Reykjanes Peninsula, Iceland
What are the questions you are asking yourself? I’m listening to Jane Hirshfield and reading her new book The Asking. In an interview I listened to she said this is her practice. To live with a question. To determine what question you want, or need, to be living with. And today, I think my question has something to do with distance, time, and footprints.
It started with pulling over on the side of the road to Grindavik, just before the road is closed to prevent people from getting close to this eruption of Sundhnúksgígur. So far we can only get this close.
Eruption of Sundhnúksgígur on June 5, 2024 from the road to Grindavik
After three takes at waking up, two on Icelandic time, and the third still on Maine time, we explored the Reykjanes peninsula yesterday. I tried, mostly unsuccessfully to capture videos of the arctic terns in flight along the seacoast in Vogar. The terns dance with each other through the sky, swooping and turning and diving toward the grassy field and back up into the blue above. They appear to be less intimated by us when we’re shooting through the car windows than when we are out and about walking through the fields by the sea where they might be nesting. Later, driving around the end of the peninsula, past the Gardur lighthouse, we saw another field full of arctic terns with one big black one that seemed to hover over a large bus near the farmhouse. I drove slowly towards it so it wouldn’t fly away, making the car a dolly for Jane to be able to film it with one of her many cameras. When we got pretty close I started laughing. “That’s not a bird Jane,” I said, “It’s a kite! It’s tethered to the bus.” It was a big black kite in the shape of a tern (yet they are smaller and white with black markings). It was just the first laugh of the day at ourselves.
A little further up the road was the eider duck protected breeding area, and I said, “why are we seeing only male ducks with their bold black and white plumage, where are the females?” And Jane said, “Stop the car. Is that a rock or a bird?” Turned out it was a female eider that blended in with the grasses and rocks and was sitting on a nest, just on the other side of the fence. When we looked closely, there were several of them. One got spooked by our presence and walked away and we could see into her beautiful nest, lined with down feathers, with five eggs in mottled shades of pale yellow, hints of blue, and the rusty browns of the surrounding grasses and rocks.
Eider duck nest.
female eider duck, blends with the grasses
It makes me think about what we don’t see. Until we look again. Until we look closely and pay attention. And that’s what this trip is about for me, paying attention. Because when I get wrapped up in the everyday busyness of life, and don’t get me wrong, I love to be busy doing things I love, but I get taken up in it and I forget to pay attention. And hopping on Icelandair, a last minute decision to see if I can see the eruption that broke open last week outside Grindvik, was a way of interrupting myself and giving myself a different focal point. I left with no expectations. I knew the roads were closed in and around Grindavik. That this time, unlike in 2021 when the eruption first broke out in Fagradalsfjall and we hiked up and got close, this time there were no hiking trails, no getting close, and the only images I had seen on Instagram came from Icelandic photographers who had access and drones. So I had no expectations of getting great images. Only of living for a week close enough to pay attention in a way that I would not sitting at home in Camden, Maine. So much of my life I “never saw the fish” which is an old story of the time my husband left a giant bluefish on the doorstep to our house, and coming home from work, I stepped right over it and never saw the fish. My mind was elsewhere. Solving problems, wrapped up in work, whatever. And today the question I am asking is not of time, or distance, or footprints, but what am I not seeing? What is here for me to see.