One year ago today, I was in Greenland and ...

Ilulissat Icefjord, 2017

... fourteen months after I started reading it, I finished Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams this week. As it was published in 1986, the prevailing thought was wishing he would return to the far north and write a new book of what has happened since. So much has changed with the physical landscape but his meditations on history and our personal relationship with place have not. Here are four of my favorite passages with three images from the old iPhone.

From Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams:

"... we bring our own worlds to bear in foreign landscapes in order to clarify them for ourselves. It is hard to imagine that we could do otherwise. The risk we take is of finding our final authority in the metaphors rather than the land. To inquire into the intricacies of a distant landscape, then is to provoke thoughts about one's own interior landscape, and the familiar landscapes of memory. The land urges us to come around to an understanding of ourselves."

Sermermiut, UNESCO World Heritage Site, 2017

"No culture has yet solved the dilemma each has faced with the growth of a conscious mind; how to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one's own culture but within oneself. If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox. One must live in the middle of contradiction because if all contradictions were eliminated at once life would collapse. There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light."

East Greenland, Flight from Nuuk to Reykjavik, Iceland

"The edges of any landscape - horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall - quicken an observer's expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth's twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity."

"It is in the land, I once thought, that one searches out and eventually finds what is beautiful. And an edge of this deep and rarified beauty is the acceptance of a complex paradox and the forgiveness of others. It means you will not die alone."

Beatrix Reinhardt's "On the Rocks: Landscapes of Greenland" and Other Thoughts

I am slowly gathering information on artists creating work about global warming, specifically in the Arctic Circle. My friend, Colin Edgington, suggested I look into Beatrix Reinhardt's photographs of Greenland from 2007, ten years prior to my visit.

Beatrix Reinhardt, Untitled, 2007 

From Beatrix's website: "This Disorder and order are in constant flux, as the landscape expresses grandeur or devastation, oppression or dynamism."

Beatrix Reinhardt, Untitled, 2007

  

Beatrix Reinhardt, Untitled, 2007

I quickly found that it was difficult not to take a photograph of Greenland like everyone else's. Perhaps it is all so foreign that we are attracted to the same subject matter. 

Jacinda Russell, En route to Sermermiut, 2017

After selecting Reinhardt's photographs for this post, I thumbed through my journal from June 2017. 

"First impression: LUNAR."

The last entry:
"I will never, ever forget the impact of the icebergs, the air quality in the UNESCO World Heritage site, the best water I have EVER tasted (even better than Iceland), BUT there is also the trash, the cigarette butts that have never been disposed of in a place other than the ground, the exhaust from the few cars that are driven [only 90 miles of roads in the whole country, 40 of which are paved], and the poverty."

In my quest for the "metaphorical antipode," this country of extremes offers diametrical opposites within its own borders (as referenced in Reinhardt's quote above). So begins the search for more photographs that indicate that.