CONFLUENCING

REYNISFJARA, SOUTH ICELAND

Wandering adrift on Reynisfjara beach, I lose all sense of time. Not just the hours. But millennia. My only clock, a spit of basalt columns that marches before me with geologic regularity.

Am I in Reynisfjara, or somewhere less fixable? at the confluence of Arctic and Atlantic, where the sea eats away the land; above the rift that births new earth, where lava flows with the ice; chilled by global warming's southern-most northern front.

I'm here at the crux of involvement, so groundlessly grounded, so inhumanly alive.