Ytra Lón - The heartbeat of Mother Earth

Have you experienced the energy so pure and so strong, felt the heartbeat of Mother Earth?
Listen to a story from Mirjam Blekkenhorst and how fate brought her to Iceland in her early twenties.

In the player below you can listen to the story as well as it is available in writing further down the page.
The story is read by Birna Pétursdóttir.

"I was in my early twenties, that summer I had been on holiday in Swedish Lapland. Just me, a couple of friends and our backpacks. Hiking in the rough wilderness of Sarek National Park. Drinking the fresh water from it’s lakes and rivers, gazing at the golden sunsets over the mountains.
Such heart touching experiences for someone who grew up in an overcrowded, completely cultivated country.
Once back in the Netherlands I felt out of place. Couldn’t find my purpose in the Academy of Arts I was in. Just had this overwhelming feeling I had to get out of the country again.
Just somewhere… into nature…
Fate brought me to Iceland.
There I was in the beginning of November, in Reykjavík…
After a few weeks I had to get out of the city. And this time faith brought me to the North of Iceland.
On Hólssel, a farm close to Iceland’s remote highlands, I woke up on a beautiful clear December day, everything covered in snow. The energy so pure and so strong, I felt the heartbeat of Mother Earth.
I knew I had come Home.

So here I was, for the first time in my life I felt I had come home.
But three years later faith had other plans for us. Me and by that time my husband.
We had to move.
We started looking for a place just as isolated and quiet as we were used to. A place that could offer us enough pastures / grazeland for our sheep, a fertile piece of land where we could keep on farming. All this we found here in Ytra Lón on Langanes peninsula.
Superb land for our sheep. A lake and a river full of trout. Beaches with driftwood. Islands with breeding Eider. Mother Earth providing us with everything we could need.
So we moved…

To be honest, Langanes didn’t feel as home to me from the beginning. Not as Hólssel did so naturally. It took effort, and patience, and adapting.
I saw the birds arriving in spring… But didn’t really see the rich birdlife. I was grateful for the driftwood, of which we used plenty in rebuilding the place. But maybe didn’t really ‘feel’ how special this was.
Every time we went back to Hólssel tears just started flowing. Yes, it took me some years… Yes, I was homesick… To my old home… And sometimes to the Netherlands…
But I always knew that for some reason I had to be here.
We did build Ytra Lón from the ground up after it had been neglected for many years. And we build a family. Our family grew with four children.
It was a lot of work, but the land has been so generous. And I started to see the richness of it more and more each year that past.
Birds returning one after the other each spring. Breeding, raising their young, then leaving for their winter grounds. Our sheep, living with us and providing us with a living every year, again and again. The living of the land and with the land. I couldn’t think of any other way of living.
By now, we also run a guesthouse and retreat on our property. We show our guests around, tell them about the farm, about our way of living. Show them Langanes peninsula, it’s beautiful nature and wildlife and tell it’s stories. I love connecting to people from all over the world like this. It is so amazing, though living remote like us, getting to meet all those people. I’m very grateful for this.
Taking that leap in my early twenties, jumping on a plane to Iceland, has been the best thing I ever did.
The energy here at the Edge of the Arctic is so pure, the people living here are so grounded and connected to their environment.
For me Iceland and the Icelanders was love at first sight. There was never a way back to ‘civilization’…"