Love Letter to Earth - My Ode to the Land of Fire and Ice

In this latter chapter of my life I am growing into my best version. And by that, I mostly mean I am better grounded, better connected to myself and to Earth. So my visit to Iceland albeit brief, in the Summer of 2025 was a pilgrimage.

This visit was a homage to Earth. (I use the term Earth in this piece as a noun to refer to a unique living entity). I want to inscribe how my heart resounds with the hymns of Earth before she stops singing to me or rather, before I cease hearing the songs as I've drifted far away, or time has dimmed the sound. Earth is alive is an unmistakable truth one feels, while in Iceland. It is churning and rumbling, and moving and grinding, gurgling out steam and boiling tears through geysers. Since eons its gut continues to digest the emotions of all its creatures. Every now and then it splits open to spew out fire and molten lava which seems to me, all the suffering and pain it has absorbed over the millennia. This viscous fire cools and petrifies on its body in the form black and grey stoney scales. As I walked on the hard lava floor and bent down to stroke its rough surface, it felt I heard her whisper a long sigh. Earth, in its anger, also gushes forth showers of ice which slice through the compressed layers of glacial ice that also cover its body. It is a creature that issues forth liquid fire of accumulated wrath and holds its traumas in frozen shelves at the same time. Earth here has written its birthing pain in a visually breathtaking poetry.

Human greed has gouged out its body rapaciously for too long. Its internal viscera has been hollowed out rapidly and its entrails sold for profit much as the organ trade of humans. And maybe in response, Earth is spewing out fire and ice more frequently and more aggressively. It fights back.

This island has a mantel of ice in its northern reaches, and vast tracts of it. But in this part where I am, there was no ice. It felt a bit weird to be in Iceland without any ice. As strange as to be in Greenland with no greens. Visible everywhere are tracts of gouged up gashes of brown black Earth. The vast velvet green carpeted lava floor of the island is stunningly rich in elegance with a weave of velvet green, golden, mustard, rust and burgundy moss, stitched in with all textures of coloured lichen, peppered here and there with fuzzy shrubbery. The rich glossy carpet is ripped apart by deep black fissures that appear suddenly, at any time and everywhere, due to the volcanic activity under the Earth’s surface. The island is located on an active volcanic hot-spot where two tectonic plates meet, grate and grind, and push each other away. These two plates, North America and Eurasia respectively, place Iceland uniquely as part of two continents, at the same time.

The topography here reveals the raw material of birthing through the struggle of ripping apart. Fault lines stay exposed, covers are stripped away and a rugged nakedness stuns as the skeleton moves and jangles under a thin crust of rough volcanic skin. Familiar wild flowers like buttercups, bluebells or daisies found elsewhere on heaths and highlands, were hardly to be seen. What is visible is the alchemy of aesthetics is its uncompromising, unrefined rawness. Here Earth is not decoration but a revelation.

The island is relatively young, 16 million years old. It was pushed out by a volcanic upsurge from within the sea, almost 50 million years after the last of the dinosaurs perished. So yes, a relatively young land!. No tree higher than 3 to 5 feet is visible across its vast scarred stretches. I learnt that before the arrival of the first settlers from Norway in the 9th century these stunted trees constituted 60 percent of the land cover. Now under two percent of the trees survive because the settlers, over the centuries, cleared this foliage for wood, construction, firewood and other uses. There is a serious attempt underway in Iceland currently for reforestation. One can even order the planting of a tree via internet today.

The only indigenous animal existing on this island today is the Arctic fox, which like a chameleon changes colour for camouflage - white in winter to merge with the snow, rust and grey in the summer. All other animals - sheep, horses, cattle, pigs, dogs were brought in by the settlers on rafts from outside. The cat came from Ireland. Alongside a population of 400,000 humans, there are one million sheep in Iceland, and a large number of horses. White, brown, black sheep are seen dotting the formidable landscape in clusters of 3 or 4 whilst no humans are sighted for miles. I kept thinking where will the sheep shelter as night falls? Will they be rounded up or do they just live on the heath? Of course they are owned because sheep wool and lamb meat occupy a place of pride amongst Iceland’s produce and exports. The wool is indeed exquisite. And then, there is the Arctic Tern, a smallish bird which migrates from the northern extremities of the Arctic. It arrives each year on the afternoon of 11th May, nests awhile and then heads 45,000 kms south to Africa before returning after a few months to return to its base.

Agriculture is a major industry today. Until recently, Icelanders were subsistence farmers, many living in caves carved out naturally in the flanks of the basalt hills. Caves offered warmth, security and lodgings and did not require much investment. Today the country’s agriculture is largely mechanized. Large green houses dot the landscape around the capital city, and grow all manners of fruit and vegetables including mangoes and bananas. This industrial level of farm and dairy production relies on geothermal energy which arguably, is aplenty on this volcanic island. This country has fairly sound environmental policies. Interestingly, it’s governance is largely run by women.

Iceland owns itself. For sure. I recalled the forest in Holland I visited recently, which is a legal entity today and referred to as the “forest that owns itself”. Standing here, on this island, the notion sounded preposterous. That humans should bestow rights on land, forests, rivers, in their progressive benevolence and “allow” entities of nature to” own themselves!” Of course, nature owns itself whether humans see and acknowledge this or not. In contradistinction, humans seldom own themselves, or very few do.

For some reason I felt a visceral hesitation to refer to this piece of Earth as ‘Her’. Humans have referred to Earth as Mother for birthing and sustaining life. Standing grounded in Iceland I knew this vast land to be beyond identity. It is a form of raw-clad awareness or consciousness or energy. It has a pulsating body but cannot be anthropomorphised or genderized along the restricted tropes of human imagination. Human hubris appears infinitely puny as it seeks to offer legal identity to nature.

I cannot end this piece without paying obeisance to its magical mist, the Aurora. The stupendous awe I experienced through these swirling folds of glacial mists at play with the highlands and heaths, was breathtakingly magnificent and paralysing. Standing transfixed is an understatement. Nature has choreographed a spectacular performance of light in consonance with the sun and clouds. The theatre of play is vast and ever changing, the quality of light exquisite and mystical. Earth meets the horizon to become completely unearthly as the light shimmers alongside swirling sheets of mist. And this was not even the season of the northern lights.

Nothing in nature is vulgar, obscene, garish or jarring. I felt this in my core. Elegance, raw perfection and breathtaking awe emanating from this landscape is not just about otherworldly aesthetics, it is essentially ethical and spiritual. It counters shoddiness, vulgar display, and hubris. It resets the moral compass.

A hundred times I knelt down mentally, in obeisance, with humility, to touch my forehead to the ground. This was my other Kailash.

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Aurora Image credits -

By AstroAnthony - Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84294969