Aurora hits 8 out of 10

Sometimes wonder if my timing is a function of what I wish to do or what the Universe needs to get done. The Sun has been quiet for a few years, and today a huge piece of it exploded, and I've got my ticket to the end of the world to go film it. Aurora borealis, here I come. Eva & Ingo & Maya & Hedinn pls poke yr head out next couple of nights to see if you see any white in the colors! Solar storm will be happening for weeks! The Borealis has been rating 1-3 on a scale up to 10 for the past two years; but an 11-year cycle of activity is now at its beginning, when the sunspots are most numerous and the possibility of Northern Lights most keen. Today, it hits 8 for the first time since 2002. I don't know it yet, but clouds will hamper visibility in Iceland and Norway for a few more days. Still, this activity is a harbinger of what is to come!



Is Heartbreak Curable?

Is heartbreak ever curable? Would anyone with heartbreak want to cure it? If life means something because death brings oblivion, is it possible that love needs the pain of a broken heart to mean something? What can love mean, if love does not become heartbreak? Like the massive star, pulsing out heat and then contracting in cold, doesn’t love wish to end in a bang instead of a whimper? If love could choose its conditions, wouldn’t the first demand be heartbreak? Don’t I go beneath the sky looking for something that cannot be photographed or videotaped so I can remind myself that I search equally fruitlessly for love, that magical bind that only works when a lover is willing to let it go?

Don’t I hope for heartbreak? Isn’t heartbreak the continuous act of my life, rather than just its occasional punctuation and final full stop? Don’t I long for love, still, beneath the stars?

The sky in all its possibility, painted in all those forevers which stretch like meadows toward sunrise, contains love, I am sure. I will go looking for it. What else could I do?



weather not looking well . . .

Eva, whose hotel on the lip of the Arctic Circle we will use to chase the Borealis, writes the following: "Dear Sean.... now we really need your luck because it isn´t looking too well with the weather as far as we see now on the forecast... we´re going to Reykjavík in hope of getting home again on the 21st.... so let us hear from you...." The road to her place is one of the loveliest drives on the planet, but is completely unmaintained from January 1st until April. We have to get in, get up and get back before the Arctic snows come. Sobering reality, right off the bat!

New Year with the Lights above

We were under the borealis screaming it up in the courtyard of the Hotel Djupavik, when all of a sudden firebombs broke out and made us run for cover with our jackets on fire! But we're all alive, eating pistachios and drinking Grand Marnier and wishing you were here!



all risk is calculated

From Sean's Facebook page: "Elsewhere, on Sandra's FB page, there is a photo of me swirled in a wave. I shouted at her and Hedinn and Hermann and Mark that I wanted just one shot, and then this wave growled in and scared the beejesus out of me; I got up on a rock and waited for whatever part of it was heading back out and calculated what I needed to do if another was on its heels. Because in this piece of ocean, there is no rescue of any kind, and I had been formally warned before wandering out this far. This is the fifth time in my life that a wave left me thinking I was about to lose my cameras if not worse, and I keep supposing there is a lesson to be learned here, but how do you switch off your nature? I am a dog chasing cars and biting tires, and the waves come into my adventures like strange joyriders breezing through time; how can I stop chasing that part of myself which I hope secretly I can never catch?"

from Sandra Bishop: "Hedinn tells us, if you step out there and a wave gets you, you're dead. There's no rescue. We're hundreds of miles from coast guard cutters or helicopters and it is below freezing. So what does Sean do? He goes out to the edge, and of course a wave snarls in and he gets on top of this rock before getting swept away. We tell him off, but he comes in saying he had a plan if the wave got any bigger, and besides, he got the photo."

Sandra says: "The wild part about this picture is that we are 15 feet up in the air. The foreground of this picture is a hot pot which has cooled down from the Ocean. So, that water around Sean is veeery... deep. I was freaking out to say the least, screaming at him at the top of my lungs."

To which Sean replies: "I knew if the next wave was bigger I could wedge myself into the crevasse of the rock bottom and hold my breath for 60 seconds until the wave went back out. I was sure about that. 20 minutes after this shot, the waves were regularly sweeping over the rock as the tide came up! Next time, I'll check the local tides better. The moon is with me right now. I won't get hurt this way. Not yet!"

Lavender says farewell

In the warehouse where I am working on my art projects, I sometimes worry about the air. Alana is over talking about a movie project, and there is warning in her tone when she asks if the air is okay for me to be breathing every day. And when I ask Andy about it, he tells me he’s been in worse places most of his working life, but that same tone is in his voice, too: warning. The air in Manhattan is so bad that the worst rates of asthma in children can be found in New York. The air in Jersey is so ridiculous that people in New York see fine sunsets as the particulates of manufacture block day’s last lights: pollution on I-95 is a gauze on industry’s scabs, and the light that seeps through makes for the best sundowns New Yorkers have ever seen. I worry about what I breathe. But I tell Andy and Alana that I will be in clean air soon enough, and we remind ourselves of the lungs’ tremendous capacity to repair. My 78-year-old mother on her deathbed was asked to stop smoking; she stopped, astonishing her doctors and family when her dementia left for two months, but then started smoking again and was dead shortly after.

The air that I breathe worries me.

So I am here, around 66 degrees north, some kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. Maya works in the aluminum smelter in Reykjavik, but that is hours away, and the winds do not blow her ashes north. I am in the crispest air. The kind of stuff they thought about at Westinghouse when they pushed refrigerators into every suburb. I breathe Djupavik's turbo-oxygenated airs, and feel like lettuce, green and watery, my very own fibre, can be eaten with anything.

The sunset falls out of the air, and its blast is a farewell in lavender and iron. We stop for two hours on a windless evening, and become bits of graffiti in our own kaleidoscope. We are not looking at the sunset; we are the sundown itself, smidgens of color and exclamation at the very end of the planet’s revolution, one more harmless day spinning into the next, stitching time into patterns we try to sell as schedules instead of acknowledging the days as fun rides in the fairground that is every person’s personal life. To be sure, some of the grounds are wrecked or poisoned and lives are snuffed before they start, or go bad slowly, but most of us here in FB-land can quit the schedule anytime we want and walk into our own carnival of being and take a ride into the sunset.

Is it really yesterday out west? And when light comes back and chases away the cold, will tomorrow really already be happening?

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the icy path of self

You wander the terrain looking for construction. The building of your ideas, at least. I am here to see certain things, you tell yourself, and then you enumerate what you came for; the sum of all your lists is constructive, usually. Apples and mortgages, returned phone calls and love letters, profits and promises, promises, promises. But then you step over an abstraction. Literally. Beneath your feet, the very foundation of your support: imagination, twisted beyond recognition. What am I seeing? And why is what I am seeing not the same as what I am searching for? Those lucky people who unravel their imaginings as real life, skins they get to inhabit, shed and grow, they are always seeing worlds of possibility in their steps between responsibilities. It bothers me that I do not see this way enough; I make a note to self, telling myself to see more abstraction and less construct, but just this message is the sort of quicksand I am writing about now, in this weird cyclic way. I suppose this picture is about a path in the ice beneath my feet that allows me to walk away from myself, and I am showing it to you here as evidence that sometimes when I am lucky my imagination is working sharply enough to prod me into thinking this could be me, walking away from myself, from one edge of the frame to the other, without being stopped by any notion of a box. This path goes forever. It twists and straightens and falls and rises into a billion trillion possibilities. I could stand up right now, and endlessly change direction.

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Radiant, without & within

The light is so fantastic. The ice hides a million prisms in the rivers and tides of the country. For three hours after dinner I slog into streams and across hillsides to find ice forming so I can dance lights through the frozen architecture, red and blue, and whatever it is they call white, bounced off silver or grey light discs. I need four hands for all the flashlights; one of them is mounted on my head, one is in my mouth (luckily the wind slumbers), and during the 15 seconds of exposure I perform a small routine perched on rocks slippery with fresh glaze; one of my shoes is soaked from stepping into the arctic waters earlier today, and I can vouch that wool does indeed keep you warm when wet; the squish in every step is ominous, though, and now I sit with hot chocolate and tingling toes, radiant from without and within. These bulbs of ice are formed by flecks of spray. They are beautiful jewelry; nature's liquid adornments. Sometimes I think they are better to shoot than the aurora; but the borealis was out on New Year's Eve, flexing its energies, but for twenty minutes only and then a mushy turquoise melt. The glimpse is tantalizing, and the ice reflects our ambitions in its shards of light; there seems to be every color, all hues, except for the northern light of phosphorescent green. 

Danger coming; leaving time

The dog starts to walk away, leaving me in the river, shooting. I call to her and ask her why she's leaving; I call her back and she is willing but wary and walks away. At the moment she turns her back on me, bits of sleet hit my face. Danger comes, the road when it closes can stay blocked for weeks, and it will close tonight. We go South. Reluctantly.



Whited Out

Pure white out! absolutely thrilling. We knew we wouldn't die, but we weren't too sure about getting scared out of our skins! But the 4-runner was like a horse in a meadow, frolicking over hill and rabbit holes, mindless of ice or snow or the blindness in a storm! What a truck. The video below was shot by Mark Hooker, using the GoPro, and picks up where Mr. Blue clambers back into the truck and informs his companions about the conditions ahead!

Homeward, to edit

Loaded with spice and jewels, my ship begins its drift homeward. But the magnetics of being have bent my compass, too, so the word "home" seems suddenly to mean more about thought than place. But maybe I will recognize myself, soon?