5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

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The land of fire and ice. 

After spending most of the first half of the year in Asia, mixing things up a bit feels nice. We flew in the family to Iceland for the summer. It’s always such a treat when landing at the airport. Seeing the lava fields from above - black, desolated, quiet and not a tree or creature in sight - makes it feel like we are landing on the moon. That’s why Iceland will always feel other-worldly, and that’s why we are here. It’s the closest place on Earth to be space travellers! (With kids and some imagination, that’s not too impossible to see.)

The kids are here to learn about geology. No geology lesson is real until you saw a geyser bubbling and boiling, and spitting through the air every few minutes, or saw a volcano erupting red glowing hot lava, or climbed through an ice world within a glacier of the deepest most beautiful blue that you had ever seen. I remember how I was struck by how alive the Earth was when in Iceland. It wasn’t just some inert thing sitting there for human beings to take advantage of or to bully into submission. It breathed and burped and spat. It can be angry, tempestuous and not to be trifled with. 

We, and the kids especially, gained much more respect of Mother Earth from this experience, and with that, a deeper connection to Her. I believe the root of all our ecological crises is our disconnection from the Earth. When you no longer have a relationship with something/someone, you cease to care. Iceland shows us a way. If our next generation can reconnect to Earth in a deeper way that we from the previous generations had lost, perhaps there’s hope yet.

So strange, that by being the most other-worldly place in the world, it shows us how to save this world.