Park

Here's where the washing was done up until the late 1920's when the Reykjavik finally piped steaming hot ground water into the city center. Women lugged their dirty loads the 3 kilometer distance from downtown to Laugardalur, Hot Springs Valley, walking Laugarvegur, or Hot Springs Road. Going out there and reading the info plaques about what laundering was like and how it was all done less than a hundred years ago helps to put things into perspective . We've come a long way...(Here's a good link if you want to read more about Iceland's more innocent version of dirty laundry)

When we pulled up to the entrance to the Laugardalur botanical gardens this past weekend, just by the little zoo and skating rink, I saw some skinny young badass hanging about at the edge of the parking lot looking all jittery and expectant in his cool sunglasses and swanky sneakers. Two cars pulled up for whatever he was peddling in the time it took me to park and guess his game. By the time the third car was pulling away, the kids had run ahead of me into the gardens and the skittery, embarrassed-looking dealer knew that he'd been made by a 'suburban' mom. So just to bug him I called out in English Dude, you are So obvious and smirked. I know, he replied as he sheepishly jogged away, I know.

Times change.

Play

Play, originally uploaded by blue eyes.

Our beautiful Eva Guðrún Gunnbjörnsdóttir presented her graduation production for the Theatre: Theory and Practice department at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts on Saturday.

The play, Pósteria, was written, designed and directed by Eva, who also acted the role of a sweetly ignorant, hopeful, frustrated, underpaid and disturbingly gullible post office worker (seen here at the beginning/end of the play reading a Cosmo quiz for her coworkers.) It was a painfully truthful, quirky and very funny look at the modern day feminist dilemma, full of awkward and loaded silences interspersed with roars of energized rebellion against the roles women adapt to and, often all too willingly, adopt. Cyclical, contained, explosive, sentimental, ironic and shyly childish, the play is like growing up, coming of age, becoming an adult in a world we don't quite understand, even if any number of subtle (and not so subtle) clues are left here and there to form and guide us. It asks What if I don't get it? What if I don't want to take part? How does this secret happiness thing work? What do you want me to do!? and leaves us with enough thoughtful detail to help us form our own, very personal answers.

Congratulations, Eva. Wonderful stuff!

Blooms

Springtime in Reykjavik, with pretty blooms and hints of blue skies, is finally here after our long winter of discontent.

New life is pulsing, quickening, in the warming earth and in our hearts. Elections have brought hope to many that our little island nation will survive our recent disgrace and grow again, if ever so humbly. We can't escape our pasts but are forced instead to review missteps, misdeeds, selfish living and a collective disconnect from the land we live on. But Nature, in her wisdom, always grants a new spring, a new chance to plant and nurture, sow and reap. The lessons never go away. They are revisited on us until we get them right, until we learn to cherish, selflessly, all that truly matters in our lives. What we run from comes back to us in ways we never imagined, offering new chances to bloom, and to grow.

Tower

You've all read this Vanity Fair article about Iceland's crash, yes? Here's the tower Michael Lewis refers to. It's glorious, shiny and very very empty...

By the way, Mr. Lewis nails us in many ways, but yes, we do have more than ten or twenty names in circulation here, and no, not too many SUVs have been blown up and sorry, but even the women here can be stubborn and bumbling and inexcusably, unapologetically aggressive when in public.

It's a space thing: Dr. Seuss' Zax anyone? (and the Zax's even agreed to disagree, and not barge into each other sans eye contact, a disturbing local phenomenon for those from more cultured cultures.)

Atlantis

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," as Keats put it and to be boldly truthful, the resort casino down the beach from the ashram was a daily draw. Great pools and aquariums abounding with local sea life, the overly-manicured landscaping and the immense hotel structures towering over the gentle Paradise Island beaches testified to the human will to tame nature and erect monuments to the gods of engineering and ingenuity.

It was very worthwhile to saunter over for immersion in American family-vacation reality, a big reminder that while daily silence, yoga and meditation are a way of life, humanity in all it's baseness and glory doesn't disappear in the meantime, and that we're all in this life thing together. In other words, those little trips (along with forays into urban, decaying Nassau) proved that Oneness, Service and Compassion are always the order of the day.

All that, and a daily double latte to boot.

Way

Paths wind through the ashram foliage, yours to choose.

Here you are not an accumulation of all you've been, but an unfolding of pure potential at every moment.
 

Doves flow through this compact jungle, cooing the name of Sumer's goddess, Hu.
 

If you step softly you may even hear the soft rustle of a swami's orange robes on a path nearby, or the gentle chanting of students in their morning meditations.



Here you stretch your heart to the sun, on a beach, by the trees...
 

...and meet like-minded souls over shared meals.
 

And, of course, there's always the sea...
 

Paradise

Paradise, originally uploaded by blue eyes.

The dock at another little island in the Atlantic, called Paradise.

Keflavik to New York to Miami to Nassau and onto a small boat and suddenly you're there, at the ashram for a week of sun, kirtan, asanas and silence. Your mind stills, and all the pains of yesterday are washed away in the warm and salty sea.