p. 21: on wisdom, time, and connection...

"In the end, we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught." Baba Dioum

Imagine that. Two hundred and sixty-two years. That's the length of time you connect across. You'll know the people who span this time. Your time is the time of the people you know and love, the time that molds you. And your time is also the time of the people you will know and love. The time that you will shape. You can touch two hundred and sixty-two years with your bare hands. Your grandma taught you, you will teach your great-granddaughter. You can have a direct impact on the future, right up to the year 2186.

p. 59: on nature

When I was in this region myself, having spent a day in the crowberry meadow beside the roaring Töfrafoss waterfall before heading back to the campsite, a full moon looming over Mount Snafell, I experienced what Helgi described:

Quiet is the night and full of peace, fresh and pure, undisturbed. As though all physical connections to the outside world have been severed. The soul finds itself alone, brimful with calm and the night's all-encompassing stillness. Wordless and omniscient. The ages and eternity flow through her like a gentle murmur with an incogitable and sweet sensation of delight.

In the tranquility of the wilderness, we understand fully what a glorious and amazing adventure our life is, a gift from God, one we seldom understand or pay proper heed.

p. 85: connection of Icelandic mythology to Jainism, Mount Kailas!

The great Himalayan trail runs from there: the old salt road that goes up to the sacred Mount Kailas in Tibet. This mountain is axis mundi, the center of the world, the most sacred place on earth according to the ancient philosophy of Buddhists, Hindus, Jainists, and Bonpa. It is sometimes called the stairway to heaven. The sun and moon revolve around Mount Kailas, home to the throne of the god Shiva, who is said to sit atop a great bull. At the foot of Mount Kailas is Manasarovar Lake, long considered the highest lake in the world.

p. 87: on wisdom, time, connection

In Sanskrit there are words that sound like Humla. Haimala is winter and hima means snow, frost, or rime. Audhumla. Ice as the source of life and prosperity. Buddhism assumes that everything is interconnected and suddenly I find all the threads coming together. Could it be that there is some connection there? Actually, there is a word in Icelandic (samband) that's also in Hindi (sambandh): they both mean "connection." Everything is related to everything. Everything fits.

p. 136: on wisdom, time, connection, and nature

• Laozi’s Tao Te Ching (Classic of the Way and of Virtue, written 4th-6th c BCE in China) -> section on usefulness:

  “Thirty spokes coming together make up a wheel but it is the hole for the axle that makes the wheel useful.

  We throw clay to shape pots which work because they are hollow.

  Men cut out doors and windows and the house's empty space inside makes it useful.

  For existence to bear fruit what does not exist is most useful.”

  Emptiness allows the wheel to revolve. Throughout the twentieth century, we have demanded that the Earth turn a profit, that it produce ever greater output. We have filled up more and more of its empfinsss. We’ve called that common sense.

p. 154: on art/writing, wisdom, time connection

The world is full of stories; far too many of them disappear into fog. It would take a whole life to gather a life of stories.

p. 254: on wisdom, time, connection, nature

There is no such thing as a permanent landscape; nature has no constant. Change is its essence. If it weren't for weather systems and volcanic activity or the moon that guides the tides, the Earth would be dead, or at best a stinking ball of algae. Nature is like the Hindu goddess Kali, who destroys as she soon as she births. She makes love as she kills, because creation and destruction take place simultaneously; in nature, there's no separation between them. It doesn't matter where we rewind back to in time, nature is always right, has always been true and right. Creation is change. Everything is in the process of transforming. In nature, the waterfall gradually forms deeper ravines or rapids and the glacier either retreats or else wipes out entire continents; tectonic plates push against each other and press mountains high into the heavens as other continents get swallowed and disappear into glowing magma.

p. 316: on wisdom, time, connection

Haraldur Jonsson, the visual artist, told us that the word "apocalypse" in Greek means "to uncover something." And this was an apocalypse: an uncovering of our smog and smoke, an uncovering of our fragility, our supply chains, uncovering competence or incompetence of governments, revealing to us how health is not an individual issue, because the health of every person on the planet is connected -and is again connected to the health of the earth systems.