Monday 9 July 2018

In the land of the Gods

It's been (as usual) longer than I intended.

In June, my family and I - my wife, my mother, and my two dearest friends and I, flew to Iceland for a week. Four of the five of us are pagan, and three are heathen or heathen-ish. 



We spent the Summer Solstice in the land of the midnight sun, and saw a legitimate 24 hours of daylight on the Solstice day. 

Being in a land which doesn't see real darkness is a really bizarre head game on your sense of time. At 11:30PM, it is easy to be outside casually walking around, not realizing it is 11:30PM. 

We spent the first two nights in a house literally beside the sea, at the beginnings of the Westfjords. We saw more sheep than people, and saw some of the most wondrous, bizarre, barren but beautiful landscapes I have ever seen. We spent a night nearer to the south of Iceland, with a beautiful endless field for a backyard. We spent our last three nights in the capital, driving around to various places of interest, and parking the car and exploring the downtown areas on foot. From a purely tourist perspective, Iceland is beautiful, the people are wonderful, and the horses are wonderful creatures (coming from someone not overly used to horses.) The air is clean and fresh, our accommodations were all absolutely lovely. 

On the spiritual side...that is a whole other level. 

The spirit of this country is alive like I've never felt before.

For the Solstice, we went to Þhingvellir--it's a national park, the historic seat of the Alþing, and a very powerful place, having been there now. It was wildly windy and rainy for most of our time there, but we - inclusive of my mother - found a flat rock to use as an altar, and placed on it what things we'd thought to bring with us, and did several rounds of a blöt with a bottle of Brennevin. 

A waterfall at Þhingvellir

A very dear and very sacred-seeming encounter with Goose
I of course loved birding in Iceland, and was especially excited by the possibility of seeing Greylag geese "in real life". Goose is my totem, the greylag specifically - while we sometimes get the odd stowaway here in winter with the flocks of Canada geese, the odds of seeing them are rare. We saw them in Iceland almost right away, but never up close and never within photography range.

After our ritual, we continued down the path for a ways, and there they were. A few geese settling in for the night ("night" being relative - it was after 10pm but the only dark was cloud cover.) We watched for a bit and I crept a little closer for photos - and the geese were kind enough to let me in on their little secret - goslings! 

I'd see them again later at a pond in Reykjavik, and closer up, but that night at Þhingvellir there was magic at play. 

It's a pretty surreal feeling now to wear my Mjolnir pendant, knowing it's been in the sea of the Westfjords, and has laid upon a rock as an altar at Þhingvellir. I've been wearing it practically nonstop since I got it as an iniation gift from my wife so many years ago - the silver is starting to show the sort of deep worn tarnish that can't be polished away. And now it's been on this amazing trip with me.

In other news, I lost my grandmother last week to a long battle with Alzheimer's. It was thankfully very quick when the time came - she did not have to linger or suffer too long. As I've been puttering in the garden this past week, I've been thinking of her a lot. 

It's good to be back - maybe sometime soon I'll get back into posting more than every 6 months, perhaps?