Let A Little Air In

There are a lot of things that I admire and respect about backpacking and hosteling communities, and a lot of things with which I could really get on board. One of those things is the book exchange.

At Schuler Books in Okemos, Michigan, USA I picked up a murder mystery from the used section. It was painfully clever and feverishly well written but I did not like it because it did not allow me to escape at all from my deepest pains and prayers. Nevertheless, I finished it and left it at a hostel in Hoi An, Vietnam.

Weeks later with my new friends that I met in Luang Prabang, Laos, I went to a small bookshop and bought a collection of essays by Robert Fulghum. You know, the guy who wrote All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. 

I am now on the island of Phuket in Thailand and I've finished that, and collected a new novel from my hostel here. I imagine I'll leave that somewhere in Cambodia, where I travel tomorrow, or possibly Malaysia if I dilly dally too much.

While Fulghum's essays sometimes exude what can be described in 2018 as the oversimplified opinions and adventures of a privileged white man, they were far ahead of their time for the 1989 publishing date. And I think he really is as genuine as anybody ever could be. I liked the essays, and they resonate with anybody who feels the muchness of their human spirit. 

On October 7th I was in northern Vietnam and I was a mess. I was in pain and didn't know how to deal with it, and I was afraid that I had lost some of the most important love in my life. On November 7th I was on a bus from Phuket Town to the place I'm sitting now, and I was also a mess. I was insecure and didn't know how to deal with it, and behaved so poorly and irrationally that I probably should have lost some of the most important love in my life.

But I didn't. Instead, I was given more love.

So after finishing up Fulghum's essays a few minutes ago, I am understandably emotional. In one of the final pieces, Fulghum tells the story of Hans Ludwig Babblinger from Ulm, a prosthetics craftsman who managed to build a makeshift hang glider and soar from the foothills of the Alps, where there are ample up-currents. 

But when the King came to Ulm and Hans was asked to demonstrate his flying skills, he unintentionally chose a location where there were heavy down-currents and ended up crashing into the river instead of flying. Of course, the church used his mistake as an opportunity to shame the sin of human pride, and Hans shut himself in and eventually died with a broken heart.

People can do that, you know. Die of shame. Because you can die of shame long before you ever physically die.

Except centuries later when Fulghum was riding on a hang glider himself, he thought of Hans and wished he could tell him that he had been rightful in his pursuit of flying. "Look," Fulghum wished he could say, "Look and be not ashamed. Man was meant to fly."

For me, the story is about shame and how it's a big liar that only knows part of the truth. As far as I can tell, none of us really know what to do with shame after we've exhausted ourselves talking and praying and doing and achieving and it still holds on. It's that rock in your chest that shows up when a dog doesn't trust you, or a child (who has never seen a white lady before) looks at your face with dread and cries. That feeling that says, wow, there must be something really wrong with me that only the purest creatures on this Earth can see.

I am feeling well, now. Biochemically, it's because whatever hormones have run their course for this go-around. Spiritually, it's because I've been shown the tremendous depth of how much I am loved.

And that love is deeper than my shame, which persists but so does the love. The shame leaves me exposed but the love wraps me in a blanket. The shame is suffocating, but the love lets a little air in.

So I hope that the book I left today finds its way into the hands of somebody who is tired and can find rest while reading it. Oh -- and I did find a dog who trusted me. Turns out, there are far more friendly dogs than not.

This floppy goof is called Lucky, and he's the best.

Killer Pain

"Oh God, 2018 is not my year," she thinks to herself; herself being some special kind of asshole who had recently finished a M.Sc. abroad and has visited four continents over the past ten months.

Seriously, what a tool.

Solo travel is not making me bananas, but it may be heightening the bananas that I already have growing in my endless grove. Simultaneously, I have met some lovely fast friends and have also felt lost in my own head. And it's really hard to find my way back.

There's almost no way that this is real life, but it is and it is being lived. Here in Laos, I have the very real ability to earn enough money in a few hours to do literally anything I want for an entire week. It's totally rad but also makes me feel like a total joke. I can run parallel to my Lao neighbors but never with them. I'm not sure that I want to, anyway, which also makes me feel like such a piece. I've often been critical of economic divides, but now I am one.

But I also ran into a burning building with my Lao neighbors to try and save it, so I guess I'm not all sugar and entitlement. I am also ash and ember.

Everybody already knows that I don't do well with transition and unknown, so I don't need to talk about that. Instead, I want to talk about superlatives and hyperbole and pain. 

Existing online is different than existing in real life, but I try to bridge the chasm as best as I can. I don't think I would like being a social media promoter because then I'd have to add another seventeen layers of bullshit to an already bullshit-looking existence. Not only would I have to have way fewer curves (or at least have to pretend to love my curves) but I'd have to tell everyone that "I did this and so can you."

I mean, no you can't. Most of you can't. You can't because your priorities are not and have not been my priorities, and most of you fools don't know as much calculus as I do. Most of you don't have my abilities, my connections, or my freedom. 

Part of me just shook her fist at the air, lamenting "but at what cost?!?" 

She's dramatic, but she's also right. A life like this, just like any life like anything, comes at a tremendous cost. And right now in the quiet, in the midst of a schedule that isn't really a schedule, the pain is coming through. Loud and clear and oh look -- another back spasm.

My body is holding pain in my joints and I don't know whether it's holding trauma or harboring injury. My inclinations point to both. But I'm obsessed with pain right now because my internal dialogue has been using words like "always" and "unbearable" when it comes to thinking about my pain.

But it isn't unbearable. I've borne it. I am bearing it. It just can't be borne in a constant or endless sense, and my brain is quick to assign conditions like "constant" and "endless" to whatever I'm feeling in the moment. It recognizes what is unsustainable but wrongly assumes it will sustain forever, and that gets very overwhelming. 

I am hard working and lucky, and also extremely unlucky. Most people are, I suppose. For example, I spent my 28th birthday trekking in the hills of Northern Vietnam and soaking in a relaxing herbal bath in an oaken barrel and drinking rice wine made by a grandpa of the Red Dao tribe.

But I also spent my 28th birthday realizing that this would be the year that I've been holding trauma for officially half of my life and during the span of that half-life, I continue to hear that it's easier to assume survivors of violence are just lying. Safety continues to be a convenience issue, and I break under the weight of that. 

I don't want to carry it, but I also do not submit or surrender so I guess I'm stuck this way for now. I understand and realize that this is unsustainable, but ethical suicide is a logistical nightmare and I can't afford it anyway so I suppose I'll have to keep living. I'm too curious to die, anyway, but I am in enough pain.

I am in enough pain to need it to stop. 

Pain grows the more you think about it. It multiplies and transcends dimensions. Mental stress becomes physical phantom sprains. Trauma becomes a curled spine. Broken hearts become broken breaths. 

Pain demands to be felt and needs to be center stage, then the entire show. It turns rest into restlessness. It turns relationships into bargaining chips. It causes me to question whether the love in my life is genuine. It distorts reality and creates permanent exhaustion. It convinces me that this is normal and that I'm the only one who clearly doesn't know how to deal with it. Pain problems become shame problems.

And during this grand adventure, I can't really introduce myself as Becca from the US, killing time until Christmas, in pain for a living and ashamed of myself despite my good bits. Ignoring it isn't dealing with it, but I can't deal with it if I don't know what I need. I have everything that I need, but I clearly don't.

I don't want a new relationship or a new job or another place to live. I just want to stop being in pain.

Laundry Day

I've left it alone since April. Somebody recently asked me if writing professionally has kept me from writing personally, and I said that it had.

It has.

But also, I've been doing some stuff since April. I finished a Masters degree and I hosted my parents and my friends and I wrapped up my life in Iceland and I went on a worry-free, work-free vacation to Norway and I came home to the US for a few weeks and now I'm in Vietnam.

So.

I don't know how to do nothing, but it's kind of what I have to do right now. But before I talk about how I don't know how to do nothing, I'll briefly explain what's happening to me because it's all sorts of legislative.

My residency in Iceland expired on 15 July, and I used 35 of my 90-out-of-180 days of Schengen "tourist" allowance to stay in Iceland. But since Iceland is in the Schengen alliance, it kind of shuts out much of Europe for me for a while. I didn't want to use the rest of the 55 days because I'll probably need a few in December, and Europe can be pretty expensive anyway. 

So, the solution would be to come home. But since the US doesn't have a double taxation agreement with Iceland, I can't. Because if I come home for more than 5 weeks during the year, then the US will claim tax authority over my Icelandic income, on which I have already paid (or will pay) taxes in Iceland. 

I'm happy to pay taxes, especially in Iceland where they go to nice things like my education and health care. However, I don't want to do it twice. 

So, I went to Southeast Asia: arguably one of the least expensive places on this Earth and with moderately consistent WiFi, I can continue my remote jobs and earn on the USD.

It's literally the most responsible thing that I can do, so I'm doing it and I'm doing it as well as I can. It's a working vacation, but it isn't. It isn't, because I have to actually sustainably live here until December when I'll take a flight from probably Kuala Lumpur to continental Europe and then to Iceland to pick up my winter things and then to Toronto and then home for Christmas, somehow.

A proper round-the-world trip, expedited version.

But I've also put off writing because the things that I'm thinking about lately aren't things that I really want to talk about. Mostly, I think, because I haven't solved any of them yet. And I can't, really. And since life is pretty much great, feeling lousy doesn't make sense. I feel whiny and then I feel worse.

It's the middle again, stuck between the Next Right Things. I'm trying my best and have been competing pretty well, but I haven't found a PhD program yet. This means I haven't found a salary yet, and I haven't found healthcare yet and that really frightens me every time I think about it because I've taken so many meds from Iceland that they wouldn't fill the prescription anymore. And when I run out of meds, I'll need to find some more, but it seems like a mountain I can't climb sometimes. 

And my knees have started to give out, and my back, and I'm not even 28 and what if I can't even climb literal mountains anymore? I can't believe how much they hurt, the joints, the vertebrae. I'm glad for the mountains I have climbed so far, but I thought I had more time.

It upsets me to think about this, because I inevitably compare myself to people who are doing, or at least look like they're doing, much better than me. Much easier, it's unfair, it's impossible. And then I realize that I'm in the middle of a beautiful, mountainous place. Sometimes that's comforting, but sometimes it just makes me feel ashamed of myself.

I don't know what to do, so I try to find PhD jobs and work on little projects and catch up on things and pretend to rest. It's laundry day. I brought a bunch of Tide packets with me, and all they've done is explode in low-pressure cargo holds on the way here. The hostels here will do laundry for me, so I guess I just have a bunch of exploded Tide now.

You all know how much I love metaphors.

I Believe in Spades

I was wrong about a lot of things, and I am a root canal of a human being right now. I ran away for six days, not expecting it to fix anything, but expecting a quiet place where I could finish my thesis edits and I was peaceful for a minute. Peaceful despite tiny teenage tyrants and approximately 8,000 new Snapchats saved on my phone. All I do in Reykjavík is cry. Cry, cloud, soak, breathe, survive.

My lovely sister-friend who has been helping me feel loads better lately reminded me yesterday that it would be ideal if I could do more than survive, and I'm bottomlessly thankful that she loves me like that. She does deserve a nod for that. I have, though, been reminding myself not to fall into a thought-pattern that endlessly lauds everybody for "loving me when I'm so hard to love"...blah. 

I'm not hard to love. I am pretty easily loved, lovable. I am, however, not hesitant to call a spade a spade, especially when the spade is destroying me a little and burying me a little and when the spade very much incredibly sucks. 

I met an old man on the road who was sort-of on my level, but way more so. He was raised here; not in Reykjavík, but somewhere on the island. As we were driving between Búðardalur and Hólmavík, he wondered aloud why I wanted to go to Súðavík in the first place but readily agreed with my necessity of getting out of the city.

"Reykjavík is a terrible town," he said; something with which I agreed but don't necessarily believe all the time. Reykjavík is not what's ruining me, but that was a time for solidarity.

At some point, he asked me about my religious background and I told him I had been raised protestant. "Protestant?" he asked, "Why not Catholic?" And that question caused me to stop for a second, wondering to myself why not Catholic; my wonders having nothing to do with Catholicism itself but everything to do with the history of the immigrants who shaped Michigan, and why protestant but not Catholic; where was our Bible Belt, who made it and shaped it and kept it growing? But he mistook my silent thought experiment for a defensiveness, offensiveness, a search for an excuse or explanation for the God to whom I turn my face...and he quickly redacted his question.

"I don't really care either way," he said, backpedaling. "It doesn't matter. I don't believe in anything. I believe in those mountains."

"The mountains are easy to believe in," I said, pointing at them through the windshield. "They're right there."

He chuckled. And by the time he left me to head farther north while I trekked on westward, he had instructed me to find an old, lonely farmer who could "die pretty soon of any sort of circumstance, really" and take over the farm, happily minding my own business in the Westfjords. 

I didn't hate that idea. I still don't. I could stop fighting with immigration. I could find some peace and quiet. I could have a bit of Earth, it could be all mine...after I "accidentally" poison my husband...or, ya know, whatever.

I don't know, shit happens in the Westfjords, man. 

Allt í lagi. Ekkert mál. Þetta reddast. 

My deportation countdown is nineteen days and I don't know how I'm supposed to live, or silently count down the days while not actually believing that it'll happen, believing instead that the papers will somehow finally push through in that time. Crying and packing my clothes without actually putting them into bags, laying in bed all hazy while realizing that my thesis actually did somehow write itself. Some miracle.

Quarantining myself. Watching my energy. Handling it. Handling several jobs, managing time, not starving, approaching some semblance of financial stability, planning a real actual vacation. 

Trying to graduate. 

Knowing that Defense and Deportation all kinda happen in the same week. And something about for every mile of road, I gotta dig two miles of ditch.

At least that's a halfway decent use for a spade. 

Suðurland on Ice: a Road Trip Along the South Coast of Iceland

The South Coast of Iceland is arguably one of the most eye-roll inducing areas of the entire island, so it may seem relatively hypocritical that this is where I chose to go for a weekend away. As a side note, I totally blew my entire budget for what may have been a nice writer's retreat, since this is the month during which I need to finish my thesis. It would have, without a doubt, been cheaper to fly to either Prague or Katowice and then take the train to the Slovak/Polish Tatras, respectively, hole up in a lovely little Airbnb for less than it costs to camp in Iceland, and have a lovely couple of days in the mountains.

But those flights don't leave Iceland when I need them to leave, nor do they arrive when I need them to arrive, so I stayed home...and payed a lot more. With that I chose, consciously chose, to drive the entire southern length of Iceland and camp in freezing temperatures on purpose.

Now, I admit that camping in sub-zero temperatures is an art that I have not yet mastered; it requires a delicate balance between not freezing to death and not asphyxiating to death. But, I am happy to report that despite the wind at the tongue of Skaftafellsjökull, I secured my tent with rocks (because the ground was too frozen for stakes) and slept a good 5-6 hours before getting sick of the fact that I couldn't feel my toes. It's not the fault of my sleeping bag (it's Big Agnes, rated for 15 deg F/-10 deg C) but rather the fault of my poor circulation.

Anyway, the South Coast has kind of a bad reputation for being the "tourist coast." When the tourist boom happened in Iceland (and is currently happening now) the tourists did not have convenient opportunities to evenly distribute themselves around the island so unfortunately, businesses anticipating a tourist boom in the East Fjords, Westfjords, and the North did not necessarily get the slam that the Reykjanes peninsula, the South Coast, and the Golden Circle did. 

So, the South Coast (Suðurland) is where we send everybody because there are, like, a billion waterfalls and it is where the glaciers are most accessible. Because of this, the glacier tours all go down to Suðurland. Most Icelanders and most RVK locals will avoid Suðurland like the plague because we really don't want to deal with a ton of traffic on the Ring Road (okay, there's really no traffic in Iceland. But imagine being stuck on a two-lane highway behind somebody going a hot 50 km/hr with too many curves and too many cars to pass...ugh, not my idea of a pleasant afternoon drive) or people who don't know how to drive in Iceland under certain conditions (the weather can be awful) or visitors who are rendered utterly flabbergasted by the one-way bridges that make accessible the otherwise impassable glacial moraines. 

With that, I had people back in RVK requiring that I check in occasionally just for traffic accident reasons alone (fair) as I'm not driving a lot anymore, and sometimes tourists (and occasionally locals) drive like they're on fire. Luckily, though, I picked this past weekend because the weather was so good and the roads were completely dry so I figured I'd be okay.

I left RVK on Saturday morning and arrived at Skaftafell around 2PM, where I did a quick hike up to Svartifoss. Svartifoss is a beautiful basaltic waterfall; it's interesting because the basaltic columns that form from slow-cooling lava are falling as well as the water. So, you get kind of a fast-moving waterfall and the slow-moving, indistinguishable falling of the basaltic columns. Well, indistinguishable until they succumb to gravity and crumble in chunks at once. 

After that, I went up to the glacial tongue Skaftafellsjökull, and although it was super windy, I was able to walk around on the ice for a little bit because I brought my ice spikes. Up there, I discovered a couple of moulins, a little ice tunnel and a little bit of crevassing; I didn't go very far because although I was not alone, I was by myself and I didn't want to unnecessarily risk my own life. I did wear a climbing harness just in case something happened, and on top of that, I was checking in with Salóme back in RVK who knew my whereabouts and would be able to alert me if weather conditions ended up taking a dramatic turn for the worst. Conditions followed what had originally been forecast, so I enjoyed loads of sunshine for the first time in a while.

After I got off of the ice, I went to set up my tent and, as I said before, secured it with rocks because it was so windy. The campsite at Skaftafell is nice because they know that their worst wind comes from the East (we were getting the Northeast wind) and so they have planted a bunch of small trees and shrubs to help break up the wind a bit. Since the sun went down around 7PM, I didn't have a whole lot to do; there are not any serviced buildings in the area in the wintertime (it's a National Park) so there really wasn't anything to do. So, I did actually write a couple of paragraphs about elevation-dependent sliding laws and stress balance in glacier models, which I thought was pretty appropriate because I was literally sitting at the foot of what I was talking about. That was nice, but after a while I couldn't feel my fingers so I settled in and eventually drifted off.

I woke up around 2AM because my feet got really cold, so I rubbed some heat back into them and fell back asleep. I woke up again around 4AM, listened to a bit of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and then around 5AM I got up, threw everything into the car, and headed out.

Since it was still so early, it wasn't quite dawn. To kill some time, I stopped at two glacier lagoons: Fjallsárlón (literally Mountain River Lagoon) and the famed Jökulsárlón (Glacier River Lagoon.) I managed to experiment a little bit with night-time (well, I guess dawn-time) photography and braved the wind to see if I could take advantage of the moonlit ice. 

I had a couple of hours before my destination would open up, so I went down to Diamond Beach thinking I'd be pretty much the only person there. I was, for a second, and all of a sudden around 7:15 AM, a bunch of people started to show up. An entire tour bus even came, and then I realized that I was bearing witness to the "sunrise crew" for Diamond Beach. So, these were going to be professional photographers, and there I was with my Google Pixel and my adventure camera that I had bought second-hand from somebody on Amazon.

Side note - it's a great camera; it's an old Canon DSLR and I got it because it can take decent low-light photos. I live in Iceland so I need northern lights photos, and this is why I bought it. It has served me well; it did great in Africa and very well this past weekend, but it isn't fancy or even clean. It has been sand-blasted by Iceland and safari-dusted by Uganda, so it really kind of paled in comparison to all of the professional-grade gear that I was watching these visitors unpack. 

All of these people with tripods and telephoto lenses headed down to the shore and I decided to just go ahead and join them, find my own diamond, and photograph that until the Sun came up since I had time to kill.

Diamond Beach is a place where the icebergs that are calved from Breiðamerkurjökull arrive back onto the black-sand beach so when they're washed up, they can often have rounded corners or interesting shapes from tumbling around in the water. They are often made of very clear ice, and if they aren't so clear, then they have pronounced crystallization features or ash intrusion lines through them which is very cool. The black sand offers a bit of a contrast to that clarity. 

I found some smaller, very clear pieces which were nice to photograph as the Sun was rising, as well as some larger, internally broken chunks which refracted the light in interesting ways. As the Sun came up, the light changed and the waves were crashing onto the beach so it ended up being quite a spectacular thing to experience. 

After that, I went ahead and drove to Höfn and made my way down to the beach down there, to a place called Stokksnes. Stokksnes is a place I've been wanting to find for a while. Because of my overreaching suite of hashtags, I assume, Instagram often markets to me other photographers who photograph Iceland. I am not a professional photographer; I just have a decent phone camera as far as phone cameras go, a relatively creative eye, and I live in a place where...the photos just take themselves. Nevertheless, Instagram associates me with Iceland and so loads of professional photographers of Iceland end up in my feed. 

One of them was featuring the place where I went yesterday, and because this person is so well followed, they do not usually geo-tag their posts whereas I do. I have fewer than 1,000 followers so I feel that there is no danger in my geo-tagging locations. But, I understand why they chose to do this; it's because once people see something on Instagram, everybody goes there and it gets ruined. This is kind of what's happening to other parts of Iceland; the argument can be made that social media has had a large presence in the Icelandic tourism boom which is both a good thing and, sometimes, not so great. 

So, this person chooses not to geo-tag their photos; however, I figured out where it was based on looking at a map of Iceland and rationalizing to myself where a place like this would be. And, it turned out to be Stokksnes. 

Stokksnes is about 10 km outside of Höfn and it is a privately owned farm area. It's just...really precious, and I think you should go, and I think it's okay to for me to say that you should go because, again, my following isn't huge. Those of you who are coming to visit me generally go wherever I go anyway, so it's alright. 

I looked this place up just to orient myself with what to expect because a lot of attractions in Iceland are privately-owned; they're not public land. Since they are private, the land owner has the right to decide what to do about that. They can decide to charge for parking, they can decide to charge admission, they can decide that everything is free but that there are certain opening hours...things like this.

So, a whole lot of people were complaining on the internet about how the land owner was this unfriendly person who would chase you down if you didn't pay 800 ISK (~$8) admission, and was super rude, and to me...I took that with a grain of salt, because people will complain about everything while hidden in the trashy corners of the worldwide web. 

By contrast, when I arrived, I found the land owner to be just wonderful. He has it set up now such that there is no need to chase anyone down anymore, because he has the access to the beach gated off and the gate can only be opened with a ticket that has a QR code...so it's actually really brilliant. He is usually around from 9 until 18, and there is a little cafe there where you can go to pay the admission fee and get some snacks. I am not trying to pay $8.50 for a mocha, but you can if you wish! 

On the property, he has access to a little Viking village that was used in a film as well as a hiking trail that goes all the way around the mountain that descends to the beach. You may access all of these things with the admission fee. The mountain descent to the beach was the reason I wanted to see this, because it's absolutely beautiful. 

So, I thought that he was really nice. I went in and ordered a muffin from him, paid my 800ISK for admission and 500ISK for the muffin, and without any prompting from me, he went ahead and explained to me where everything was, where I was at that moment, where I could go to access the Viking village, and where I could drive to get a little bit closer to the beach. He explained that there had been some storms and that it may be hard to access, but he noticed that I had a 4x4 vehicle so I should be able to pass over the sand drifts without a problem. I thought that this was very kind and attentive to me, his guest and customer. 

I think you should go; he's not rude and he's not unfriendly, and I think he's doing the right thing by charging $8 per person. If you own a farm road in Iceland on which visitors are constantly driving, it's going to keep breaking and it's going to require constant upkeep and constant construction. In order to keep your land accessible, you would need to charge admission for something. He even offers facilities, so for Iceland, it's not a bad deal.

I did end up driving down to the beach and snapping a few photos, but it was crazy windy and I got sand-blasted the entire time. I was super glad that I had purchased Sand and Ash Protection (SAAP) insurance for my rental...kinda wish I could have purchased SAAP for my poor raw face. But, SAAP is something that you should always get with your rental vehicle, especially if you're traveling in Suðurland due to the sandy moraines and high winds. My car was sand-blasted on several occasions, and according Blue Car rental agency this morning, everything looked fine to them when I returned it and I wasn't held responsible for anything. The deductible is pretty high for SAAP; the premium is not bad, something like $15/day, but the deductible is $900 through Blue. So, if something had gone terribly wrong, I could be held responsible for $900 worth of damage. My guess is that this $900 deductible has to do with worst-case scenario volcanic activity, though, which there was none; a good thing, too, because if there were, I probably would have died in a glacial flood since my tent in Skaftafell was pretty close to a drainage floodplain of the volcano underneath Öræfajökull.

But, Stokksnes is absolutely gorgeous. It's stunning and it's worth a visit; I'd like to go back and spend some time hiking around the mountain but I wasn't feeling up to it yesterday. My knee is acting older than 27, my body was pretty sore from the previous day, and it was super windy and freezing so it's probably a better trip for another time. 

On the way back to RVK, I stopped back at the glacier lagoons so that I could snap some daylight photos as well. Since it is the end of winter, the lagoons are doing well; they're not completely frozen and there are plenty of icebergs to see that are nice and blue in the sunlight. 

There are a couple of ways to do Suðurland: one is the way we did it last May when we did #fosstour2k17 and visited about a billion waterfalls because the weather was far too horrendous to go up onto the ice. But this weekend, I did a more rustic, more freezing and windy tour of Suðurland because since it was so sunny, everything was clear. This is the clearest I've ever seen the South and it's been breathtaking; I've lived here for 18 months and I have not seen views of Suðurland like this before. I've never seen it so consistently clear and I've never had good visibility of the glaciers all the way down the coast, so this was an absolutely wonderful weekend to do this. Even though I've taken a weekend of writing away from myself, hopefully this was just what I needed to continue cracking away at the thesis this week. 

Bottom line: I very much enjoyed my weekend on ice. And I still haven't been to that famous plane wreck yet...but I had, I think, a much more fantastic adventure.

The Moon Sees Me

I'm down here on Earth, staring at a full Moon. A full Moon that I know will eclipse during the wee hours on the other side of the world...and now I'm kinda wondering if it knows, like if somebody were staring down at me just before I walked straight into an enormous shadow but couldn't tell me, warn me, would I know? Would I want to?

I can't warn the Moon. The Moon has done this a zillion times and is clearly unconcerned with my foresight. And the moon probably doesn't speak English. Or Icelandic. Or whatever languages are in my head or heart or spirit. 

I used to tell myself that healing was slow, sweet, and golden...but guarded by bees, like honey. I'd say that you'd either have to work like mad to make it, or endure the sting to get it.

I was probably right. But now, I'd say that it's probably both of those things. Healing is loads of unrewarding work and tears that make no sense and that feeling like somebody, something stepped on your chest and crushed you, that they reached down your throat to personally pulverize your heart. It feels fuzzy but not like a blanket, instead like a fog.

Like a shadow.

And on the other hand, healing makes no sense if there's nothing to heal. If you've never been stung, you don't need lavender or witch hazel or tweezers.

But it is true that it's slow. Slow both in pace and in displacement, because it's nonlinear as all get out and setbacks feel like failing and hurting and dying, probably, dying before this is over.

Dying before this is over is how everybody gets out, but do me a favor and take that statement without indulging in the temptation of focusing on morbidity. It isn't morbid; it's the truth. We die before this is over because the "over" doesn't look like being restored. 

"Over" is somebody who died of old age, but lived with everything else. Learned how to live with it, learned how to manage it, learned how to love herself in spite of it, learned how to finally let somebody love her completely.

That's "over." 

And the Moon will be just fine.

I don't have any pictures of the Moon, but here's another pretty night thing.