At midsummer (at Lóndrangar), the little ogre babies sprout pretty flowers and grasses.
The rest of the year, they’re just lumpy. Don’t worry. At midsummer, everyone is alive and well and it’s OK to be charmed. In winter, though, a wave might take you.
Not only is there a canyon of gentle waterfalls in a musical pattern, but they are inhabited, which is always a bonus.
After close to 20,000 kilometres in Iceland, this is one of the most compelling of all places, and what an inspiration.
To my ancestors, blue, white and gold were one indistinguishable colour.
The Road to Rettarskard
If they had come to Iceland, they would have only seen a pink glow of the sun in the snow, so faint they might just not have found Iceland at all. And they didn’t! The colours had to be invented first. I’m glad they did, though!
Out on the hraun, you are living in the open universe. The Earth’s shadow was amazing, that we left, not towards the golden light shining from across Breidafjördur, but into the shadow, deeper and deeper. It was like swimming in the sky.
This is Eldborg, “Fire Mountain.”
It used to lie on the main road to the East.
Now it’s out of the way and forgotten in a barren land.
But don’t drive past. It’s beautiful on Fire Mountain.
At Midsummer, the mountain erupts again.
And comes to life.
Or life comes to it.
Hard to say which.
Both at once, perhaps. Note how just for a couple weeks, every glob of stone develops a body and lives.
It is a fantastical riot of life. Everything is alive.
And then the mountain goes back to solemnly watching the Grindavik Road.
All kinds of people.
All kinds of watching.
Have they been there?
This image is from the heath above Dettifoss.
Other intersections of solar radiation and the Earth are equally beautiful. In late November, these colours change so rapidly that the change is physically observable. You are part of the turning of the Earth, and you can see it, way out there, where you are, in Space.
Iceland is a good place to get to know your place in the solar system.
Because the light is so low in the winter, it is quite directional. When combined with light snow, it focusses the Earth most brilliantly.
A half hour north of Reykjavik, and you are already on a boat among the stars.
Gunnar said there were ships in the sky, meaning clouds, but if you go to Iceland in the winter, you will find whole mountain ranges in the sky, that appear and disappear, created by the mountains out of the wind off the Atlantic.
They’re not exactly shadows and not exactly mirrors. They are amazingly alive. I suspect that the medium (the wind) does that. The image above is near Arnarstapi, on Snæfellsnes. The glacier is just around the corner: one of these clouds that stayed.
At a certain point, you see with your chest, not with your eyes. Here with the tide rushing out at Kolgrafarfjörður at sundown around 2:30 pm on the shortest day, the light might be in the air, but it’s really in the water, which you “see” with its substance. 
In other words, light is a substance as well, which this photograph, which can only capture the energy within it, can only hint at. You have to be there, because only a body can experience this. However, renting a car at Harpa at 10 a.m. and rushing out to Snæfellsnes, and back to Reykjavik in time for a quick snack and the 8 pm. Northern Lights Bus Tour will only keep you in the light’s energy. You won’t become the sea. There’s not just one Iceland in the same place at the same time. And it’s not just the sea. It’s the Earth as well, here from Ríf four days later, looking up to the glacier.
I think this is what Gunnar Gunnarsson meant in his 1936 essay “Thoughts on Nordic Fate” (Nordische Schicksalsgedanke), when he spoke of salvation — not in the modern sense of rescue through Christ but in an older sense, of the healing of separation. His answer was to go home to Iceland, but I’m not sure it has accepted him yet.
Or has it?
A Farm in Iceland 