Losing my Edge / Growing Squidgy
My Westfjords! Your sea-incised landscapes float on the map like prehistoric backbones snared in-between time. I too got caught in-between time, right after we last departed, now nearly two years ago. The previous 10 years, my feet, entranced and brooding, traced your tides while bounding on sea-sprayed boulders. Or crossed barefoot your mountains’ torrents—I liked that best: my feet would bruise and blush before sliding back into a leather shell pocketed by wool. The pain of your cold followed by woollen comfort arrived as some kind of affirmation: my toes were yours to test, and I’d chased the sheep my socks were spun from—an ascetic’s dream.
I love your body: your unsullied breath, flecked with salt and shards of sun, your sound-shedding skin, voices reverberating within your ancient dimples, and, of course, your water-veins, devil-spouts, hail-misery and never-ending whiteouts—I’ve seen you re-imagine water in ways I’d never dreamt, ice impersonating wax on a beach, an icicle simultaneously melting and freezing.
I left you nearly two years ago. You’d become my ‘second home’, so remarked a family friend in the presence of my parents. The parents recoiled, I murmured a muted yes, embarrassed that I should have a home away from home, or a home away from the parental home. For, as much as I’ve tried, no matter how far I’ve spun in circles across Earth’s knotted musculature, and I’ve been far, I’ve found myself always returning to the place I was born on the British Isles, in Woodbridge, Suffolk, where my extended family still live, and where I have a flat .
We all have roots. Some become a tangled mass of lived experience freezing us in place; others, secret traumas that unwittingly determine the growth pattern of the human plant above.
My dear Westfjords, I departed because I had to. I was exhausted. Our three Wayfinding guidebooks and a map, created together, finally finished and telling the story of all our shared bliss and pain and wild white nights. And, yes, in that moment, as the sun finally rolled up the sleeve of your horizon, I left. I finished and left. Something in me had to retreat. And of course, I found my way home, to the flat Suffolk coast, and immediately began pining for you.
While living in a red, circular tent, a summer storm hammering overhead, I began to lose my orientation to anything more than fits of shaking rain. My heart began to run to my head’s discordant drumming; the noise was too much, and my hareeyes soon succumbed to the chase. Blood then drained from my nose for two hours straight, and I got hospitalised. There, I held a conversation with a distant ancestor whose life ended on a train track, imploring he let me be. I jangled through public transport networks, skittered while driving, and so movement of any kind became impossible. In a very real sense, I was trapped within the tangled roots of my kin. And so I had to accept, my home away from home, my dear fjords, that I couldn’t reach you. I was stuck-fast, and was being asked to track and untangle, track and untangle—teasing one painstaking root free from the family knot at a time.
There, I said the word: free. Yes, that’s what I love about you most. Your generous invitations to mingle freely with your body, to wander your nervelines unimpeded—your shorelines, meadowlines, mountainlines, riverlines and sealines—each one imploring the rub or glide of my body across your skin. And with your bilberry bushes as my pillow, my eyes sinking beneath your sea’s surface, I would nuzzle against your rutted skin, and in those moments, feel our love dream freely.
But I shouldn’t romanticise you entirely. Your winter rage is true, your loneliness, too, and how imposing you can be. Never have I felt more unconsoled while attempting to navigate, on foot, your cold, mysterious ways. And the stories from your long-term lovers, those living with you year-round, reveal certain sacrifices must be made. One dare not attempt a dance with you for many winter months, while all wild dreams are only one misstep away from disaster. Your narratives run thick with hardships, tricks and the elements—you are as capricious as you are uncanny, and, contrary to what instagram’s billboard would have prospective suitors believe, horrendously drab for sometimes weeks on end.
But there’s more to this, something I need to reveal: I’ve been carrying a hidden agenda over the past 10 years—I have devoted myself to our tryst as a way of proving myself capable of charting my own course, free from parental (read: fatherly) influence and support.
I would go my own way, thank you.
/
I’ve never quite managed to sever myself from the parental home. My initiation into full adulthood has felt truncated, reflected over the years by a choice to dance itinerantly between the safe, abundant family vessel in Suffolk and far-flung, desolate coastlines, divine healers and their teachings, and, quite often, lovers too.
Rarely have the two worlds mixed.
And yet my wanderings have something of the hero’s journey to it, none more so than my trips to Iceland—a voyage to the edge of our world—testing myself physically while growing creative, healing capacities as I led groups of artists and conservation volunteers on multi-day walking residencies. And like all good hero stories, the chance to return to one’s community carrying gifts, my potential community being my family’s farm in Suffolk, felt somewhat inevitable. But when the moment came, when my love-affair on the edge found its natural completion, resistance to returning took on epic proportions. A battle ensued, Henry vs Henry, paralysing me in place, as I gently greeted an old wound, and reckoned with some childish propensities to both rely on and carry too closely my family’s expectations of me.
You’d find this tussle strange if you knew me. Prescribed roles have never been my thing and everyone watching senses I’m free as a bird. But lovers know differently. The forever wranglings behind closed doors: abject drabness to submit anyone to, let alone those I love. Sorry sweetheart, I needed to initiate. All initiations are into something specific, so shared Martin Shaw during a weekend listening to him on Dartmoor. Yes, mine has been into full adulthood—nurturing full responsibility for myself, also integrating, not knee-jerk rejecting the father archetype, and finally, most importantly, trusting the pathways tugging at the heart.
This has been a masculine initiation into the ways of my heart and thankfully my process has found support from some truly heart-beautiful humans: Karmit Evenzur, Thomas Prattki and Nina Baun. And through the process, I’ve felt myself grow a little squid-gy. Yes, a squid’s soft elastic body provides the perfect analogy for the heart’s qualities, and have you seen them swim, they pulse like a heart to propel forward. And from this place of squidgy-ness, things have begun to change: I offered a, ‘no, thank you’ to my parent’s offer to become a farmer, and have instead continued developing an ecological-arts-divination practice. Bouts of anxiety have taken a back seat, and most enjoyably for my itinerant soul, movement has once again become possible.
In fact, during the time of writing this missive to you, my Westfjords, I have made my way to your shores! Your edge, my edge, called again, and I’ve responded, this time carrying the question: what does it mean to approach the edge with heart? To help me explore this question, I will be tussling with your rock while building dry stone structures on your coast—walls, and steps on a mountainside leading up to Glymur waterfall.
/
I’m sitting in a giant’s car heading to a farmhouse nestled in the gum-like recess of Hvalfjörður, whale fjord, an hour north of Reykjavik. En route, we pass by the relics of an American WWII army base, an old whaling station and an array of plastic pipes steaming with Earth’s hot water. It’s June, it’s raining, or rather squalling, and on arriving I’m handed waterproofs and steel-capped gumboots which make my Icelandic employer, Unnsteinn, laugh as I confirm they’re called Willy boots in English.
I’m introduced to the team: Maria, a lighting technician and painter in her 30’s, who’s looking for a career change; Gretta or Steel Mouse, an old timer who lives up to his nickname by hauling 20-40 kg rocks for hours on end, taking pause only to inhale snuff from a kidney shaped plastic container. Oli is of similar age and disposition, and likes to wear very bright protective workwear. Together with Unnsteinn, we are five, and are tasked with rebuilding and improving a rough, rocky trail up to Iceland’s highest waterfall, Glymur, over a period of two weeks.
Heavy duty drills, a rock-saw, pulley systems, steel bolts, crow bars, hammers, chisels, spades, a wheelbarrow and over fifty 10 kg iron poles need to be carried over an icy river and up the mountain to where we’ll be working. How to approach an edge with heart, with gentleness? This isn’t the way to go about answering that question, I quickly realise. But my heart’s pounding. And I’m proud. I wouldn’t have been able to let it pound a year ago, fearful it was the beginning of another panic attack. So I manage to enjoy the soaking then grimace as I’m asked to retrieve more poles, my fourth trip up and down the mountain that first morning.
The trail climbs up a steep-sided gorge tracing the 200 metre + sheer drop into the canyon below. Nesting within the cliffs are thousands of fulmars, soaring for fun in between foraging the fjord the waterfall feeds into. They’re one of my favourite seabirds, inquisitive, related to the albatross and with a penchant for vomiting on would-be intruders. Over a lunch break huddled among some dripping dwarf birch, Steel Mouse shocks the group with details of his childhood diet: soft embryonic chicks from fulmar eggs well towards hatching.
I gaze to the distance, a fjord, a silver dab on the horizon; the sea cups the land in its mercurial vase. Vessels have emerged as a theme for me during my healing journey. While exploring some shapeshifting pathways supported by a German genie, two divination bowls emerged through a clay medium I was sculpting while blindfolded. One bowl to hold love for others, and one for myself. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction offers a potent reframing of our culture’s roots, our origin story, where technology is a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination. A carrier bag is a collection point, a vessel able to hold our divergent and collective realities. It asks us to hold with awareness all life and all personal truths and narratives. By contrast, the hero’s journey has an edge that appeals to the victor, the warrior, the lone-wolf seeker, but it lacks the intricacy and soft beauty of a woven basket.
Work continues, and by the end of the first week, I’m broken. My hands are swollen and I’ve developed a rapacious appetite that has me devouring pots of skyr and honey while sitting at the day-lit kitchen window in the witching hours. To recover, I ask for an extra day off after the weekend; my request is granted—the whole group is asked to start on Tuesday. I congratulate myself for this little bit of social engineering, for listening and holding space for my body’s needs.
The summer solstice aligns with our second week of our trail work, and graciously the sun finally peeps through. It changes everything for me. I’m a sun worshipper and most of the time utterly confused how I came to call Iceland my second home. As with all of life’s experiences, the paradoxes we live and carry are what allow the creative tension to live in us. No life without death, no relaxation without hard work, no sunny grin without enduring the clouds of darkness—perhaps these tensions are what provide our vessels with their structural shape. My itinerant soul senses this to be true.
During our last day of working the trail, the wind blows hard and cold from the north. The sun stabs and Glymur waterfall responds with a billowing rainbow at its base. The fulmars soar closer, all females, eyeing our work. Then they about-turn to land and feed the males incubating the eggs. At the end of the day, having hauled the tools back over the river, I strip and position myself in torrents of blue crystal water and waggle my tail like a salmon heading upstream.
Later that evening, adrift and wandering the fjord-shore, I put up a colony of terns, dozens of oystercatchers and a bevy of eider ducks. Out in the middle of the fjord an aerial feeding frenzy is underway, perhaps herring brought to the surface by a humpback whale. It provides my conclusion: I love Iceland, and, yes, especially the Westfjords, due to the abundance of life its watery vessel offers. Life on land would not, does not, exist in Iceland without the ocean’s generosity. As I submerge into a hot pool hidden on the beach, I know that just as all our land masses are all held by the ocean, I too may trust that my bodily vessel is held within the deep currents of oceanic dreaming, and my story is there to be woven in its tensile medium.
Ouroboros
the O in ocean
as in life, in death
whales, built with plankton,
tend the gardens
where plankton grow
while in death, they smile
in recognition of the way they travel
—towards the core of the earth
and on the bed of Rán
a ceremony befitting their
angel-fluked frame awaits
crabs, hag and rattail fish
are first to arrive
then the ocean’s oldest gatekeeper
the Greenland sleeper shark
(500 years young)
hustles its way to the heart
the bared skeleton then flowers
for half a century more, with
anemones and bone-eating zombie worms
the ocean said to me
—all is well in the depths;
the whales
still fall