We arrived in Reykjavik at 6:00 AM yesterday morning during a spring snow squall that made the road to Akureyri impassable. But our friends Vigdis and Sveinn took us in, fed us Icelandic pancakes, and sent us to bed, for which we were grateful. We're on the road today after a good night in the company of good people and two sweet-tempered cats who curled around us while we slept.
Iceland isn't a foreign country to me anymore, breathtaking because I have never seen her before. Now her snow-covered mountains and spring-brown soil are familiar, even welcoming. I love this place from volcanic bones to glacial crown. She is a young queen among geological elders, still showing off to the world.
I said something to Vigdis about that love that I think is worth exploring. I told her that I admired the landscape, the language, the culture, and the history of Iceland but also tried to be a wise traveler, as the Hávamál recommends. Then I talked about the Pagans who come here to fetishize these things, which I gathered was problematic for the Ásatrúarfélagið when I visited the organization last summer. "I'm not one of them," I told her, and I'm not, but only because I made those mistakes among the Gaels some time ago and know better than to make them again.
It was hard to fall for a landscape, culture, and spirituality that wasn't mine by birth. When Christianity divided my family, I went away hollow from the experience. Hegemonic religion held less than nothing for me, so when I discovered "Celtic," it was like finding food at the end of a bitter winter. I conflated modern Gaelic and Celtic culture with their historical predecessors, with fragments of pre-Christian Celtic religion, with modern Pagan writing, and with my own gnosis (I should add for the Heathen crowd that I'm solidly pro-gnosis, but I'll cover that another time). Underneath it all lay a deep, sweet yearning I came to identify as hiraeth, the longing for a time and a place in the distant past.
That yearning drove me to the University of Toronto, where I earned a Bachelor of Celtic Studies, to Ireland, and ultimately to Cape Breton, the Gàidhealtachd where I now own a home. In that time, those pieces of Celtic I had conflated became distinct again. It was good they did, because then I learned to see and interact with them separately, a necessary prerequisite for avoiding the specter of cultural appropriation. As a result, I've come to embrace Heathenry on better cultural and spiritual footing. The mystic in me wonders if there might have been a greater plan at work in this, but the evidence of that remains to be seen in my deeds. I don't walk with Gods who teach me to no good purpose.
We're climbing into the mountains of Northern Iceland now, and we'll make Akureyri by dusk. The road rises damp and gray ahead of us, and there's a good playlist on the car stereo. We were wise to rest yesterday and travel today; early spring is a mercurial time in this country. I hope that I have grown wiser in the ways I choose to travel the soul road as well. It too can be mercurial, but I wouldn't trade either journey for anything you might offer me.
"A better burden can no woman bear
on the way than her mother wit;
'tis the refuge of the poor, and richer it seems
than wealth in a world untried."
Hávamál, Stanza 10