For the time being

He was the surveyor of his own ice-world
- Geoffrey Hill, An order of service


With changing weather patterns, other changes follow suit. In my native village, Hyen in Western Norway, we see this in the way that the ice freezes on the lakes. The old patterns, familiar to me from my boyhood and recounted in the stories of my paternal grandmother when growing up, are now replaced by new ones, and we are re-learning the mechanisms by which the thickness of the ice develops. In conjunction with warmer and more abruptly shifting weather, this also means that there are two great uncertainties that preside over the winters: whether the ice will form, and, if it does, for how long it will stay. For the time being, it has stayed for the better part of two weeks, and I have made the most of it by taking almost daily excursions into this world of new perspectives and accesses, knowing that I am enjoying this for a limited time period, knowing that I don't know the extent of this time period in question. 

This uncertainty and this mutability currently overlaps poetically with changes in my own life. This week is the final week of my current contract, and after that I am again unemployed for an uncertain stretch of time, and one that hopefully is short. But until I know what my next step is, I am back home in my native village, and I will most likely spend the spring writing applications, working on articles, doing the kind of unpaid labour that is part and parcel of the academic life, even outside of the institutional payroll. For the time being, this is a rather pleasant prospect, in spite of everything. The past few months have been exceedingly hectic, as the normal demands of the working day has been exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, leading to extra work and a student body more concerned and more stressed than they would be in a normal situation which is in and of itself stressful. I am now entering into a different pace, however, and while it is not void of deadlines or stress, it is a pace in which a significant part of my rhythm will be in tune with the landscape around me, it will consist of trips on the ice - if it stays - and the possibility of pressing pause to a greater extent than I could before. For the time being, this works, and then we'll see.