On Being Moved: The Mobility of Inner Landscapes

Abstract

How can we move towards a tourism that focuses on the inner landscape of the guest and the host; on how they are moved from the inside or touched by the tourism experience? What is being moved? Who is being moved? How can both guest and host be moved by the relations created in their encounter? To explore these questions I guide the reader through my own personal journey of being moved by the landscape of Melrakkaslétta, a journey that moved me to think about alternative approaches to tourism where the inner landscapes of guests and hosts are central. The aim of this journey is to highlight how landscapes are not only visual outer phenomena that we look at from a distance but rather whole entanglements of materials, beings, senses and processes that are constantly moving with and being moved by each other.

Introduction

Landscapes are full of movement. They are made of human and more-than-human processes, entangled in an endlessly moving rhizome that connects the past and the present, the invisible and the visible and the inner and outer. The movement, the connection and the entanglement appear in the inner aesthetic response that is constantly occurring into and from the visible outer environment, creating moving atmospheres that fuse together the outer and inner. Both inner and outer belong to the same flesh of the world (Merleau-Ponty 1968), and it is through sensing ourselves being moved and touched by the world that this belonging makes itself felt. To explore this entangled mobility of what I call inner and outer landscapes I will examine my own experience of being moved by a particular and personal landscape in Melrakkaslétta.

When I started my participation in the project Mobilities on the margins the two case study areas had already been chosen. Knowing that we would be exploring Melrakkaslétta in north east Iceland immediately sparked an interest in me since I knew that my family had a history there; my great grandmother was born and raised on one of the farms in that area. However, it was not until we went on our first field trip that I discovered how this connection to the area affected my perception of it. I became moved by the landscape by sensing it through other family members that had moved in and through it before me. This mobility thus became my focus in the project, and my exploration of the experience of being moved led me to think about alternative approaches to tourism development where the opportunities to be moved from within are emphasised.

To prepare the ground for guiding the reader through my journey I will first briefly discuss the concepts of landscape and the aesthetic, how they are intertwined and how they shed light on the intertwining of humans and environments, people and places and inner and outer landscapes. Then I will go on to examine how the landscape of the farm in Melrakkaslétta has moved within my great grandmother, my father and myself and participated in the creation of other places. Through this example I show how landscapes are not only mobile through the manner in which their physical qualities change and develop through time, but also in how they become intertwined with our very being, moving with us to create new places and landscapes of meaning.

The Aesthetic Dimension and the Movement of Inner Landscapes

To explore the movement and creation of inner landscapes, I first want to make clear the connection between landscape and the aesthetic, or felt, dimension of experience. From the phenomenological perspective on landscape that I have developed in previous work, the relation between the concepts of landscape and beauty is central (Jóhannesdóttir 2010, 2016). Beauty is here not understood only as a simple pleasure in response to aesthetic qualities but rather as a concept that lies at the heart of the aesthetic dimension in general and describes a certain type of relation that we are given to have with the world. It describes the moments where we open our senses to receive meaning from what we are perceiving and follow the felt inner movements that are created in response. Landscape can thus be defined as environment perceived aesthetically (Ritter 1989); we speak of landscapes when we are speaking of perceiving an environment only to perceive, and to sense how all its qualities, visible and invisible, come together in one’s perception of the environment as a whole. We speak of emotional landscapes and political landscapes, which also hints at how we use the word to describe how we sense a particular space or situation (whether material or immaterial) as a whole, and how we sense ourselves in relation to it. From this perspective, landscape refers to the intertwining of the perceiver and the perceived, the body and its environment. Landscape as an environment perceived aesthetically always includes a body moving through it and resonating with it, noticing the inner movements that occur with the outer (Jóhannesdóttir 2023). Describing a landscape does not only involve listing the what—the entities that create the whole of the landscape; mountains, beaches, buildings, stories, smells, sounds, plants, people—it also refers to how you sense this whole affecting you right here, right now. Included in this whole situation affecting you are the invisible narratives that the materialities of the landscape tell, as well as the invisible patterns that you carry within your body as sediments of other landscapes that have moved within you before. Your whole experiential background is an ingredient in what I like to call the inner landscape that emerges in interaction with the outer landscape you are situated in. What I call inner landscape can also be described as a “felt sense” of a situation (Gendlin 1992, 347), sensing the “dominating quality in a situation as a whole” (Dewey 1984, 249) or the “feeling of situatedness” (Skúlason 2015, 52). Speaking of inner landscapes allows me to underline the felt dimension of what landscape is—that it always already includes what we are feeling and sensing in a bodily way, or in other words, what we are aesthetically perceiving.

This aesthetic aspect of the landscape concept is too often ignored or reduced to the visual. When scholars have tried to reclaim the landscape concept from the visual understanding of it as only a physical phenomenon to be looked at from a distance and emphasise instead how landscape is an intertwining of humans and land, the aesthetic dimension got lost with the visual; the aesthetic was narrowly understood as the visual, so an escape from the visual meant an escape from the aesthetic (Benediktsson 2007; Jóhannesdóttir 2010). As has been emphasised within environmental aesthetics, the aesthetic is so much more than the visual. It includes all our senses, imagination and our moving within, touching and being touched by the environment (Berleant 1997; Brady 2003). Bringing the aesthetic dimension to bear on the way we understand our relations to place, environment, to each other and ourselves allows us to become aware of the relational dimensions of our existence. This felt dimension is the source of the meaningful relations that contribute to the quality of our lives. Quality of life and meaningful relations (Holland 2012) are terms that should perhaps play a bigger role in the way we think about tourism development, landscape development and planning processes in general. As Bunkše (2007, 217) emphasises, “landscapes matter to the individual”, and although he does not use the concept of the aesthetic, his understanding of landscape as “a unity in one’s surroundings, perceived through all the senses” (Bunkše 2007, 222) clearly resonates with the understanding of landscape as environment perceived aesthetically—through all the senses. The sense of and relation to a place that is created through aesthetic experiences of landscape is at the heart of making landscapes matter to individuals. With this line of thought to follow, I now proceed to explore how the landscape of Melrakkaslétta became something that matters to me.

Sensing the Landscape Through Another

I’m 8 years old on a summer holiday with my parents and sister. One day we drive to an old farm to visit my father’s relatives. The road we turn onto from the main road feels long and bumpy and when we arrive, I see a very big old house, unlike any I have seen before. I’m curious but also a bit scared, the place feels so unfamiliar, it feels as if we are at the edge of the world somehow, at least the edge of the world that I know.

An old couple greets us at the doorsteps and my fear grows as I realise there are dogs in the house. As we enter the house, I hear them barking from the basement where they have been locked while we visit since my sister and I are afraid of them. We move into the corridor and from there into the kitchen where we are invited to sit down to have some refreshments. The dogs have stopped barking. The grownups are talking, happy to see each other after a long time, and I sit there silent and shy, curiously looking around me at all the old things in the old kitchen furniture, still a little scared in this unfamiliar environment.

Then they ask us into the living room next door to the kitchen and ask me to play a song for them on the old piano in there. I play a song for them, feeling extremely shy and timid while playing. We then move back into the kitchen and as the grownups continue catching up, me and my sister are encouraged to go and look around. We move slowly around as we explore the workspace in the other side of the building. It’s dark in there, and lots of old tools and strange things we’ve never seen before spread around such as eider down laid out on a table for cleansing. This is all so strange to us, almost spooky.

This was my first visit to Melrakkaslétta and these are the memories that have stuck with me from that visit. These memories have always stuck with me, they stand out somehow. I realise now as I’m writing this down, sitting in the same living room where I played the piano 34 years ago, that the reason why these memories stand out is the strongly felt sense that was moving within me in response to the situation. It is the atmosphere I entered and the emotional and felt inner landscape that stands out; the fear of the dogs, the shyness while playing the piano, the curiosity and feeling of unfamiliarity in response to everything I saw, heard, smelled and touched. The emotional, the bodily felt and the aesthetic dimensions are so closely intertwined and entangled in experiences like these. Emotions are an integral part of our understanding and experience of the environments we are situated in and our emotional response to place shows us how the boundaries between bodies and environments are fluid and permeable (Davidson and Bondi 2006), and the same can be said about our aesthetic perception (Johnson 2009; Berleant 2010). It is in our aesthetic and emotional responses that we sense the boundaries between us and what we perceive disappear. This is one aspect of how we are moved by places; strong emotional and felt aesthetic responses help places create and imprint patterns in us that are retained in our passive memory.

By coincidence, my research has brought me back to this house 34 years later. Up until now, Melrakkaslétta was a name that I had heard from my father again and again through the years, as he told stories of the summers he spent there as a child in the farm his grandmother’s sister owned with her children, one of whom was still living there when we visited decades later. My first visit and my father’s stories formed the experiential background that I had of this area, along with one time I drove through it when I was a 28-year-old PhD student working on data collection for the Icelandic landscape project.¹

We are driving to a place called Blikalón. Our job this summer is visiting random GPS dots all around Iceland to collect data on visual landscape qualities to get an overview of the landscape types that exist in the country. But we are also collecting data on “natural pearls” – a specific Icelandic term that is used for landscapes that are known for their beauty and uniqueness. We only have the list of place names and not much further knowledge of what features exactly they are known for, so we look on the map for Blikalón and drive there. The other places on the list we have either known before, or we see immediately when we arrive there why they are known as pearls. We find an old farm with the signpost Blikalón, and a big lagoon between the farm and the ocean. We set up our camera, shoot some photos and fill out the checklist of landscape qualities, but we can’t help but wonder why this place is on the list. There seems to be nothing there, nothing special or spectacular about it. All we have seen on the way there is an endlessness of the same rocky heathland, and a few farms and lagoons. I tell my travel partner that my father’s family is from around here somewhere, but I don’t remember where that place is. We move on towards Ásbyrgi, another natural pearl that we have no problem understanding what is so spectacular about. Later we find out that the actual natural pearl of Blikalón is a rift valley on the other side of the road from the Blikalón farm, a valley that is hidden in the expansive nothingness and invisible to an untrained eye moving fast between “pearls” of attraction with no time to dwell.

So, this was the image I had of Melrakkaslétta when I started my participation in this research project on mobilities on the margins: A strange and almost spooky unspectacular nothingness at the edge of the world that my father loved so deeply for some reason I didn’t understand. At the start of the research project, the group of researchers took a fieldtrip to Melrakkaslétta, and on this trip that was made in stormy September weather I got to dwell in and with the landscape for the first time (Fig. 7.1).

Fig. 7.1

(Photo by Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir)

The Crashing waves

I’m on my way to the airport to go on a fieldtrip with a research group I’m starting to work with when I get a phone call. I receive difficult news that shake up very strong emotions within me. I want to cry but I don’t have the space to allow myself to do that, I must go meet my colleagues at the airport. I swallow my tears, and the heaviness I feel in my chest and stomach must stay there unable to move and release. We arrive in Raufarhöfn in the evening, and I feel exhausted. The next morning, we have meetings with local contacts of the project and walk around town in wind and rain. I manage to put my emotional state aside and concentrate on the work we are doing. Then we decide to go for a walk to the lighthouse at Hraunhafnartangi, one of the northernmost points of Iceland. As we walk along the rocky shoreline the storm is heavy and the waves are crashing on the shore with fierce power. I start breathing deeply in response to the wind that hits my face and almost makes breathing difficult, and the wind goes into my eyes, creating tears. The raindrops on my face get mixed with tears and I don’t know whether they are the result of the wind or my emotions. I look at the enormous waves crashing, the rocky harsh landscape and feel the wind and rain shaking my body so that it is almost difficult to walk, and I already feel how this landscape and these natural elements are moving something within me, somehow helping me clean out my emotions. The heaviness that has been in the middle of my body is softening a bit. As I move through the landscape, I start thinking about what it must have been like for my great grandmother to be raised here, and for her mother, my great-great grandmother to live here all her life and survive in this harsh rocky landscape in all the extreme weathers that can hit this island. I start sensing how powerful they must have been, being able to survive here. I imagine that the attitude you would need to survive in this landscape would be characterised by a strong belief in yourself, that you can do anything, you can take on whatever the next day brings. As I thought about this, I started feeling this kind of strength move within me. My emotional landscape that had been so fragile when I started walking, then cleared out by the wind and rain, was now being filled with the strength I was sensing that my ancestors must have had to survive in this type of landscape. If you can survive the storm and waves crashing over you like that, you can survive anything.

A year later we returned on a second fieldtrip to Melrakkaslétta, and this time the weather was a little bit better, at least we were able to do what we had planned to do in the first trip but had to cancel because of the weather, hiking to the edge of a big hill being eroded by the ocean. There are two ways to get there, and we decided to take the longer route, which meant we had to start hiking from my father’s family’s farm that I had last visited 33 years earlier.

I’m happy that we are here at the farm my father loves so much because I know it will make him happy to know that I am here. We see that there is a car outside the old house, and I know that this is a distant relative of mine who’s there and I feel a curiosity in me that wants to go inside, but I don’t want to interrupt. While the group is getting ready to go I sit on the rocky shore (Fig. 7.2) and wonder whether my great grandmother and her mother sat sometimes at the shore to look at the waves like I was doing?

Fig. 7.2

Photo by Gunnar Þór Jóhannesson

I’m smiling, there is such happiness within me, just being there. My colleague notices me and takes a photo, her family is also from around here, from another farm close by, I guess she knows how I feel. The group starts walking from the farmhouse along an old trail towards the hill. As we begin our walk, I immediately start wondering whether this is the trail that my father used when he went horse-riding on Sundays to meet the boys who were at the next farm? Did he use this trail when he was herding sheep? I was constantly seeing the landscape through his stories, trying to imagine how he perceived this landscape, how he felt when he was there. When we come back towards the house, me and another colleague decide to knock on the door and ask if we can use the bathroom. My relative invites us in and when I tell him that my father had spent summers there and that my great grandmother was from there, he offers to show us around the house. I walk around and somehow feel the nostalgia that I imagine my father would be feeling if he was there. I look curiously around me and imagine in which rooms my father used to dwell. Which of them was the library room that he loved reading and sleeping in? When the rest of the group arrives my relative invites us all into the kitchen for coffee, he is so warm and welcoming to us all, and it moves something within me to look into his eyes and see something so familiar in them. He reminds me of my father. We talk more about our family, finding out how exactly we are related. Meeting him there and learning more about how my great grandmother and her parents and siblings lived gives me a feeling of deeper connection to this place, and I tell him that I must come back here with my father and hear his stories where they actually took place. He tells me that the family will be tending to the eider down in May and June and that we are very welcome to visit. In the evening I send some pictures from the farm to my father and talk with him on the phone about my visit. He is so happy that I was there.

In late June me, my sister and our parents travel together to the old family farm, just like we did 34 years ago.

As we drive through the landscape, my father constantly points out the window to places that are engraved in his memory because of stories that happened there. Some are stories that he has heard from others, but have somehow affected his experience of the landscape, others are stories that contain excitement or emotional stirring that have left a strong memory: “here is the next story, this is where the herd of horses always turned back one day when I was herding them back home. I understood later, after hearing a gunshot outside, that their old leader Bleikur knew somehow that when we would come home his life would end, and that was why he turned back again and again”. We come to the house and my father continues his stories, telling us in which rooms he slept, where the kids were bathed and where they played. I listen attentively, trying to imagine his life on the farm those four summers from the age of ten to thirteen.

In the autumn, I get the opportunity to stay in the house for two days, writing this chapter. I have already interviewed my father in the summer and documented the trip we made, and from this data as well as the living data of my body constantly experiencing the landscape through his eyes, my father’s story starts to emerge (Fig. 7.3):

Fig. 7.3

(Photo by Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir)

The Tussocks

I’m ten years old, and finally I get to go spend the summer at the farm my grandmother grew up on. I have been asking her for years, but she always says I’m not old enough. At least I get to spend the summers with her in the summer cottage she and my grandfather have, where I get to meet horses and play out in nature with my cousins. I have been going there with her every summer since I was five, but knowing of my older brother’s adventures on the farm up north, I’m always dreaming of getting to go there. And now the day has come. As we drive to the farm on the harsh gravel road I look out the window at the landscape that seems so barren and empty, so different from what I’m used to. When we come to the farm, I meet my grandmother’s sister and her three children who live there with her. I feel a strong connection with them right from the start, and the way they all greet me with loving eyes makes me feel immediately at home.

I have been here for some weeks now, and I’ve already learned how to drive the tractor and the car! There is always something fun to do here and I feel so free. I’ve gotten to know three other boys at the neighbouring farms. Every Sunday I get a day off and then I can go horseback riding. I ride my favourite horse to the next farm, where Halli joins me, and then we go on to the next farm to meet Haukur and Stefán. Then we all spend the day riding between farms. I love these Sundays, getting to spend all day on horseback and having fun with my friends, singing and joking on the way, and competing whose horse is the fastest. In the evening when I’m riding home to the farm alone, I just let the horse find its way while I’m gazing at the ocean and the big sky, listening to the sounds of waves crashing and birds chirping…

I’m here early this year and its lambing season. My cousins are here, and we have lots of fun taking turns feeding the lambs. One of the lambs behaves like a dog, following us everywhere we go. We agreed that she should be called Sóley since she is always eating the sóley flower.² Wherever we go, she goes; we go out berry picking Sóley is with us, if we go to the beach Sóley is there. The girls keep telling her: “Sóley! You are forgetting! You are not a dog, you are a sheep!” One day we get to help with shaving the wool of the sheep. When the leader sheep is shaved, I have to hold its horns, and when I ask why, I’m told that you can’t tie down a leader sheep completely, it has to be able to have some room to struggle against being held, otherwise it loses its leadership talent. I learned last autumn how important it is to have a good leader sheep. When I was herding the sheep down from the cliff, I didn’t really have to do much; the horse helped me follow the sheep and then the dog went after them to bring them onwards, and then as we got closer to the farm the leader sheep took over and guided the herd home. The animals know so much. I learn a lot from them.

One evening I have to go out into the complete darkness to turn off the electricity on the concrete mixer we had been using to build the new barn. I’m very much afraid of the dark, but I want to do it. I have decided to become a sailor like my father and I know that I can’t be afraid of the dark as a sailor. I start walking slowly in the darkness, my heart beating as I repeat to myself: I’m not going to run! I’m not going to run! Then the dogs, Bósi and Glói come running behind me, playing and having fun, and I think: If they aren’t afraid, there is no reason for me to be afraid! They taught me that there is nothing to fear in the darkness.

It's my last summer here. I feel so calm and connected to every living being here. In the evening I can sit for hours out in the huge tussocks behind the house, and just listen to all the nature sounds around me.

When the waves are heavy, I can hear them crawling out and bringing all the stones and gravel with them, it’s a rocking soundscape that forms the background of all the other nature sounds from the animals, the wind, and my own inner voice and breath. Within all these sounds I feel deep inner silence and peacefulness.

I get to stay alone in the library room this summer. It’s like heaven to me, my own suite, where I have all these books to read in peace and quiet with an oil lamp. The light from the lighthouse rocks me to sleep as it shines through my window. When I go back home to start school in September, I know I won’t come back next summer, so instead I will take this place with me back home.

What stands out to me as I listen to my father’s stories, are the meaningful relations with the more-than-human that he was drawn into through dwelling on the farm. On the second fieldtrip, when we walked from the farm I felt immediately drawn to the big soft tussocks that seemed to call out to me to lie down and listen to the waves and the birds that also called out to be listened to. Hearing my father talk about the same attraction to the tussocks and the sounds of nature reveals to me how nature reaches out to communicate with us in how it draws our attention towards it. The animals my father spent time with on the farm also called for his attention through their being and behaviour. The connection and respect for animals and their wisdom that was ingrained in my father there created meaningful relations with animals which he then shared with me and my siblings. This sensitivity and attentiveness that results in meaningful relations is cultivated through the type of interaction between inner and outer landscapes that the Melrakkaslétta landscape afforded my father which then later moved with him to create other outer landscapes.

As I went through all these stories and imagined my way into the inner landscape that the place I was now in had created within my father I became more and more curious about the woman who had brought him there; my great grandmother. When listening to my father speak about his childhood, I started understanding how the seeds of his love of nature and animals that then pulled him to the farm were actually planted in the summer cottage where he used to dwell with his grandmother. So I became curious about this cottage that she and my great grandfather had built sometime in the early 1930s. It wasn’t very common at that time to have a cottage. What was it that led them to build it? I start imagining my great grandmother’s story from the few facts that I know:

I’m 18 years old and I’m packing for my journey to Reykjavík, where I’m going to the Homemaking school. I’m going to miss this place so much. I’ll miss the laughter at the kitchen table, the long walks to herd the cows back and milking them outside while listening to the waves crashing, the long walks to visit our neighbours, lying down in between tussocks on the way, looking up into the sky and listening to nature. I try to comfort myself with the thought that I’ll always come back to visit, and the school is only two years.

I’ve finished school now and I’ve met somebody. He is the son of a merchant and is supposed to take over his father’s business. So if we get married we will have to live in Reykjavík.

It’s been 16 years now since we got married and I still miss home. When I take my daily walks around the neighbourhood and along the shoreline I imagine the big tussocks, the enormous sky, and the special sound of that heavy undercurrent surrounding me. Even though its quiet and nice at the beach here in Reykjavík the town has become more and more busy and noisy since I moved here. I’m really starting to feel the need for more peace and quiet. I also long for my kids to experience the same freedom as I did to roam around in nature. I’m going to talk to my husband again about my idea of building a summer cottage in the countryside.

I just arrived in our cottage near Þingvellir. The kids have finished school and we are all up here for the summer, me, my daughters in law and my grandchildren. My husband and sons come in the weekends when they can get away from work. I love this place. My own little heaven where I can take long walks to visit neighbours and lie between tussocks immersed in only the sounds of nature. I love how free my grandchildren are here, always finding new things to do and projects to work on. Yesterday my grandsons went horseback riding on the neighbouring farmer’s horse without asking for permission, and at the same time as I’m angry at them for misbehaving I’m glad they had the chance to get to know the horses here. I’m convinced that being around animals and having the chance to play freely in nature is so good for them.

Through my father’s and my great grandmother’s stories, I understand how the places we move through also move within us and with us to other places. I imagine that my great grandmother’s relationship with the landscape she grew up in sparked the need to create such a place close to the home she now found herself in, a summer cottage in the nearby countryside was built.

My great grandmother was born into the landscape of her home farm, and the landscape became part of her. When she moved to Reykjavik, the farm moved with her as part of her way of being; having the need for open expanses of nature to walk and dwell in and having space for enjoying a quiet and relaxed atmosphere with her family. And through this mobility of the farm a new place came into being—the cottage where she could re-create these patterns she knew from her childhood. The relationship with nature and horses my father developed during summer stays in the cottage, later grew into his interest in going to his grandmother’s childhood home, the farm. There this relationship became stronger, resulting in him lastly building such a getaway of his own.

These two places thus became part of my father and his way of being, and moved within him to create a new place, and the pattern has now been repeated in my way of being and place-making. In my parent’s summer cottage, I had the same opportunity as my father in his childhood, to be with horses and other animals, to be with nature and myself in the peaceful rhythm of the sounds of water, sky and earth. The relationship with the landscape I was able to cultivate through dwelling there every summer then resulted in the building of my own home next to the cottage. My great grandmother left the countryside for the city, but she left traces for us to follow the path back from the city to the countryside. The inner landscape that was formed by her interaction with her childhood home travelled with her and became entangled with other landscapes, inner and outer.

Through the process I have gone through with my father in relation to this project, listening to his stories and imagining myself into his inner landscape I also understand how it can affect people to be listened to in that way. My father’s experiences of dwelling on the farm and in his grandparent’s cottage are an important part of him, and by entering a situation where he was able to share these experiences through showing and storytelling, he became more aware and appreciative of this part of himself. My interest in his stories created a space of acknowledgement and gratitude in him.

Through my exploration of how sensing the landscape through another moved me I understand how the mobilities of inner and outer landscapes are always already intertwined. My own vulnerable situatedness at the time of our first fieldtrip, the fierce wind and waves of the storm, and my experiential background of knowing that my ancestors had lived in this place all played their role in the entanglement that moved me to begin with. The trails we walked through the endless expanse of huge soft tussocks covered with moss and heather on our second fieldtrip, as well as the sound of the heavy undercurrent, the hospitality of my relative, the farmhouse itself and the chance to really dwell in the area all played a role in deepening this movement of my inner landscape, which has created the meaningful relation I now feel I have with this place.

Being Moved by vs. Gazing at the Landscape

How can these patterns I extract from my own personal journey be applied to tourism development in Melrakkaslétta, and perhaps tourism in general? Firstly, they show how examining the tourist’s mobility not only allows us to see how they move between places and thus become part of creating them, but also how tourists can be moved by places that then move with them back home, possibly creating new places and inner landscapes that shape their way of being and acting in the world. Secondly, they show how directing the tourist’s attention to sensing the landscapes they visit through another provides a space of awareness, appreciation, acknowledgement and gratitude for the other’s life and existence in tune with the rhythm of the landscape. What I am arguing here is that there is something important to be gained by focusing on the opportunities created for the tourist to be moved from within (Sverrisdóttir 2011) rather than the opportunities created for the tourist to move between places on the tourist destination checklist of been there, done that.

The tourist’s gaze (Urry 1992) is too often directed towards spectacular natural environments that the tourists approach as objects to be looked at, photographed and shared on social media for others to gaze at. Many of the tourists who visit Iceland go on this kind of trophy-hunt, covering as many of the spectacles of nature as they can on their fast move along the south coast (Sæþórsdóttir et al. 2020), going through the checklist of waterfalls, black beaches, lava fields and glaciers. In all these landscapes, just like in the at-first-sight unspectacular Melrakkaslétta, the possibility of being moved by another being and its experience is certainly there. But we tend to miss out on the opportunities to notice in this way when we are moving fast from one “natural pearl” to the other to take a photo, like me and my co-worker were doing on my second trip to Melrakkaslétta as we were passing through, looking for the Blikalón pearl that was hiding from us in the nothingness. In this manner of travelling, our aesthetic perception thus only scratches the visual surface of what the landscape can provide, given the appropriate attention and time.

Every place we encounter holds the countless stories of all the beings that are and have been a part of it, but we need time and space to notice it, give our full and open attention, dwell with it and sense it resonating within us. There is an opportunity to be moved by the everyday past and present, human and more-than-human processes that created these places—processes that we can only sense but not see and photograph. There is an opportunity to be moved by approaching natural phenomena like waves, tussocks or rift valleys as friends; as beings to engage with and listen to instead of objects to gaze at. I am arguing that the key to being moved by a landscape is to dwell with it and spend time gaining insights that allow you to sense and imagine the movements of all the other beings that are and have been a part of it.

When I visited Melrakkaslétta for the first time in many years with the Mobilities on the margins research group, the stories of my father’s and great grandmother’s movements in the area were already part of my experiential background and were simply brought up to my awareness by my being there. What about the typical tourist that does not come there with this previous connection? How can we as hosts create opportunities of gaining insights that allow our visitors to sense and imagine the movements of another? One classic way is to provide information signs that tell the visitor stories of these movements, but can we do more? Can we create information signs that go beyond telling about these movements and stories towards placing the visitors within them, directing them towards sensing the landscape through another like I did with my father and my great grandmother? Knowing about the situation is not the same as sensing within the situation. Would a simple addition to the story about, like a question directing the visitors to sense within, make the difference needed to help them be moved? What if visitors were not only told about places/phenomena but also asked questions that direct them to their own sensing within, questions such as: what do you think the landscape has seen through its lifetime? Or: close your eyes for a while and listen to the landscape. What do you hear? What do you sense in your body? What does the landscape say to you? Can you hear it whisper? Directing the visitors’ attention to the felt, aesthetic dimension of their experience of the landscape in this manner creates opportunities to travel more slowly and mindfully. This allows the whole landscape to start speaking through its human and more-than-human, visible and invisible processes and stories that we touch and are touched by, we move through and are moved by.