In the Medieval Old Norse poem,“Völuspá,” the god Odin listens to the Völva prophesy the world’s birth, death, and rebirth. 2021 marked a massive eruption of the Fagradalsfjall volcano near Reykjavík, eclipsed by the most recent one in December 2023. Nine years earlier in Iceland, the Okjökull glacier was declared dead due to climate change.

Finally, at the end of Bioneers 2023, it was time for the panel I’d been eagerly anticipating: “Can Storytellers Help Save the World: From Fictional Narrative to Real World Change.”

I was excited about it because I deeply love words and the transformative power they possess. And I wanted to meet the activist artist Andri Snær Magnason, author of On Time and Water. This panel of writers, filmmakers, and provocateurs also featured Keenan Norris and the moderator, Laleh Khadivi.

Laleh posed marvelously insightful questions that wove both Andri and Keenan’s diverse lives together. She opened with this one: “Why, to write about the future, do you both go backwards?” She pointed out both their novels begin in libraries. Kennan’s opening for Chi Boy places him in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, where the black luminary Richard Wright’s archive reveals correspondence and original manuscripts including Native Son and Black Boy.

In his novel, Andri’s soul-searching through deep time starts as a student in the Árni Magnússon Institute for Icelandic Studies at the University of Iceland. There, he holds the revered Medieval Old Norse manuscript (ca. 1270): the Codex Regius, the “King’s Book.” Within it lies the Poetic Edda, which includes one of the most treasured poems of Norse mythology, “Völuspá.” This is the Icelandic creation myth of the world’s birth, death, and rebirth prophesied by a seeress, a völva. Andri deciphers this chilling script:

“The sun goes dark, the lands sink, the shining stars disappear from the skies, the great ash will burn and fierce heat will lick the skies.”

Throughout the panel, I listened closely to Andri’s provocative responses to Laleh’s prompts. She focused on the role of stories to manifest change on social, scientific, and ecological scales and the enduring impacts of language used in spoken, written, and digital mediums in all forms from mythologies to poems to manifestos. Finally Laleh asked this: “Given the environments you’ve lived in during your life, how do extremes influence and shape you as a storyteller?”

A question began to form within me shaped by the vast, raw, mercurial Icelandic landscape that Andri, his children, and generations of his family before him were documenting, exploring, and witnessing. I sensed something vital was missing in this public conversation.

In On Time and Water, Andri’s stories shock us into relationship with time and the earth in an age of ecological crisis. He tells the terrifying truth that geological time is beginning to move at the speed of human time. Think about it. Pause to consider how the pace of change is accelerating beyond anything familiar in the linear, chronos construct of this reality, right now, right in this precious moment of your life.

In order to bring about a planetary paradigm shift, Andri urges, “We need new ways to see and imagine ourselves into the future.”

I muse, perhaps consulting a contemporary völva might give us some life-saving visions pointing to our planetary rebirth. Perhaps we need to take our place as seers. What if we are the ones who can shift consciousness and balance between the worlds of ordinary and non-ordinary realities with access to spirits offering essential knowledge, healing, and guidance? This would mean navigating the cyclical kairos of timelessness and translating it into real world change.

As the close of that afternoon session at Bioneers neared, I was granted the last question. I directed it to the panel of storytellers who had made a compelling case for time-traveling on the wings of world-saving stories.

“I would like to deepen this conversation by looking at the relationship between place and being. Andri, I begin with you.” You are from the island of extremes—fire and ice.

In your country, the first glacier on our planet, the Ok (Okjökull) Glacier, went extinct. You wrote a eulogy for it. In 2021, a vast volcanic eruption near Reykjavík occurred. Your family along with many Icelanders were there to experience the awe.

“So my question is this: How has the coldness of glacial absence and the heat of volcanic presence shaped your soul?”

This is the essence of Andri’s edifying response, somewhat paraphrased: “After the Okjökull glacier died, we had a funeral to draw attention to the consequences of climate change. The commemorative plaque I wrote was installed with this inscription.”

A letter to the future

Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier.
In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.
This monument is to acknowledge that we know
what is happening and what needs to be done.
Only you know if we did it.

August 2019
415ppm CO2

Andri continued with a startling counterpoint, “The Fagradalsfjall volcano was a Disneyesque event, a “tourist eruption.” Many Icelanders went there with our families. Some warmed their hands and roasted marshmallows.

“In Iceland, seasons have been replaced with the geology that shapes us. It has immense beauty. What we witness brings the realization of how small we are and illuminates the vastness of our role, which becomes how to survive in it and help save it.”

Andri’s answer crystallized deeper questions in me. (I’m waiting for his response.)

“So it seems your soul is being shaped by the spirit of a land in the midst of simultaneous extinction and creation?

“Perhaps this soul-shaping is also occurring for Audhumla, the Holy Cow from Nordic mythology. In Time and Water, you share that she came to you in a childhood vision ‘begging for help, on its own behalf and that of all its dependents.’ Over time, you’ve discovered the Hindu narrative of ‘the mother of materialism and spirituality.’ You’ve come to know her as the World Cow who is embodied as the earth. You say you speak on her behalf.

“So, in the language of Sea Change Design: “Would you say you speak from the expansive state of Design Consciousness? This would mean you are co-creating with humanity, nature, spirit, and time in an eternal flow of infinite transformations—in service of life.”

“Oh, and one last question, Andri. “Would you say you are a seer?”

The transformative power of language can startle us into relationship with deep time, ancient manuscripts,  a glacier’s eulogy, the Holy Cow—and our innate ability to shift consciousness and “see” our planetary rebirth.

I agree with Andri Snær Magnason: “Now you could say the paradigm has shifted. What needs to be done is obviously in front of us, and it’s not essentially negative to be a generation that has to rethink and reinvent and redesign almost everything.”

_________________________________
Photo credits, Left to right:
Fagradalsfjall volcano ©Brian_Emfinger
Odin and the Völva (1895) by Lorenz Frølich
Dead Ok (Okjökull) glacier by AFP/Nasa