By Jessica Edington
CELL Alum, Iceland Fall 2013
If the world were a logical place, I would have studied abroad in England.
Boiled down to the facts, it made the most sense to study somewhere in the United Kingdom—it was, after all, the birthplace of both my major and my ancestors. I could combine my academic interests with an exploration of my cultural heritage. And there were castles. In any given situation, the right choice is almost always castles.
But the world is not a logical place, or perhaps I am not the most logical actor on its stage.
As I was trying to select which of the many programs in the UK I would apply to (Cambridge, Oxford, Exeter, Manchester, Nottingham, Wales, Galway, or St. Andrews), I stumbled upon a little blurb at the bottom of a listserv email. Watch out for listserv emails. They can change your life.
This blurb promised that if I attended one of its programs, I would “go beyond abroad.” What is beyond abroad, I wondered? The answer: Iceland.
It was not a traditional study abroad program. I would not be studying at a university. Instead, I would be living in an eco-village, population 100, where approximately half of the residents were people with disabilities. I would be studying not English, but sustainability through community, or the art of living symbiotically with the environment and the systems that comprise it.
“This is what I want to do,” I realized. And so I bit into the apple. It was locally grown and organic, and it was crisp and sweet.
I wanted to go to Iceland and learn how to live sustainably, in harmony with my community and my environment. What I did not know was that all I would really be doing is learning how to knit.
(Now, I must pause here and say that if you think this is going to be an essay about how “cool” Iceland is, you are wrong. If you are looking for volcanoes and glaciers, puffins, ponies, and sheep, fermented shark and ram testicles, the world’s oldest functioning democracy and a country recovering from a crippling financial crisis, a rich literary history and a thriving music culture, Vikings and farmers, or the Northern Lights, go pick up a guidebook.)
That being said, it all began a long, long time ago.
I used to know how to knit. When I was 12 my best friend convinced me to join a weekly knitting club at the library with her. We were the only two people under the age of 60 there, and it was hard at first—my yarn would always get tangled, my rows were crooked, and for all my efforts I think I only ever finished half a scarf before I quit. But the old ladies loved it, and I remember wondering if I would ever love doing something, let alone knitting, as much as they did. I eventually gave up knitting because I was too busy doing other things—doing homework, reading books, hanging out with friends, and worrying about my future. It seemed to me a slow, laborious process, out of which I would only get a scarf.
I used to be more connected to nature as well. I spent every possible moment of my childhood outside climbing trees, watching birds, chasing frogs and lizards, and in general being a wild thing. I was part of a community of other wild things. I played with the neighborhood kids; I went on trail rides and slept in barns with the local horse people; I paddled out in a canoe and spent days pulling slimy garbage from the creeks and rivers in my town with the Save the Bay environmentalists. But then I got busy. I had more homework, more responsibilities, and I had no more time to be a wild thing. I had to have a job to make money. I had to join 1,001 clubs so that my college applications would be competitive. I had to keep my grades up so that I could get a scholarship to be a lawyer or a diplomat.
In short, I went inside.
When I went to Iceland I wanted to go back outside. I wanted to find that part of me again that loved the trees and the way sunlight sparkles through leaves, to know what it is to really love and fight for something important. Unfortunately, Iceland doesn’t have many trees. But they are trying to plant some.
Instead of climbing trees, I picked up a pair of knitting needles again. There’s so much cheap wool in Iceland, it seemed like the only logical thing to do. And, stitch by painful stitch, I began to knit again.
It all came back to me easily once I began, but quickly I realized I had only ever known the basics. Recycling is not enough. Just because you recycle all the plastic water bottles you drink, it doesn’t mean you’re helping the environment. I knew the basic knit stitch, and how to go back and forth between two needles in a straight line, a method that is good for making scarves—and just about nothing else. At some point, I needed to go beyond scarves.
I began learning immediately, from my own research and those around me. I realized that food and agriculture are massively important when it comes to living sustainably, as is transportation. If I take a plane instead of a train or bus, my carbon footprint is disgustingly higher. Worst of all, I could take a long trip in my car—alone. Similarly, fruits and vegetables grown thousands of miles away are essentially doused in oil for the amount of fuel it takes to produce and transport them. I was learning to knit stripes first, the big, bold swaths of color that it’s easy to see at a distance. It wasn’t too difficult of a transition—I simply picked up another color and began to work with it for a while, and then another. Soon, my scarves had more life and depth than they ever had before.
But still, I had to go farther than that. It wasn’t all easy. We went on a four day backpacking trip through the highlands of Iceland, to learn to appreciate the place we were living in and respect it in a way that would help us understand the impact of our actions. I cried the first day, but luckily the freezing rain was pelting us so hard that no one noticed. I could not keep up with my group, but they helped me along anyway, dragging me across rivers and giving me an arm to steady myself as we walked across ridges where the ground dropped so sharply that I knew if I didn’t brace against the gale force winds that were tugging at me, with one off-balance step I could fall hundreds of feet and never get up again. I was learning the purl stitch. The purl stitch is, in essence, a backwards knit stitch. It is the hardest thing for a beginning knitter to learn, and it’s when most of them give up. It was when I gave up when I was younger. But not this time; this time I had an arm to hold. I had to learn to hate nature before I could really learn to love it. It was all backwards. The purl stitch is all backwards. But without it, you cannot make anything truly beautiful.
I came back from that trip beaming. For the first time I knew my limits, and they were much farther than I had ever imagined. Things were easier to learn after that, and I began to learn more and more from my friends and less and less from my books. I learned that I have addiction to sugar when I tried to go a week completely without it. I learned that when it comes to the environment, everyone is responsible and everyone can make a difference. I learned to knit hats. I was a hat knitting fiend. I think I made, in total, seven hand-knitted hats. Because our group took turns cooking dinner for everyone, I started learning to cook. Before Iceland, I knew how to heat up food so that it was edible, but the art of really cooking was as foreign to me as our Icelandic vocabulary homework. But as food is vitally important to sustainability, so is cooking. I began to dream of having my own garden when I went back to the United States as I stockpiled more skeins of wool than I could ever fit into my suitcase.
More than the simple skills, though, I began to learn the true art of knitting. Sustainable living is an art, and at its core is not a complete knowledge of natural systems, but rather, community. Interacting with the other people in the village, especially the people with disabilities (known as the “home people”), I started to see the beauty of even the most basic interactions—a smile, a laugh, a hug. Each morning everyone in the village would meet for “morning circle”. We came together and held hands, forming a circle where we greeted the day with song and exchanged news. Whenever someone in our small group of Americans had a birthday, all of the home people would surround them and give them a hug or a kiss on the cheek, even if they had never talked before.
It was here that I learned that every member of a community is a point on a string of yarn that becomes a stitch. And in knitting, every last stitch matters. Every single stitch is crucial to the integrity of the whole. Alone on our string of yarn, we are separate, distant, and can easily become tangled and confused. We have no purpose and serve no function. But when we begin to knit ourselves together, suddenly each of us is supporting another, giving shape to each other and becoming something truly greater than the sum of its parts. Knit or not, people are still inevitably attached by being a point on the yarn. But a hat or a scarf or a pair of mittens is so much more than a ball of yarn. A ball of yarn cannot keep you warm. People cannot accomplish anything until they are knit together into a community.
Knitting now brings me the same peace and solace that climbing trees once did, and still does. At times, it can be infinitely exciting, as when I find a new tree or a new color of yarn. But most importantly, it’s a slow process. No matter how you do it, knitting takes a while. Learning to really live sustainably takes even longer. But I know that as long as I don’t put my needles down, I will get there some day.
Most people who study abroad say that it changed their life, and I’m sure that it did. I know that my time in Iceland changed me, but I am not sure if I was changed in exactly the same ways. I was not changed because I was exposed to a completely different culture that challenged my world view—while interesting, the Icelanders I met were pretty similar to most Americans I’ve met, only less boisterous. I didn’t learn to be more independent and take care of myself in a foreign place—I had already learned that the summer before when I lived in Washington, DC by myself for the first time. I had wonderful, memorable experiences, but I’ve had those at home too. I think when most people go abroad, they get bitten by “the travel bug” and want to keep seeing as many new places as possible until their money runs out. The opposite happened to me. Going to Iceland made me want to find a good place and throw down some roots.
My time in Iceland changed me because now I want a goat. I want a permaculture garden, I want to clean off my old bicycle, and I want to stop eating sugar and start eating asparagus. I still cherish my books, but I no longer want to live my life with my nose always in them. I came home from Iceland with seven hats, two headbands, a pair and a half of mittens, one very long scarf, several balls of yarn, and a burning desire to make something out of them