Colder & Darker

Two months have passed in Iceland. I am just now cracking open my bottle of organic Vitamin D-3 to supplement the lack of sunlight. We are losing over six minutes of sunlight every day. The sun rises around 9.30 or 10.00 and sets between 17.30 and 18.30. It’s great on the weekends because I get to watch the sunset every morning no matter how late I sleep and I get to readily use the morning and evening suns to help heal my eyes. I am diving deep into a self-healing of my own eyesight, which has been unperfected over years of improper use: staring at the television, spending hours on the computer, squinting my eyes at small cell phone screens, straining to see things without my glasses. I have been reading Ben’s book entitled, Mind and Vision: a handbook for the cure of imperfect eyesight without glasses by Dr. R. S. Agarwal and inspired by Dr. W.H. Bates, which is opening my eyes (literally) to a new world. I am re-learning how to blink properly, how to relax my eyes, how to use the sun to treat them, and how to read correctly.

I am still getting used to waiting for the water to get cold when you turn on a faucet. Back home the water coming out is cold and I had to wait for the gas-powered water heater to warm it up. Here the closest source is boiling water underground so I must place my finger under the steam to test if the cold water being piped in from a nearby farm has reached the faucet yet. Below is a picture of the pipe that pumps water up from underneath Solheimar. After the hot water circulates and is used throughout the village it is sent down this natural spring and steam rises all the way down.

Snow has finally made an appearance. The previously bare brown surrounding mountains are now snowcapped and seem much closer and more present in Solheimar. In fact, it is snowing right now, harder than it ever has yet. This is the first time it has stuck to the ground as well. I finally feel like I’m in the arctic. Every Icelander we’ve spoken to has commented on how warm it has been lately though. They say that at this time of year it is usually 5 or 10 degrees C cooler. The CELL group is getting a sobering look at climate change in action.

I have been pretty busy lately with mid term assignments and assessments. I have also been asked to take on the special task of photographing every Solheimar worker and resident for the updated phonebook. This has been an amazing opportunity to literally meet every single person here and practice my Icelandic conversation with him or her. This week marks the beginning of my anthropological journey here. I will begin conducting interviews with people here for the sake of my ethnographical research. Solheimar is the first eco-village and intentional community I have been in and I hope to gather some useable information here to compare others to that I may visit in the future. To get an idea of how many other eco-villages there are, click on the “Eco-Villages” tab at the top of the page.

Many more links have been added to the "Enlightening Links" page if you have not yet checked that out. I have been exposed to so much new content here that I have a deep desire to share with others, so make your way on over there and take some time to challenge your thinking and wake up to some urgent issues we all face.