Fire and ice, and towers of steam. How easy it is to forget that we are all floating on a thin crust underneath so much heat! Yet this is the true nature of our Earth – both today and millions of years ago. This is where first life was created, in a primeval soup with a temperature close to 100 degrees centigrade.

We humans have a wonderful ability to restrict our reality to something immediate we can cope with. Curiously we consider ourselves safe and sound on a smoldering ball of fire and iron, spinning away in the solar system on the fine line between freezing cold and boiling hot. And so when a volcanic eruption blasts out a gentle reminder of a more objective reality, we are unable to accept that the world we consider green and beautiful and full of life is just a thin exception of the norm.

(Great Geysir, Iceland; January 2014)