Meditating Under a Volcano: at Snæfellsjökull

Óðinn under Snæfellsjökull a few years ago

It's obvious from my past few posts that I'm not exactly non-political. But at the rate that things are changing here, I'm pretty glad I haven't written up anything since our first lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, was revealed to have links to Mossack Fonseca in the Panama Papers leak. 

If I'd have jumped on the news that her husband, our president, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson decided to run again for office, edging out the frontrunners with his older conservative constituency, or that our former PM Davíð Oddsson, a man deemed responsible for the 2008 crash, then said he was running, upsetting the polls even more, the public seeming to now have to choose between
two old fogies they knew well, or that in between those two events the sitting president had to claim no knowledge of his wife's finances and admit they lived, for the most part, in separate spheres of reality, then I'd have wasted a lot of time at the keyboard. 

Because as of earlier today, the president backed out of the running, fulfilling again the claim he made in his New Years Eve address that he'd retire the position this year. This move on his part was, in my humble opinion, a set up between Oddsson and Grímsson as a means of allowing the president to gracefully back out of the race now that his wife is definitely connected to offshore accounts (link is to a great Guardian article from May 2), something he'd recently heartily denied. And of course it's timed very well with tonight's second data reveal on Mossack Fonseca by the ICIJ, which may very well cause even more chaos here on our disturbingly corrupt island. As usual, Paul Fontaine at the Reykjavík Grapevine has put it all together very nicely in his coverage of the emerging situation.

So in the meantime, until the next vinkill emerges, I think this is a great time to chill out, breathe deep and meditate on what we're grateful for right Now, and what we'd like to see for the future of our island and for ourselves.