Greenland. Day 7: Mist

According to Gretel Ehrlich, the Greenlandic word 'sila' means weather. It also means consciousness. I sat here this evening listening to Nive Nielsen and watching the mist creep arthritically up the hill, edging from the harbour and from the mountains and the waterfalls until slowly, slowly, I could see nothing outside at all. All was white, hiding, hidden. Moments before this just-living ghost shut us all, finally, inside, I watched a bunch of kids clamber up and over boulders and slippery, snow-covered grass, throwing a pink frisbee to each other, play-fighting, all the while wordless, thoughtless, effervescent. 

I had a foggy, pixelated chat on FaceTime then and we talked about distance and separation, about mortality, about the absurdity of writing and writer's block and about the point of it all. Is there any real difference, we wondered, between life and death, between weather and consciousness, between the material and the spiritual, between you and me? And surely the mist and the mountains and music and love and lust and laughter and art are - have to be  - the point of it all? Consciousness, it seemed, is inseparable from nature, just as each simultaneously dissolves and sprinkles glitter and meaning on the other.

At the end of the call I felt bright, clear, conscious. I looked outside and darkness had fallen. 

Qaqortoq