Monthly Archives: February 2017

Water Paths in Iceland

There are vertical paths.
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There are horizontal ones.

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In a gale, they can be both at once.

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We see these falls as paths because we are pathfinders. See the path to the right in the image below? Can’t resist?

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Of course not. That is the human spiritual trace. The sheep is an elaboration, and exquisite for that. These creatures are not paths but warmth, hearth and home. Their other form is this:

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That is a sheep and a human family, spiritualized as one, in time. This is the water path that makes it possible:

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It is one with them, because of human path-finding. That is the spiritual path at the edge of the known world.

Forever on Guard for Iceland

While we’ve been chatting, the ogress of Dritvik has been keeping guard to the west. p1350855

Day in and day out, in darkness and light, with a cormorant on her head, or not, she has been guarding against the formlessness that comes in off the sea.  With her troll whale companion. Never heard of a troll whale? Go to Dritvik.

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Together, they watch out, for us.

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This is vitally important work. I give thanks.

If You Talk to Ravens

They will do tricks for you. If you talk to them. That’s because you’ll startle them and they’ll do acrobats mid-air to try to understand your bad accent.tricky

Don’t worry. They’ll repeat what they think you said so you can get it right. You’re up to this. Don’t worry. They’ll always have the first word…and the last. But you’re good with humility, right? Sure you are!

 

Of Dwarves and Men

Dwarf city in the West Fjords…p1040628

Frost spirits at the Glacial Lagoon, in the South …p1320454

A buried elf city in þingvellir.green

The patterning is consistent. This is flocking, the rubbing of loose knots of fabric out of a woven cloth. Sheep, birds and cheese follow the same energy to come together in groups, and clots, as does, yes, blood. Yes, you’re looking at blood, not the red stuff in your veins so much as something more general, part of an old conception of spirit that predates Iceland by untold millennia and is remembered there as a living world.

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The principle is universal. Where today’s civilization, the civilization of “nature” sees one form of energy, the old one is scarcely hidden, a kind of edge effect…waterstuff

… a kind of way of seeing transformation rather than durability.pebbles

We call that life.

 

Camping and Poverty in Iceland

Private life in Iceland is often an improvisation. Many people are just camping. p1400630

Reykjavik, Downtown

This misfit between built environments and how people fit into them is profound and nearly universal. It looks like poverty. It probably feels like it. It’s probably a profound resistance, the very one that Gunnar, in a more rural Iceland, called wealth.

Street Taggers Mailbox in Reykjavik

I present this image as an example of the current state of traditional Norse skaldic shield poetry — a traditional form of defensive armour, to verbally accompany intricate, interwoven carvings on shields, which told truth to a chieftain; if told intricately and wittily enough, it could change a chieftain’s path without forfeiting the skald’s head. It’s good to see the tradition continue, and with disposable beer glasses for all, too.p1330410

 

The Thing About Being an Island

On an island there is only the sea and an eye in the midst of it. Things wash up on the eye. They are magical emblems of a distant world. It doesn’t matter what they are, their magic haunts you. Purses….pursereligions…maria

… cheap junk from China.p1330196

It is all the same. By displaying it, you become part of the world, through display. Each piece is an amulet that calls forth the notion of travel, which, because you are an island, you can only achieve by standing still.

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Soon, you dress yourself in these amulets, and the style with which you disguise yourself, just enough so you aren’t completely hidden, becomes your ‘self’. In this way you are revealed, as if you are naked.p1330206

You are. Deep down, you are an island, where the idea of human occupation is just another piece of driftwood washed up on your skin, and everything you do will not erase the foreignness of the world, not even 1100 years of improvisation.

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It becomes your voice, as you drag whatever home you can, thinking, “Ya, I bet I can find a use for that someday…”

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or “Hmmm, I could wear that.” p1030097

One can make combinations, for example. p1050949

Really, anything goes because everything is equal. Everything comes from the world.This is an island. It is not the world. It is a place of finding land, and, slowly, being found by it.

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And then being the land on which others land.

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Here, every window is the sea.