ICELAND 1

Video 1: 'Footsteps'


The following has been written by Matthew Coleman, who put the videos together.

In April I went to Iceland for a week, for a road trip with a photographer. It was a place that had a very profound effect on me, one that moved me in ways I could never truly know or even unravel. My self was opened to things I had only ever read about and, like the Romantic poets of the past, I wrapped its world right round my being. It was its nature: its mountains, rocks, glaciers, valleys, rivers and snow that shifted something within me. I remember standing on top of a glacier one night, at midnight, with a carpet of clouds drifting below me, snow and ice in every direction and the stars bursting with brightness above when, suddenly, the Northern Lights began dancing before me, its mixture of greens and light yellows throbbing and flickering like cosmic flames in the immenseness of the universe. I was silent in those moments, still. I was almost paralyzed with awe. Tears began welling up in my eyes at what I was seeing. I then laughed, firstly inside, and then out loud as I thought how foolish it is to contemplate the conception of heaven when one dies when, if we look in the right place, heaven is all around us every moment of every day. Heaven really can be found on this world, waiting for us to go there and walk within it, to breathe it into our body and our being, to let our senses soak in it, to revel in it, to not label it but to simply experience it. I say bring back the Romantic poets of the past, bring back the focus on nature; on the flower, the wind, the sea, the Earth, bring back the attention onto the elements around us, bring it all back so we can open our eyes and be drawn to it, so that we can go to it and be at one with it, even if only for a short period of time in all of our busy lives.

But let me get back to Iceland before I present to you what it is that I want to present to you. And so, in bursts, I did some filming, though not much. I spent most of my time just looking at the world unfold before my eyes as our car glided through the snow-stricken mountains. The footage, when I eventually got home, was then carved into tiny pieces and given to the hugely talented author and publisher Heidi James, who wrote and then read her pieces to go with each of the segments that I sent her. The music and the sound has been added and composed by Vim Cortez, the editor of 'Paris Bitter Hearts Pit'.

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