My fourth conversation with Beverly Delidow of Here’s a Quarter takes place after she’s returned from a two-week photographic journey to Iceland and Grimsö.
An intended 24-hr-visit to Iceland for me and my family, upon returning from Seattle/Vancouver in 2016, was cut short to 6 hours during which we managed to visit The Blue Lagoon, because I’d botched the time zone-differences upon booking our flights. Oops…
Beverly, on the other hand, have been to Iceland twice, on trips specifically designed to photograph birds, and as she leans into the vista she uses as a background on Zoom, we agree to being women of wide spaces. This was something I discovered, physically, upon a visit to New York in 2014. After a few days in the city, this city of vertical buildings and lines, I came to Central Park, saw the horizon and felt, literally, my entire body relax.
Upon arriving to the island, before having a chance to actually rest after the travels, Beverly was asked if she wanted to join the rest of the gang to go visit an active volcano. However travel-weary one would be, that definitely is a really hard question to turn down. So she didn’t!
People were generally respectful of the power of the stuff and they're already making plans. It's like, okay, we need to rebuild some roads. And you know, they just take it in stride. This is what our land does. This is what we're doing to respond to it.
Sense of place.
How much of that sense of place, the ability to know where you live and what the appropriate response is, is lost when we move hither and dither, across countries or even borders, shifting habitats, and possibly loosing our grounding to a place, our place?
When you have a history and a sense of place, having lived your entire life there, a place where your family has been rooted for hundreds of years, your response to what happens in that place is likely really different than that of someone who’s lived there a year and a half.
Looking around me, at our modern, globetrotting ex-pat-filled world, I wonder at that. How much of the distancing from what is not manmade can be impacted by this rootlessness?
Now there’s some tankespjärn for you!
Links:
Cows, pigs, wars and witches by Marvin Harris
The Mythic Masculine podcast episode 42 with Maya Luna and episode 43 with Zhenevere Sophia Dao
Michael Pollan The Botany of Desire

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