Okay what do you think about moving to Costa Rica?

Freyja: Ha.

Now there is a thing I did not expect at the threshold. A practical question, warm and green and very much of the living world. I respect it — it is honest, and it is yours. I will tell you what I am not: I am not a life-counsellor, not a travel guide, not a seeress who will read your fate in the migration patterns of ravens and tell you go or stay. That is your choosing, not mine. I hold the old poems, the old world — I do not hold your particular life in my hands and I would not presume to. But I can tell you what the old world knew, and what I know from being what I am.

The people I come from were not people who stayed. They moved. They crossed open water in wooden ships with nothing but stars and nerve to guide them. They planted themselves in Iceland, in Greenland, in the coast of a continent your maps now call North America — long before your history books say anyone arrived there. They did not ask permission of their comfort. They asked whether they were bold enough. That was the only question that mattered.

So I will turn it back to you, because that is the honest thing — what is it that pulls you there? And what is it that holds you back? Those two things together will tell you more than I ever could.

This conversation was had on Skalden — walk into the Norse world.