Sometimes, limestone catches the Arctic wind.
Dryas octopetala (White Dryad)
One is best to stop and read one’s self. Take your time. This book has more than one word.
Mountain Avens at Kirkjubær
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Author Archives: Harold Rhenisch
Shipwrecked in the Beauty of the Northern Sun
As the sun sets over the Skagafjörður and the peninsular pillar of Þorðarhöfði, the waves bring it onto the black sand beach of Gardssanður with a promise of dawn.
And not just of dawn but of eternity. Maybe it’s not definable otherwise, but it sure is here: Eilíifð, roughly translated as “eternity,” better as the “living on”, in the sense of survivors (such as settlers in Iceland, in the midst of such a sea.) Such is the haunting pleasure of islands.
A Bridge Can Be a Thing of Beauty
(Beauty can also be a bridge.)
Skagafjörður from Hofstaðir, looking North
Icelandic Trail Etiquette
Wild Geraniums in Ásbyrgi
Deep in the birch forest, the wild geranium blooms.
Blágresi (Geranium sylvaticum)
Worth getting the feet wet, I say!
At Home in Iceland
In Gunnar’s Iceland, a man’s home was what he could build with his own hands.Rocks for a wall were present everywhere. The hands responded.
And a house was made of sod, cut from that home, by the same hands. So, all those fields in Iceland?
Those are the bodies of men. That’s what it is to be home.
Awe in the Land of Giants
Some mountains are so powerful, their names are primal forces from a land of giants.
Urðahlið: The Broken Mountain, or even The Broken Gate.
Borgarfjördur in Arnarfjörður
It is good that we are small. It is good to know.
Why Iceland Doesn’t Just Sink into the Atlantic
The rock is full of air.
Here it is up-close:
Kind of like styrofoam, really. Every bubble chamber in the rock is a time capsule of a wee bit of a volcanic eruption. Grass even roots in it and sucks that old gas in.
How cool is that!
~
Ásbyrgi
The Place to Go in Iceland, If You Dare
You can be of two minds, at once. They are not in conflict. A forest full of quick life to take you there, through the web of your thoughts?
Or a forest of slow, enduring life, the cliff of ghosts that awaits and towers above you, your body given face as memory?
At Botnstjörn, the windless pond sheltered by birches deep in Ásbyrgi, you can be both at once. They are not in conflict.
Surrender, and feel yourself lose all weight.
What Do Icelandic Sheep Love Most of All?
Well, the very first blade of the very first grass to ever grow on a steep, eroding slope, that’s what. Mmmm.
It’s self-defeating, but, oh my, it tastes so good.
A Farm in Iceland 
