Snæfellsbaer, Iceland. 11/1/2016

Góðan daginn

Good frost on the fields this morning, might finally be time to bring the sheep in. The puddles all iced over during the night and our breath is hanging in the air in the early morning sunrise of 9am in November here.

Breakfast:

Rye bread, wheat bread, tomato jam, rhubarb jam, halibut marinated with horseradish and onion, smoked tuna pate, cold cod with sweet mustard and fennels seeds, fresh cheese with dill, crumbly fresh cheese, hardboiled egg, and cod caviar paste in a tube. And butter.  All handmade, except the tube.

Went running after dark last night through fields by the ocean full of grassy little starlit hillocks where little people must be living.  Back to the guesthouse and ate the best fish soup of my life, everything swimming in some magical caramelized butter broth.  Had a midnight skyrr snack, pulled in from the ‘refrigerator’ bag hanging out the window where I stored lunch for tomorrow.  Woke up 1:30am to find a grey-green cloudy ribbon stretched across a massive break in the clouds.  Hurried outside with some mix of warm things thrown on backwards and stared up at the sky.  The northern lights rippled so slowly that it felt like they weren’t moving at all but that my eyes were getting tired and just bending everything a little.  I kept rubbing my eyes and staring up harder, but that extra focus just made my eyes water faster.  I couldn’t really see the greenness or the movement until I relaxed enough to calm my eyes. Traveller-friends with good cameras were taking those iconic ripply electric green across the sky pictures, the nighttime slow capture receiving enough northern light photons to show a brightness my eyes couldn’t quite see.  It was science mixed with magic to stand bathed in that confusing-looking ripple and see that same ripple shine bright and clear on someone’s screen, we were immersed in electric green clear as day but could only see a light ghost of the light, like an invisible presence that you were absolutely certain exists.  Perfect. Perfect for the very start of Dia de los Muertos, for the winding down of Samhain, for being some number of hours after my father had surgery so dangerous that I truly did not know if he was alive or dead, for being drifting through the veil between emotions about it, not fully married to any one state or even sure which one I was in.  That night in my half-awake awe, bathed in burning stardust in the shadow of the magical Snaefellsjokull glacier (said to be one of the seven chakras of the world by someone who has an idea of what that means), standing there I took a deep breath and calmed my light shivering, calmed my breathing, calmed my movement until it was quiet and calmed my shoulders and my spine and my face and ear muscles and at last my eyes, calmed my eyes and let them fall open wide, to take in as much as I could of all that I could not see.

November 1st, 2016
Snaefellsbaer, Iceland (Langaholt) 
(Thanks Extreme Iceland! Thanks Þröstur!)