Under a range of glacier capped volcanic mountains, and fronted by dramatic black sand beaches, little Vik is a must visit destination on Iceland’s stunning south coast. The village’s newest attraction combines two of my favorite things—a micro-roastery and a little free library.
The Skool Beans Café is incongruously housed in a retrofitted yellow American school bus. Proprietor Holly Keyser was looking for a truck to convert for her coffeeshop on wheels when she stumbled on the big yellow bus and it was kismet. After two years of hard work and sweat equity, Keyser flipped the script on the now iconic food truck model and created a version that brings the customer inside.
To complete the Nordic hygge vibe, Skool Beans has a cozy wood stove and Jeffrey the café cat who greets every customer. Coffee aficianados will appreciate the lovingly roasted micro-lot, fair trade beans fresh from Keyser’s Allio Bullet roaster. And travelers looking to trade books or pick-up a free read will love the little free library.
I was dead chuffed to stumble upon the wonderful short film “Troll Bridge” which was based on an original short story of the same name by the late great Terry Pratchett. Directed by Daniel Knight, the movie was created after a crowdfunding campaign that attracted more than 2,000 enthusiastic backers who all shared an abiding love for the magic brought into being by the master of fantasy and humor. If that’s not enough to get you to spend 28 minutes of your valuable time, the live action component of the movie was filmed in the glorious mountains around beautiful Queenstown, New Zealand.
Just in the nick of time, the Copenhagen-based Happiness Research Institute has opened the world’s first museum dedicated to that elusive thing we all need more than ever. The museum is located in the heart of everyone’s favorite Nordic capital. which currently holds the title of second-happiest country on the planet, based on the 2020 World Happiness Report.
“We all seem to be looking for happiness—but perhaps we are looking in the wrong places. We have gotten richer as societies but often failed to become happier,” says the Happiness Museum in a statement. “Therefore, the Happiness Research Institute decided to create a museum where we can bring happiness to life.”
images courtesy Museum of Happiness
The Happiness Museum features eight rooms focused on different theories on the nature of happiness. In one display, guests are asked to choose between an “experience machine” that provides users with infinite, albeit illusory, pleasure and the real world, which involves pain and suffering. Other exhibits include a room of maps identifying the world’s happiest and unhappiest countries, a happiness lab, an overview of the history of happiness, and an exploration of why Denmark and other Nordic countries consistently rank among the world’s happiest.
Unfortunately, the museum is closed due to the pandemic, but we can look forward to a visit when the world returns to some degree of normalcy. Until then, we just have to discover our own happiness, or just visit the world’s #1 happiest nation—Finland.
Artist Kate Sweeney turned the poem “Murmuration” by Linda France (below)into a profound and heartfelt animated short film. Created for the 2020 Durham Book Festival, the timely work will surely resonate during this trying period for all of us.
MURMURATION by Linda France
1
*
Because we love watching the flock’s precision glide
upstroke for height, tilt of wing spun mid-flight
just for a moment
we’re in the frenzied swirling rush
home for the winged
owls hoot their love through the dark
chiffchaff creeps up stalks
fennel and flow
dipper and wagtail
Arctic terns like darts
geese honking each note weighed
a duck sits on top of the bowling club out king of the world
if you love the bird, don’t cage it
we’ll miss the starlings when April comes
*
on any high hilltop, breathing this air,
this precious air, remember those who lost their breath
if you love the flower, don’t pick it
a sudden sweep of daisies in a green field
like counting stars
losing count
starting over again
more shades of green
than words scream Life!
life, damp grass between bare toes
light passing through poppy petals
the slow unfolding of a rose
home for the prickly, those that slither
climb or crawl
for us all
atom by atom
cell by cell
what else matters
we cherish these conversations when the vetchling speaks
the lavish eruption of nasturtiums, weaving ropes of white stems
orange flowers
lush leaves
hearts burnt open
if you love wild things, let them be
*
follow the almost invisible path through the heather
summer’s easy grin, the slow smile of autumn
gaze of winter starlight
isn’t this how we learn not to fear
change
the seasons
that mark time
shape our lives
spangles of sunlight on a river
otters rippling
the sting of cold sea on tight, red skin
we feel it all, drink it in and love it
love honey, love bees
the smell of dust, hot rain
a damson tree
dripping purple fruits
love the kiss of a dandelion clock
wind-suck and time disappears
the pull of the moon
waves that crash with forgotten history
the rubbed edges of the world
a spider crab scurrying sideways
we love the roaring isles
the taste of a peach
our neighbours busy in their vegetable patch
the daylit gate
tunnel of trees
those little paths one-person-wide
between hazel and ash
warm bark
in the city that birthed us
bright tufts that grow in the cracks
*
because we love the way dawn wakes up
and switches night to day
the twist and fall
the surging sweeping joy of it all
the visceral thrill
how dusk strips away the waste of worried days
as birds yield to their roost
and leave the night to moth and bat
beyond day, beyond everything
we know we too are rock and star
but now on the tip of our tongue
even love’s not enough
2
*
At the midnight of the year
utter darkness
a million compasses fail
and the starlings don’t come
empty sky
no swallows, no swifts
no summer nests in the eaves
threads looped in the blue
a blackbird that isn’t there
opens his throat
into silence, thin air
no golden note
you wake to a dawn
unheralded
dusk, uninvited, doesn’t know
where to begin
ghost calls echo in the trees
dogs and deer stop barking
rain forgets to fall
its rhythm broken, lost
oak and elm hold their breath
you will never see another flower
the stars’ last vanishing act
no words left
3
*
April high tide
hurls driftwood
oarweed
sea-glass
a wreckage of shells
tomorrow comes soon
how much would you pay to hear the sound
of rain
or birdsong
what if couldn’t-care-less cared more
and we let the murmur of change
change our ways
hear the roots of trees
whispering
dark soil’s cavernous memories
tectonic plates shift
sit like a mountain
all weathers
in our hearts
what if our flutterings become feathers
the starlings lend us their wings
till we trust enough
to fly together
synchronised one vast voice
all different, all the same
to mend our wounded earth
ballads of continents crossed
comrades lost to storm or predator
the shockwave moving through the flock
see how we flit
twist swell
dive
co-mingle co-exist co-inhere
belong together
*
imagine we’re made of those slivers of sky
know all the colours of light
hitch a ride on the bees’ flight
go to earth with badgers
small as Alice catch the worm
the keys of the ash
rise like a dandelion
the promise of a peony bud
where heather meets heaven
home
this is the patience of the albatross
a cormorant’s hunger
craning for a flash of silver
beneath the water
the good omen of a crescent moon
milky stars
set in new stories
meadow orchids
skeins of geese
a chance to constellate honesty
justice
escape heroic fantasies
gravity’s boots
so what if’s rubbed out
and becomes what is
the path between
then we can hear the hiss of rain
*
what is
is more than the ear can hear
or eye see —
we will never have this time again
can never rewind this moment
all the maybes, all the small things
we touch
gentle, curious
and let pass
like fruit in season
the secret language of earth
underland of coal, uranium, oil
indifference banished by love
power to the parliament of rooks
it’s just this us
the people
our footsteps
walking into all this wonder
every day through every weather
solidarity
the planet’s rage
making a stand
for a different future
it’s just this
our words
building this home we share
these bridges
nowhere else to go
here we are
turning over
this tainted page
to start again
and healing the earth
the earth heals us
our better place
not a destination
a method
common ground
*
ask
what if words could fly
and this poem rose into the blueness
a whirr of black italic wings
breath by breath
a prayer
to give life back to life
all of us
pieces of the world
what if all the time we were searching
the sky
the birds
were watching for us
what, if not cartwheeling
what, if not care
what, if not a cadence
like love
held lightly
I strongly suspect that most visitors to Travel Between The Pages are also the types of folks who love to spend time in bookshops. During these trying times, most of us are probably longing to hang out and browse our favorite bookstores. It may help to check out “a reading list for bookstore lovers” from the New York Public Library. In the post, you’ll find both fiction and nonfiction titles that will take you inside these venerated spaces and into the world of books and those who love them. I’ve read most of the titles and can highly recommend them as a salve for the pain of missing our beloved bookstores.
Inspired by the work of the US artist Jenny Holzer, who pioneered compressed texts and slogans she coined “truisms,” Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland has created a series of billboards that can now be seen along the Arbutus Greenway, Vancouver’s version of NYC’s High Line. The slogans on the boards are Holzer-esque quotes such as : Doing Nothing is Very Different from Having Nothing to Do, Everybody on Earth Is Feeling the Same Way, and Hoard Anything You Can’t Download.
A series of prophetic slogans was first conceived by Coupland in 2011, but are ironically fitting for these pandemic times. Enforced Leisure Time is Neither proclaims itself on a bold red background in front of an apartment complex. Doing Nothing is Very Different from Having Nothing to Do shouts loudly on a bright fuchsia background billboard. Everybody on Earth Is Feeling the Same Way As You was amazingly prescient.
If you have ever traveled in the United Kingdom, or even read a British novel, it’s likely that you have been confused about the correct pronunciation of place names. I’m chagrined to admit that I constantly got location names horribly wrong while traveling in Britain even though I consider myself a Anglophile. The very informative, and funny, video below is an enormously helpful episode of Map Men, from comedians Jay Foreman and Mark Cooper Jones which provides a useful history of British geographic names that don’t always sound as their spelling might indicate.
As you can hear, no letter in the English alphabet is safe from being pronounced in dozens of different ways. Including, not at all. Thankfully, there are some general rules you can stick to, and because we’re nice, we’ll help the un-British amongst you through a couple of basics. …The only way to be absolutely sure of pronouncing British place names correctly is to live here long enough to learn every single one of them one at a time. Sorry.
Travel Between The Pages 