint. But adapt they have and we have really enjoyed listening through those paper-thin walls as two little siblings talk one another to sleep each night.

This weekend the family tagged along on a lake sampling trip to Vikingvatn, the Viking Lake. The drive took us through winding cliffs along the bay of Skjálfandi. We pulled off at an unassuming spot, braced ourselves against the penetrating northern wind and peeked down on a large puffin colony nestled in the cliff walls below us. I was embarassingly giddy. They were just so RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF US! After months of talking and reading about them it was positively thrilling to see the little sad clown faces so close, their comical roly poly little bodies almost crash landing into the waters below. For a moment, I held Kyra close and pointed to the islands on the horizon. "It's 4 degrees in July," I whispered into her ear, "and there is the arctic circle. We are standing on the edge of the world." Fascination succumbed to numbness and the anxiety of having small children perched near the edge of a 300-foot cliff. We reluctantly tore ourselves away and held an impromptu picnic inside the car before heading down the cliffs to the field site (in search of midge larvae - more on that in a future post).

We closed the week last week with a road trip to Akureyri, Iceland's second largest city and the northern regional center, to catch some local music. And by local, I mean Icelandic musicians and some guy from East Lansing, MI playing polish wedding music sung in Icelandic. Varsjárbandalagið ("Warsaw Pact") were a terrific and quirky cast of characters that reinterpreted classic Icelandic folk music with klezmer and Balkan influences. They reminded me a lot of Madison's own Reptile Palace Orchestra and I know Reptile had an Icelandic drummer once upon a time and wouldn't you know it the bands knew each other and we all had friends in common. Small world, indeed.



Until next time,
helen

{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Via Soulemama

The world outside my windows

"What modern technical noises - for that matter, what music, even Bach - can compete with the music of water, river and fjord, constantly in motion? To extend that metaphor, what artwork that you hang on your walls can stand up to the splendor of the light that enters this house? It is good that humans labor to make beauty out of light and sound and language, but we must also practice a certain modesty in the presence of our superior - the world outside those windows." Bill Holm, The Windows of Brimnes

We all tend to see the world around us through windows of some kind, whatever boxes we place around our perception of the world. But literally speaking, I think the best introduction to this adventure of ours is to show you what really lies just outside the windows of this little farmhouse called Kálfaströnd.

The view as I write.

Here is a satellite image of the Kálfaströnd peninsula and on the bottom left you can see the three buildings of the farm. The farmhouse is the little dot nearest to the water.

The view out our bedroom window

The beauty of this place lies not in the what of it (though there is plenty of quaint in this old, moldy little building) but in the where of it. There is just a bigness to the Icelandic landscape and every little wooden window beckons you to take a look, to soak it in.

I find myself forgetting my thoughts, forgetting the sentence I had begun as I watch a lenticular cloud settle over the crater south of the farm.

Today, I poured coffee into the french press and forgot to put the plunger in. I was watching the ewe outside, hobbling under the weight of a tragically damaged and distended uterus, protectively herding her lamb from an oncoming car. Even though she didn't have much life left in her, she was still compelled by her biological imperative: to care for that child. The lamb herself had a disconcerting habit of parking beneath the bedroom windows and coughing loudly. So much going on, can you see why it's easy to forget that coffee?

No neighborhood cafe, but we do have these.

Icelandic cataclysms large and small

The geothermal pool at our guesthouse in Keflavik

Fourth of July with the UW field crew. Beach: normal, mittens and hats: not so much.

The view from the backyard of our farmhouse

I think they're talking about sulphur-reducing bacteria. I wasn't really listening.

A few bandages can't stop the flower-picking

Sulphur-reducing bacteria-eye view of us.

Mama by Milo

It's midnight and I am watching the sun on the horizon, though the light gets most magical around 1 a.m. Tonight after the children finally collapsed at 11 pm, we went birdwatching. Visiting Iceland in the heart of their summer is a bit of a mindgame: the day never ends but summer arrives in, like, two seconds. It's been cold, really cold, and the landscape looks - even for Iceland - rather bleak. And then, poof!, it's sunny, still and 17 degrees celsius.

Our travels with two little ones in tow were relatively easy. The most challenging part was the sketchy airport hotel in Milwaukee. The best part was waking in a guesthouse in Keflavik beneath handmade crocheted blankets to a breakfast of Icelandic smoked salmon, fresh baked bread and homemade skyr. After fortifying ourselves with dark coffee, fish and a family soak in the backyard geothermal pool, we set out for Lake Myvatn, a six-hour drive along Iceland's ring road. Given the time difference (5 hours) we woke late and only set out for our trip mid-afternoon. Which meant when we stopped to view the Golfoss waterfall en route to our field house in Lake Myvatn, it was 11:45 p.m. Messed up.

The trip has already been filled with more cataclysms than I bargained for. This country is a study in big geological events, those I was prepared for. The one I was less prepared for was Kyra's fall into the 4th of July beach bonfire and the terrifying 45-minute drive to the hospital to have her burned hand (and to a much lesser extent, lip) treated. She is fine, healing remarkably well and shockingly not in as much pain as we expected given the 2nd and 3rd degree burns her little hand suffered. The doctor (named Unnstein!) treated her hand, sedated her and released her about an hour later and we got to take her home. We anticipated a long night, especially as the pain relief wore off. Instead she slept all night and woke in a good mood, almost delighted at the big white drumstick her right hand had become overnight. The entire hospital experience here was as surreal as the endless light. The young doctor in Diesel jeans who came to unlock the clinic door and let us in, the sign asking visitors to remove their shoes before entering the hospital and the billing process. As in: none. He told us not to worry about it, it had already been a hard night and we should go home and take care of our daughter.

Today, we watched this little girl of ours not skip a beat. She just ate and played with her left hand and by the end of today, had mastered a pretty functional pincer grip with the exposed tip of her thumb and index finger of the injured hand (see flower-picking above!). Given her cheery disposition, we took her and Milo to some much calmer catalysmic sites: fumaroles and boiling mud pots. Tomorrow, she'll have her bandages changed and then probably master left-handed chopsticks.

Stay tuned...
Helen

it's all one.

"I'm beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gestures is the imagination...Each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION: it lifts the cutains for a brief peek and reveals the possible existence of literally millions of tribes." - David Wojnarowicz

Saw this image last week at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art and it stopped me in my tracks. Some later research also revealed that U2 used the image in an early version of their video for "One". Eerie and beautiful and oddly enough, a song that stopped me in my tracks when I first heard it so many years ago.

a month into it

The photo project is getting fun! The more I look, the more I see. I was worried I'd run out of things to photograph.

weapons of mass creation

To me, gardening has always been an act of revolution. A revolt against the ten hours of desk work, the multinational food giant, soft hands, and city living. With every transplanted seedling, I am master (mistress?) of my domain. When I pop a warm, ripe backyard raspberry into my mouth, I feel like I stick it to the man, just a little bit. There are so many kinds of self-sufficiency of which I know absolutely nothing. But this I know: I can take a seed, stick it in the ground and make food come of it.

My friend Mara, whose beautiful shoe is photographed above, speaks of seeds like they are magic, music, medicine. She keeps a small vial of heirloom seeds on her and will shake them for a sort of musical meditation. Wendell Berry writes poetry about ploughing the earth. Me, I make charts. My charts tell me what seeds I have left (and how much of them) and what seeds I desire. Sometimes I'll add a picture to remind myself why "Chervena Chushka" was a must-have the last time I browsed Seed Savers catalog. I chart out an indoor starts schedule and then an outdoor starts schedule. I may even chart the planting boxes, so I can rotate a few different crops. Oh yes, spreadsheets have a poetry and music of their own - the only kind of poetry and music I can produce with wild abandon.

And yet as controlling as I am at this end of things, there always comes a point where I succumb and let the creation take over. Those rigid spring spreadsheets decompose into June's sprouts, July's entropy and August's gravity. We always, always, lose control. We enter the garden with one part intimidation and three parts glee as we stumble and bump our way around the overgrowth plucking warm tomatoes, twisting off an eggplant, bending into a carrot firmly entrenched in the soil. The dirt and toughened skin is never fully scrubbed off the hands. And you wear it like a badge of honour because it reminds you that you haven't completely lost your tie to the earth.

Sowing the seed,
my hand is one with the earth.

Wanting the seed to grow,
my mind is one with the light.

Hoeing the crop,
my hands are one with the rain.

Having cared for the plants,
my mind is one with the air.

Hungry and trusting,
my mind is one with the earth.

Eating the fruit,
my body is one with the earth.

- Wendell Berry

total: 20 days

Beautiful winter weather so my camera pointed outside a lot. Which is a good thing for February. Plus some crazy texture courtesy of the funky packaging from a box of schwag delivered to the office that week.

five minute break: an experimental film

to the lake


I've always loved the sounds associated with snow. Apparently, we are many who share this fascination.

weekend mandate