Disconnect from paradise

I was away for work last week. I missed my family. And sometimes work just gets me down. Sometimes I am ambivalent, indifferent, dispassionate. I don’t like to be that way, but sometimes it’s a struggle to feel like I care about what’s going on around me. I suppose everyone feels like that at times. Last week I just couldn’t  dredge up the enthusiasm I needed to push through the days with a real connection to the world. It wasn’t a bad week, just one that didn’t fill my veins with energy.

Finally, I got home and relaxed into the contentment of being with my husband and son. And after a day of soaking up their lovely, quirky energy, I looked back at the photographs on my phone from my week away. This is one of them.

I spent a morning here in bright sunshine. A morning in precipitous, stark scenery rarely visited by anyone. This place is hundreds of kilometres from the nearest settlements in east Greenland. Pinnacles of sheer rock towered over me, fringed with a hanging glacier, its deep voice rumbling, threatening. In the far distance a wall of shattered ice sat frozen in mid fall from the ice-cap peeping over the dark ice-shrouded mountains. Below, a static river of ice, the glacier, was marked by a long, grey line, like a birthmark, tracing the path of fallen rocks that had tumbled down and that were being carried, imperceptibly slowly, toward the fjord, beyond the curved blue-grey crevassed arcs, into the hummocky masses of the ice front, to the still water front where the glacier front seemed to have been sliced away, finally joining the silent, marbled swirls of the mirrored sea that revealed hints of hidden movement below.

This is where I spent my morning. Afterwards, I flew in a helicopter back across the ice-cap in cloudless skies.

I sat with my son, stunned by the amazing pictures of the week that I had failed to fully grasp. How did I distract myself from this? Thinking of work, of the future, of the past. Then I felt my son twitching in my arms, as he fell asleep, and I felt as connected to this moment as I could hope to be.