Ok glacier

My wonderfully talented Icelandic artist friend Sigrun Lara Shanko was kind enough to agree to show her rugs at the Scandinavian Cultural Center. She takes features of the Icelandic landscape and turns them into rugs...check out her website shankorugs.com. I think they are stunning.

One of the rugs she's exhibiting is one I'm hoping to acquire, its based on the glacier Ok. That glacier is receding quickly, hardly counts as a glacier anymore, and will likely soon disappear. What better testament to global warming than to get a rug depicting a dying glacier?

Her exhibit coincides with the Taste of Iceland festival, which includes food, literature, art and music. Tonight I'm missing the writers jam, and tomorrow is the free Reykjavik Calling concert. But at least I did get to the restaurant last night where they are serving a special Iceland menu...

Just now I'm on my way to see my son, literally. I'm in the airplane writing this. I remember when I was a kid, getting a postcard from my camp counselor that he had written while riding on a train. I kept that postcard, with the shakey handwriting, for years. It meant so much to me as a kid, that he'd taken time to write to me.

This blog is a treat I guess more to myself. I've been running around at work so much lately that I haven't sat down for more than 15 minutes in days and days (at least that's how it feels....). So writing a blog has been out of the question. I have to get out of town to get anytime to write, I do believe, which is difficult for a scholar.

But I've been thinking, even while running around, about the world's youth the last few days, what kind of world they will inherit. The glaciers are melting, Ebola is spreading, the Middle East and the Ukraine, it's all cause for worry. But then there are things like the Nobel Laureate, Malala Yousafzai. What a remarkable young lady, one counts oneself blessed just to live in a time when she has a voice and gets recognized for using it. I applaud the Nobel committee for such a heartwarming choice.

It's inspired me  actually to do an exhibition on the Nobel peace prize, after Sigrun and her rugs go, or perhaps in the spring, since we'll be hosting a conference on children with the Holocaust Studies program. Seems like an odd pairing perhaps, but I think there must be something in the air, something making all these things align. I'm even thinking of my colleague Ármann, now publishing a children's book. I don't know for sure if there is such a thing as zeitgeist, but if there is, the. I would say that our zeitgeist, in the midst of this upheaval, is an excitement about what will come, an optimist of what our children will inherit. Even if there is no Ok glacier in sight.

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