Photographs: Heather Storgaard
Text: Heather Storgaard
Winter in Iceland’s Westfjords is a lesson in embracing nature’s rhythm. With long darkness and fleeting sunlight, life moves slowly, guided by the weather. Icelanders embrace rare daylight, celebrate the sun’s return, and find joy in the Northern Lights, which teach the value of spontaneity and simple moments of light.
The dark
In Þingeyri in the Westfjords of Iceland, where I am now, the sun rises first between 09:30 and 10:00. By 14:30, it is on its way down again, with darkness returning at around 17:00. Unless you take a walk up the nearby fell, there is no actual site of the sun until the first or second week of February. The darkness shortens your days far beyond what we experience in Denmark even in the middle of winter, and it got me wondering about what we can learn about living from the Icelanders. How does a country cope with the dark and cold, particularly in such remote locations?
Pace of life
Iceland has extreme weather, which likely won’t be news to any of you who have visited this enigmatic country. But while those of us in Europe have a tendency to battle against the elements, Icelanders quietly accept the limitations of their cold, dark, windy winters. Life in any rural location is inherently slower paced than big cities, but Iceland is a country mostly made up of rural pace. Þingeyri strolls through life until events require short sprints of activity. Icelanders are spontaneous like that. If the weather and daylight are with them, they act. However, if the weather asks them to stay at home, knitting and coffee dates are embraced. Planning hardly exists, never mind the thorough scheduling gymnastics of a Danish calendar. When living with winters as extreme as these, I think it is only a good thing to be more in tune with yourself on the day and act on your wishes as they occur.
"However, if the weather asks them to stay at home, knitting and coffee dates are embraced."
Seizing the day
On the 21st of January, the sun shone with blue skies for the first time since I arrived in Þingeyri. Blue Monday, reportedly the saddest day of the year, was conquered. Excited, I bundled up to head out along the shoreline in search of the sunrise. One of the positives with so many hours of darkness is that sunrises don’t require the arduous early starts I am used to. The sunrise gifted me with rich, deep purples, orange and yellows, reflecting from the snow-covered fells around Dýrafjörður.
Later that day, I met a group, and we set off up Sandafell in the crisp snow. We saw the tracks of an Arctic Fox and marvelled at the views, but perhaps most of all, the glimpse of the sun, peaking out from over the next fells. This first sun sighting in the winter is a cause for great celebration here in the Westfjords, with gatherings held and pancakes served to mark the occasion. I love the sense of marking weather and seasonal events, celebrating something as fundamental as daylight that us Europeans take for granted.
But that wasn’t all for the day – darkness arrived in the late afternoon, and with it the magnificent Northern Lights. I’ve seen them before, but that night the Old Norse legends really made sense. Supposedly, the Bifrost was a bridge to the sky, created so the Gods could travel between realms. With a clear green ladder up to the sky ahead of me, just to the right of shining Venus, I could feel the myth. I felt like if I kept walking, turning to follow the fjord all the way to its North Atlantic end towards Greenland, I could head up into the sky on the green and pink lights. When the sky entertains as it does in Iceland, who can really begrudge its measly allowance of the sun? Forget the knitwear and toy puffins – spontaneity and the acceptance of winter is the most important thing I aim to take home from Iceland.