: Sarah Thomas
: The Raven's Nest
: Atlantic Books
: 9781838956707
: 1
: CHF 7.60
:
: Natur: Allgemeines, Nachschlagewerke
: English
: 336
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Fas inating' -Robert Macfarlane, author of The Old Ways 'Truly a thing of wonder' - Kerri ní Dochartaigh, author of Thin Places 'Lyrical [and] thoughtful' - Cal Flyn, author of Islands of Abandonment Visiting Iceland as an anthropologist and film-maker in 2008, Sarah Thomas is spellbound by its otherworldly landscape. An immediate love for this country and for Bjarni, a man she meets there, turns a week-long stay into a transformative half-decade, one which radically alters Sarah's understanding of herself and of the living world. She embarks on a relationship not only with Bjarni, but with the light, the language, and the old wooden house they make their home. She finds a place where the light of the midwinter full moon reflected by snow can be brighter than daylight, where the earth can tremor at any time, and where the word for echo - bergmál - translates as 'the language of the mountain'. In the midst of crisis both personal and planetary, as her marriage falls apart, Sarah finds inspiration in the artistry of a raven's nest: a home which persists through breaking and reweaving - over and over. Written in beautifully vivid prose The Raven's Nest is a profoundly moving meditation on place, identity and how we might live in an era of environmental disruption.

Sarah Thomas is a writer and filmmaker. Her films have been screened internationally, and she is a contributor to the Dark Mountain journal. Her writing has also appeared in the Guardian and the anthology Women on Nature edited by Katharine Norbury.

Landing


May 2008


My neck aches as I react to the ‘bong’ prompting passengers to fasten their seat belts. My face has been pressed against the oval window for thirty minutes straight, turning only briefly to say, ‘tea, please’. Beyond the condensation of my breath and the delicate ice crystals forming on the outside of the window, I have been looking out at a translucent blue sky that seems stretched thin by the weight of profuse sunlight. Beneath it, the sea is a choppy teal blue as if painted by a stippled brush and the shoreline meets the mountains frankly. Their opaque indigo bulk rises sharply and they are flat on top as if a giant has taken a sword to them. It is an Arctic palette, an infinite blue, and the landscape appears as wild and unsullied as Earth does from space. Though I know pristineness is an illusion in our times, for the moment I am enrapt. I am heading the furthest north I have ever been: sixty-six degrees latitude. Even in late May, snow swirls on the mountaintops and rests in shaded hollows. Since lifting off from Reykjavík I have not noticed any other cities or even aerial towns; only settlements I would describe generously as villages, and no more than three of them.

Having started the journey in London, I am on my way to the small town of Ísafjörður – the ‘capital’ of the Westfjords – in the top northwest corner of Iceland, which for reasons none of the delegates will fully understand, is the unlikely and awe-inspiring location for a conference of visual anthropologists. I will be presenting my MA graduation filmAfter the Rains Came: Seven short stories about objects and lifeworlds, an observational documentary I made in Kenya, where I spent the latter part of my childhood and adolescence.

Observational documentary: the ‘fly on the wall’ style where the footage works to suggest that the filmmaker is not there at all. A film shot on the Equator, brought to the Arctic. The view from the plane’s window could not be more different to the world of my film: the cracked earth, coloured beads and giant euphorbia trees of Kenya’s Samburuland that will soon be projected on a screen down there somewhere.

I have been invited to stay with some friends of a friend, and as I gaze out at the wilderness, I feel fortunate to have connections in this remote place. I wrote to them a while back thanking them for their kind offer of a bed, and in response received ‘directions’: a photograph taken from the side of a mountain, looking down onto a long narrow fjord flanked on the opposite side by another steep-sided mountain – a trough of rock filled with sea. A spit curled out from the foreground to part way across the mouth of the fjord, forming a sheltered harbour. Brightly coloured houses were clustered on the spit and the few other flat surfaces of land. Their sp