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.
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!
Dwarf city in the West Fjords…
Frost spirits at the Glacial Lagoon, in the South …
A buried elf city in þingvellir.
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.
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…
… a kind of way of seeing transformation rather than durability.
We call that life.
Private life in Iceland is often an improvisation. Many people are just camping. 
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.
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.
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….
…religions…
… cheap junk from China.
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.
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.
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.
It becomes your voice, as you drag whatever home you can, thinking, “Ya, I bet I can find a use for that someday…”
or “Hmmm, I could wear that.” 
One can make combinations, for example. 
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.
And then being the land on which others land.
Here, every window is the sea.
Would you be able to support a family by raising sheep on a lava field like this?
Or would a farm on the cliff, below a waterfall blown upwards by hurricane do the trick? 
Those are your choices. Not only that, but your choices view, and are viewed by, the desperate gambles of others. Try that.
When Gunnar was a boy at ValÞfjösstaður Farm, he was given a walnut for Christmas: one walnut. It was an unimaginable gift of wealth. He ate the nut, and with the one half intact shell, he made a boat and set into the stream, the ValÞfjösstaðurá, that flowed off the Ogre’s Stairway above the farm, and chased along beside as it went. Out of that walnut, he dreamed of ships crossing the sea, and of leaving isolation to be a full citizen of the greater world. He did, and then he came home, and then he went to Reykjavik. He’s buried now on Viðey, the holy island in Old Reykjavik Harbour. I tried to bring him a stone from home four years ago, but it was late in the year and the ferry wasn’t running. I promised to come back. I did, just last fall. I brought him a gift from across the sea.
Do you see the walnut shell there, for his travels? Fare well, dear Gunnar, on whatever seas bear you.
A small woman walks her smaller child on Viðey in the immensity of the world.
When you visit Skogafoss…
… bring a camera…
… and turn your back to the water. If you look at it too closely, it will make you feel like you’re falling to the centre of the earth.
That’s right. Travel safe, everyone.
When air freezes within water, it makes stones.
This is the beach of the sky! When stone freezes and is ground by water, it makes pebbles. This is the beach of the sea.
People see all of this and make social beaches, called walls.
Life in Iceland is a beach.
A Farm in Iceland 