Travel as mindful listening: soundscapes of water and mind in Iceland and the North Sea.

Take 10 with me, breathe deeply, as you listen/watch this avant-garde, meditative piece of art I made:

There are theories about the origins of water. There are stories about the origin of sound. Both are essential to our existence, yet, ironically, we do not know where they come from...

What I do know, experientially and intimately now, after a sensorial journey around Iceland and the North Sea, where silence became presence, soundscapes altered consciousness, and landscapes invited me to hear beyond the human:

Stillness desires to flow; silence desires to be heard.
And metabole-ism is the essence. Everything flows. I am. Water. In all my states.

soundscapes and consciousness

Traveling alters consciousness, and sound is a threshold.
The soundscape of a place shapes how we perceive time, memory, and belonging.

Around Iceland and the North Sea, the soundscape is sparse, spacious, elemental.
Otherworldly, like the land itself.
Silence here is not the absence of sound but the presence of vastness, some mythic rhythm older than human memory.

Iceland is alive. Born of fire and ice, it is one of the youngest landmasses on Earth, still forming where tectonic plates pull apart. There are over 10,000 waterfalls, and in many valleys, you can hear the earth breathing, geothermal vents hiss beneath ancient glaciers.

From the moment we are conceived, we cannot close our ears.
Sound shapes how we think.
Sound shapes how we feel.
Sound shapes how we relate to a place and how a place relates to us.

Wind, rivers, market noise, animal cries, temple bells, footsteps, machines, or silence.... A culture's consciousness is tuned by what it hears. Winds and wide silence of a desert culture may cultivate contemplation and spaciousness. The rhythm of waves on an island may cultivate a sense of cyclical time and emotional ebb and flow. Layered noise of a metropolis, like honking, shouting, sirens, can foster dynamism, urgency, fragmentation, and acceleration.

What we hear daily becomes internalized as mood, as expectation, as pace.

What are the qualities of consciousness shaped by sound in your place?
What is the first thing you hear when you wake in the morning?
What is the last thing you hear before you sleep?

mindful liminal listening

As a fluid witness attuned to a sensuous planet, I conceived this audiovisual meditation in places of transition and transformation while traveling through Iceland and the North Sea in 2023.

During WWII, Iceland became a key Allied hub, occupied first by Britain and then the U.S. — a strategic crossroads.

Except the cities and settlements near the road that circles the whole island, the mostly untouched landscapes are accompanied by overwhelming silence and a slow steady rhythm.

These silences and water micro-landscapes bore ponderance on impermanence, flux, and dissolving boundaries during seemingly inconsequential but definitely alchemical, intimate encounters where I felt connected to the place.

I lingered in images and sound rather than decoding them.
Perhaps this was a quite rebellion against hyperrealism
and the cult of memory,
the impulse to last forever as a selfie.

In awe-inspiring spots, I counted at least one camera click per second.
Out of a hundred travelers, maybe two or three were truly there,
watching, listening, and feeling the land and its soundscapes.

The rest seemed busy inserting themselves into a copy of the landscape.

water remembers

Water has memory.
We carry in our bodies what melts from the top of glaciers,
bursts out of the earth, flows through rivers,
merges with the one vast ocean (of) consciousness,
beats up on the shores, vaporizes its way into skies,
and rains back down on us.

Water told me that the cycle is the source.
That person, that place, that resource, that value,
all down with the waterfall, out with the tide for me...

background

During the COVID blues, someone had encouraged me to revisit images or scenes from my past that brought joy and to recreate more of the same in my life.
I remembered being a child, on a small boat, with my dad, surrounded by a playful dolphin flock.
I remembered being in the sea, inventing unprecedented water games with childhood friends.
I remembered floating underwater staring up at the bright sun through ripples.
Walking barefoot in a river in Colorado...
Dipping my toes into an Alpine stream...
Standing on a Costa Rican beach...
Kitesurfing in Turkiye...
Always water.

Grateful for these experiences, and realizing this couldn't be a coincidence, I decided to weave more water in my life.
This led me to learn sailing,
a choice and determination that carried me, so far, from the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean to the Northern Seas around Scotland, the Baltics, and close to the Arctic
on a sailing expedition from Iceland to Greenland on an uncomfortable racing yacht (never again).

Out there in the middle of it with 360 horizon and no land,
the ocean revealed two faces:
near-hypothermic, wishing for a helicopter home;
and tender, making me want to drink the purple ocean under the midnight sun like chilled blue wine.

In midsummer, near the Arctic Circle, the sun barely sets. Locals call the dim, endless twilight “dimma,” a suspended time.

The 68' racing sailboat was not exactly an anechoic chamber,
but it was one of the rare places with no human-made sound,
except the ones in your head.
After a few days, even these ceased for me
when exposed to such sublimity.

After two-weeks immersed in water, I thought I'd be exhausted.
Instead, I was enchanted. Life is short... I rented a car and circled Iceland,
as one horizon melted into another.

Finally, viscerally, I witnessed how fire and water form the earth,
how elements transform beginningless and endlessly,
along with the fluctuations of my mind - my thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories...
Water, in all its forms, reflected the essence of life. Metabole.

Docked near Snaefelsness Peninsula,
considered by some one of Earth's heart chakras,
a hike led to a waterfall where, with a fellow crew member,
we talked about photography:

What makes a photo worth taking?
Why do people keep taking them?
What is the point of preserving that one moment in silence?

For me, it's never been about capturing the thing itself
but rendering the impression, the feeling.
In an age of fragmentation and speed,
I choose expression over surveillance
mood over message
not accuracy but essence.

This took me deeper into abstraction, impressionism,
and intimate listening to and conversations with water.
The audiovisual meditation I shared at the beginning is a part of this.

an invitation

If you had to take one photograph today, just one,
to embody in silence a moment of conversation between you and water,
what would that image look like?

What memory would you drink?
I wonder how you listen to water wherever you are.

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