just back from Helga’s funeral service at the Seltjarnarnes Church and the reception at Hotel Saga after wards. sad to see the ones who grew up with that old way of living pass away, that long-ago generation. Helga was born in a dirt-floored sod hut in Svarfaðardalur near Dalvík on Eyjafjörður just shy of one hundred years ago. she was the matriarch to four generations of descendants who follow her on the pathway.
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while I will always be an outsider in this close-knit community deep in the North Atlantic, I will always be bound to the place through the people of this family. bound in the living and the dying, the movements, the step-wise step-fool wanderings along the rugged sphere’s surface, floating in a suffused crystal darkness. where replication and desertion become forces driving Light and spare living. messages arrive from all corners of life. direct in the face, through this and that face rarely seen, age-lines and sagging skin characterizing it all. eyes peering out from under graying crop. young ones dancing around, some so young that the dance has not yet begun in the newness of be-ing. but where eyes wide open take it all in to map pathways across pure soul. they take it all in. and the living move on, the ones who have left are there in memory as the ones who formed us.