If smoke is the outpouring of a geothermal plant, such as that here below in Reykholt …
… is it pollution? I’d say, yes. What, though if it is art? What do you think? What is it?
How Green is Iceland?
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Monthly Archives: July 2018
Books and Dolls
In Iceland, they are the same things: body and mind to touch with your hands.
In used bookstores they have been touched by other hands, and that touch remains and reaches out to you. Do you dare touch back? Dare
The University of North Iceland Graduation Exam for Everyone
In Iceland, so the story goes, you knew you were old enough to go fishing in a small boat on the big grey sea by how heavy of a stone you could lift. A pile of stones was much like a university examination is today. Here is the examination set at Skriðuklaustur, more for fun than anything.
Today no one goes to sea for cod in little wooden ships, but there are still lots of rocks to lift and measure yourself by, and, what’s harder, you can lift the with your mind…
The University of North Iceland
… to learn the language of the rain, now that gravity has torn them from their original story. Much fun can still be had.
The Christian Magic that Invented Iceland
An Old Story Telling its Knot on the Road West of Sælingsdal
Over eleven hundred years, men can cut down all the trees, keep their horses for memory, erode the soil with sheep, battle frost heaves, put in a jeep track, buy a German tractor and some good American haying equipment, and strew nitrogen fertilizer around to stay alive, but the Cross that a woman ordered hammered into a stone to hold back the elves who lived inside it remains, and you will likely think of it as a children’s story. Still, your tractor can’t do a thing with it, nor your sheep, nor your beautiful horses.
Where the Earth Falls from the Sky
It’s not just in Snæfellsnes. It’s everywhere, really: clods of earth like curds in whey on the ground, glopped out of volcanoes, more made with a plow and seeded with pasture grass, and glops of earth in the sky, called clouds, that shade the earth like stone and make you pull a sweater around your shoulders and look up to the fields of the air.
Clods of Earth Falling from the Sky
The old saying, mocked by the Christian parable Chicken Little, which laughs at a chicken who imagines that the sky is falling, of all things, is given its original context if you stop driving around in Iceland and stand still long enough to become the wind, where the old words aren’t old. Iceland is always full of surprises like this.
This is the original world of the islands of the north that gave us the capacity of speech, and if we call only tilled soil clods now, while the ones from volcanoes are called lava and the ones in the air are called condensations of water under pressure regimes, we still draw a sweater over our shoulders when a cloud obscures the sun.
When is a Church a Mountain?
At 11 p.m. in August.
At midnight, you look West and forget churches altogether.
Borgarnes
Icelandic High Speed All-Weather Road
Well, 80 km/h on a good day.
Snæfellsnes
Way too fast! Maybe you should walk?
Wild Fun on Snæfellsnes
When the seabed takes to the air as volcanic stone, the sea takes to the air as cloud to wash over it.
It seems a lot of effort, but it’s obviously worth it.
This is the fun one can have out on Snæfellsnes.
The Elves Next Door
You can’t build where there is already a house. That’s just common sense, right?
The crowded burbs of Rif.
The Purpose of Trees in Iceland
In Iceland, trees wash up on the beach after swimming over from Siberia, which is fun.
Borgarnes
Their purpose is much like that of moose antlers in Canada or Alaska: nail them to the front door to honour wilderness… or a viking ship mast. Or a viking curse.
This is why Icelanders are such fine film makers. They are good at staging dramas in real time.
A Farm in Iceland 