As you like it – Connection to Laura Goodman Salverson

As you like it – Connection to Laura Goodman Salverson

“And this our life exempt from public haunt, finds tongues in trees, books in the running brook, sermons in stones, and good in everything”.
–    Shakespeare, ‘As You Like It’
Act 2 Scene 1 Forest of Arden   

My full story about my connection to Laura Goodman Salverson was published in The Icelandic Connection Magazine in 2015.
Link to the story here.

I’m at home surrounded by forest. It’s a quiet and beautiful place to be. Yet even town streets are eerily silent and there too is found a sense of unusual quasi peace and solitude.

It’s an illusion really that we are contented being alone because we need each other more than ever.

Others need us to be present for them, to help, to chat, to check in, to connect with and provide essential services, and, most importantly, to be carriers of and deliver joy.

Others want to know when you need them too. Sharing, giving and receiving can have amazing long term, even unexpected generational consequences.

If you’re like me you’re looking for ways to contribute but feel a profound sense of distraction, or are just simply sidetracked most of the time.

There’s a paradox in our separation and how our oneness is showing up big time. Discovering surprising interconnectedness is a miraculous part of being human.

While walking in my forest today I remembered a faith-restoring coincidence.

On May 12, 1915 a married twenty-five-year-old Icelandic immigrant’s daughter, Laura Goodman Salverson, wrote the quote from the Forest of Arden in ‘As you like it’ in the autograph book of her twenty-one-year-old unmarried boarder, and son of Irish immigrants, my-to-be grandfather George Alexander Jackson.

Cool Coincidence? Here’s some back story.

George left the family farm at Union Point, Manitoba as a teenager to work in Winnipeg delivering telegrams, learned Morse Code along with William Stephenson ‘the Man Called Intrepid’, and later became the Manager of CN Telegraph.

Grandpa George left me his copy of ‘The Viking Heart’ about the immigration of Icelanders in the 1870s by Laura published in 1923. He said ‘Suppers were often late because Mrs Salverson was so engrossed in writing.’

Laura was born in Winnipeg in 1890, a daughter of Icelandic parents who came to Canada in 1887. A woman worthy of greater recognition she won the Governor-General’s award twice, for The Dark Weaver in 1937 and for her autobiographical Confessions of an Immigrant’s Daughter in 1939. She died in Toronto in 1970.

I love to think of my Grandfather and Laura chatting in her kitchen in 1915.
(Maybe with a bit of ‘terta?)

Coincidences are cool. It’s an interesting happenstance that a long time before I was, an Irishman and an Icelander were connecting through the Forest of Arden.

Apparently, Shakespeare named the forest after his Mother Mary Arden.

So, in honour of Shakespeare’s Mother, your Mother, my, Mother, all Mothers, Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s 90th Birthday, forests, people named George, the Viking Heart, cool coincidences and our current lives vastly ‘exempt from public haunts’ let’s celebrate.

Cranberry Rhubarb Vinarterta anyone?

To everything just as you like it!

And to distraction, connection and coincidences.

Our online store is open! Thank you to everyone for your support!

To good in everything.
 Sending lots and lots of love,

Another entry by Laura Goodman Salverson in my Grandfather George Jackson’s Autograph Book:

Link to Book by Jeremy Taylor: