Glaciers are beautiful, as you can see.
Skaftafellsjökull
The human body extends itself into them, and is magnified, just as the sun is. Without them, we are small. With them, we are powerful…
Skeiðarárjökull
…with a power we must give over to them. Then they draw us to themselves.
Sólheimájökull
Gladly.
Groves like the one below are ever-present in Iceland. They are a cross between a will to live, a claim to land, a museum and a graveyard. They are houses for both the living and the dead, on the sites of old turf houses. Almost every farm has one.
They are places of deep feeling, loss, and connection. A cathedral in France or Germany is a more expensive form of this same art form, but no more permanent, just as these groves are worthy of no less honour and respect. They are, in a sense, what viking ships become after 1000 years.
On the south coast of Iceland, the world is being made out of primary forces. It is not happening in the past. It is happening right now.
These forces of wind, water and air are like primary colours.
Which are primary ways of seeing: moods of the day.
It is possible to live within this palette.
Power structures will be expressed in its physical terms.
Once those terms form a new palette, they become a new language.
It turns the earth into a place from which technology is the shelter.
It tries to cast light on this place, because that is what it knows. There are ways.
The world may not be approachable by language, but it is still there. In it, even water is light.
Even light is water.
Out of the loneliness where there are no words for such light, Icelanders snuggle into the dark and write novels. Then they live in them. Sensible, really. A defensive strategy, although a bit transparent.
While they are at it, they invite foreigners to meet the old world of this book…
… for which they have no words except some old manufactured rubble they read in novels: nature, beauty, wonder, the old carny shows. It is enough, though. It is sweet honey.
Words like this allow people to come here to meet themselves, often for the first time, between the lines or right in them.
While Icelanders wrestle with batteries in the mist then give up and go in for a cup of Nescafe.
The mixing goes on, regardless. It braids old battlefields …
… and old shores of grief and shipwreck …
… into that place where the only difference between sea and sky is not made by land but by wind alone and the human capacity for being present in the wind.
Here a man is wind. If you want to speak with him, you will find him there in the ruins of what can no longer be spoken: like a collection of Grecian marbles in the British Museum.
The image above and the image below are the same.
And again.
And again.
They are all books. Look at them shouting for attention.
There is, however, still a world.
It’s not what we think. Let us dare to use the old word again.
The one the eye sees before the mind.
On the woman’s hill on Viðey, it is possible to walk between worlds.
It is here the stones speak a language that is neither Icelandic nor English. It is an eruption of physical presence.
Whatever words we who are human speak, it is no less and no more than this ability to walk through bodies lifted into the air until they become it, and then to breathe them in the same moment as our walking.
This breathing is our way of talking to our ancestors, who the living call the dead. They’re hardly dead.
Not as long as we keep walking among them.
Not as long as we continue to honour them with devotion to each other.
Let us listen with all that we are.
Let us trust the old paths of care.
Let us honour the conversation and the giving forth and the point at which we become the earth at the point that it becomes us.
For it either goes on without us or with us, and we can so be there.
Let us go give thanks by being there.
Let us be honourable children. Let us be there.
Let us give praise, however we can.
However you can, let us find the silence at the heart of speech. Let us stand aside. Let us give each other that much honour. Let us be the speech at the heart of silence. Let us be gathered in.
For we are all the living.
We have much to talk about. 
We have much to walk together through the stillness that gives us movement and stills us at the same moment.
Let us rejoice.
In the understanding of people who live off their land, water is not a substance but an expression of the live-giving quality of slopes with certain qualities: not to collect water, exactly, but to amass it, like gravity. It is this coming together of forces which is water.
An ocean is a different thing altogether. It, too, is not water, but, if the expression of a water out of the land can teach anything, I think it’s that the image below is identical to the one above, with one exception: in the image above, the ocean below is transformed by the lens of the land into the concentration of energy called water.
This ocean, Gunnar Pointed Out, is the great sea of undifferentiated life and death. They are only sorted by passage through a shore.
In effect, this passage is the same one created by the forms of the land that created the small lake above the sea I showed you above. Here it is again, so you can compare.
The product is the same: you are looking at human life being formed by the land.
Look at this lovely patterned ground on the path to the waterfall Glymur. Glymur was hidden behind a flood river, but the way that far was beautiful and austere.
Patterned ground is created near glaciers, where ground freezes and thaws dramatically. Stripes in patterned ground are created by slopes of 2 to 7 degrees. This is ice talking under the ground. Think of it as a balance between water …
… stone …
… and frost.
In Iceland, life doesn’t just come from heat.
I’ve been thinking about walls. What are they for? For shelter, yes, and seemingly to keep sheep in, or out, but into or out of what? I mean, look at the pastures under the Snaefells Glacier.
There’s precious little for sheep in the neighbouring pastures below, and any shepherd is likely to break a leg stomping after sheep in this stuff, and why? There’s as little grass on one side as on the other.
Assuming that in the past Icelandic farmers were as sensible and economical with their energy as any others, might there be a reasonable, but lost explanation? Could the walls be to direct sheep, not to make pasture but so that they herded themselves, a kind of large sheep fold, like the one at the edge of the lava (below)?
Driftwood helps. Is drifting the principle here? To reap the benefits of summer labour in the winter, when labour is just too exposed on the open earth?
Or is it to direct the snow, to bare some slopes for sheep and to bury others with snowdrifts, to provide fresh water in the spring and early summer? It could be. I don’t know.
It wasn’t a fence to guide human walkers in the fog and the dark. Cairns were used for that.
Might it have been to separate the fields by the shore from the fields by the mountain…
… to keep sheep from drifting away from survival food, winter’s seaweed…
Sheep Pasture at Dritvik
…into perilous holes in the lava?
Is it, in other words, about thinking with the land? Is this the wealth that Gunnar Gunnarsson said was at the heart of poverty? Is this an extension of the principle “when you run out of hay anything is hay, anything at all” to land itself, on the lines of “when you run out of pasture anything is pasture,” even if it is only an extension of the poverty of one man over another? Could this be love of land?
In a country in which only a landowner could wed and have children, the impetus to own any kind of land, in any kind of poverty whatsoever, must have been intense. Is that what we’re looking at here? Love?
The stubbornness not to disappear of a people from whom the benefits of community were continually removed, often by foreign traders?
Is drift a way of holding on by bending the way a path goes? I don’t know. Is it still going on?
Is this the principle of drift? Are some fences made of the mind and duty?
Is this how 1,500,000 tourists are safely guided through the cold every year by a few hundred front line Icelanders?
I bet the sheep know.
The sun goes up and down, we’ve had a sandwich or two, storms have come in and out, but the Ogre of Dritvik is still out there. She never stops waiting.
This energy that has been frozen in stone has more than human endurance, even though it is human observation that gives it bodily life. Here are the bits of her that time has worn away:
That is pure Ogre, that is. It squeaks under your feet, calling out its name: “Pebble.” You can pick it up in your hand. Suddenly you are holding stillness. The whole energy of the volcano that made this coast is in your hand. Will you throw it out to sea? Will you hold it? Will you set it down? In this moment of stillness you become the world. The question all of us who have touched her ask is: What then?
It’s a good thing we’re not alone in the rain as we try to figure it out, because that might, ultimately, be the answer.
Don’t be alone in the rain.
What are we waiting for?
What if the Earth were a sphere, continually focussing the sun into moods of light, like these in Breiðafjörður in November, with a very low solar angle…
… or these in Okanagan Lake, between the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Mountains on the North Eastern Pacific Shore, in December (today!)?
To know how the planet was feeling, we would need to gather information globally and integrate it into a unified image.
With arts and sciences of dissection, we wind up talking about the arts and science of dissection, which does the planet no good at all, nor us. Let’s not forget the Icelandic sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson, who saw his task as reducing the complexity of surfaces to elements the eye could see before the mind, and then the construction of technologies that the eye, not the mind, could think with. Things like this:
Of course, he kept the mind busy at the same time, which is always polite. Following his principle, are two eye-poems for your eye, which I showed you yesterday. They are not word poems:
Jökullsárlón
And because we are hospitable here and like company, here’s something for your mind. It is not an eye poem.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
Book poems and mind poems are different things again. Poetry, though, ah, that’s a thing of the world.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
It is our home, but would we not be blind to call it our own? Let us just give praise.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
And thanks.
Breiðafjörður
And help with the braiding …
Solheimajökull
… and the weaving of the fibres of this poem …
Rushes in Lower BX Creek, Okanagan Lake
… together.
Here are some poems that the land wrote.
The land reads them, too.
Even the sun reads them.
It helps with the writing as well.
It is best to consider reading and writing as the same act.
They happen simultaneously.
You have the capacity to read along.
You could call it a map, if you like, for a voyage.
There and back again.
Jökulsárlón
Now for a novel.
Svartifoss
A Farm in Iceland 