Here is the great lone volcano and glacier, looking North from Londrangar. In this shot, it has a cloak of lava and moss spread at its feet.
Here it is a few minutes later, with human alteration: a farm!
It’s a stunning spirit, any way you look at it.
And the boats.
In Iceland, barn architecture, being as sturdy as a mountain…
…can serve all purposes. It’s the details that count. In this boat yard, for instance, it’s harbour between the devil (the road) and the deep blue sea (the shipping container.)
What jokesters those Icelanders are, when it comes to hard truths.
Build what you want. Bright colours help with depression.
Really, that’s it.
First, you sit on a troll’s head at Midsummer, when even the stones come alive. If that sounds fantastical, you should really go to Iceland at Midsummer. You’ll see. In this way of the thrush, you get to hang out with a troll. Nice.
The other way of the thrush is to be the living thought of the troll, not in words or ideas, but in thrush. Nice, too!
Remember, trolls aren’t animate beings from fairytale, but places where rocks are made into home and mind through attachment. It could be you. It could be the thrush. It could be the thrush leading you into the Earth, where you find yourself.
And, since this is the 21st Century, it’s silicon technology, of course.
And carbon free!
We climbed Orrustuhóll, or Battle Hill, west of the convent and east of the Black Falls…
… and there in the lush green full of spirits ….
…in the midst of a harsh lava field …
… we found the elves’ horses.
This is another hiking site in Iceland that was popular in the Golden Age of the 1950s, one of the ones that made a trip on the new Ring Road a trip through national pride. Now there is room for one car to park off the road. A million tourists a year (well, maybe not this year or last) drive past, just as the elves would like it. I am honoured to have been invited and let in.
It’s not like other slime. Here in Canada, slime on rocks is, you know, gross. In Iceland, where it doesn’t rise from pollution, it’s like a green sun glowing from the edges of the Earth and the sea at once.
Glow on, slime, glow on!
A warm feather quilt comes from a relationship between an Eider farmer and the Eider ducks. Each neck is marked and protected.
Fishers offshore are, perhaps, not so protected.
Harvest is not always a killing. It can be the taking of surplus feathers after nesting, in return for protection from foxes.
These are simple and complex things. To learn them, go to the far North. It is a tenuous economy, but a proud one, which is more than can be said of most.
Kristján Einarsson lived here in Djupalæk.
It’s a bit more exposed than a North American or Continental poet’s house. Here’s the kind of poem you write in a place like this:
Strings
Stones are strings.
Kristján
The water makes them roar.
Its a delight to know
What lives in the mind of water…
Mind you, water is tight these days:
Lots in the Atlantic, but for fresh water for the sheep, it has to be brought in in plastic tanks. Even though it falls, almost daily, from the sky. Isn’t this the real poverty and isolation?
Most dragons in Iceland are in the West, but here’s one in the Northeast.
Nice looking wyrm! From the north side, in the mist, she looks like this:
The dragon of many faces! What does she have her eyes on? Ah, not you or I, but Gatastapi herself.
This is an old whaling station where you can look through things to the other side.
A Farm in Iceland 