Sunrise.
Noon.
Sunset.
Dusk.
The Colours of Iceland
Leave a reply
Author Archives: Harold Rhenisch
Getting Around in Iceland
There is Iceland, the country, with cars and roads. To get around in that place, you’ll need a car.
But to get around in Iceland itself, the place where you meet the energy of the earth, right on the bottom of the sky?
Well, only your feet will take you there.
Bring boots.
Those other things tend to break down.
What Do You Get When You Cross A Sheep With a Raven?
The angelic sheep of Skogarkot!
Pahoe-hoe lava in Þingvellir National Park
When you can read it you know you have begun to spend enough time alone with the earth. This is the natural enlightenment.
How Winter Comes to Reykjavik
It comes over the mountains from the glaciers, who draw it from the sky and send it back to the sea as an image of themselves.
November 5, 2016, Viðey
It comes as a flood. It comes in a fog river many kilometres in width. It doesn’t come from the Atlantic. That is Caribbean water out there. Up in the sky, well, that is a far different thing. That is not this world at all.
The Earth, Bleeding
Both these images of Icelandic birches were taken around 3 pm in early November. In the first, the red light is brightening the colour of the birches at Geysir.
In the second, the sun is blasting through snow at Hraunfosser, without diminishing the red of the birches.
Red is not a bright colour. That is not its strength.
Only in Iceland
Here in Grundarfjörður, a horse trailer and a boat are both parked together in the harbour on an Autumn day. Fish and horses, eh. That’s the Icelandic way.
Does that not suggest that this country is a harbour, or a series of them? Are not both journeys, into the sea of the mountains or the sea of the waves, the same journey? And this third journey, up?
Life here is a shore.
It is a dangerous place of passage, a place of setting down, departure and return, and a place of harbour and shipwreck at once, but it is the only one there is. It is a tidal zone, for humans.
The Spirit of Iceland…
…is light.
And colour.
When the snow falls, then you can ask your questions.
Icelandic Old Growth Forest
þingvellir National Park, Ísland
Forest Crown Height: 18 centimetres. November, 2016
There Are No Tours to Iceland
Grundarfjörður Harbour
They drive right past.
Beautiful Ice on the Glacial Lagoon
The sun is bright inside the ancient ice of the glacial lagoon.
As the ice melts away, the sun inside is slowly revealed.
This is an artwork written with the stone the glaciers cut out of the mountains many centuries ago.
They have come together again, in beauty.
In mystery.
And in wonder.
This is the glory of the world.
Its moods are 50,000 years in the making.
They are not human moods.
Even the darkness is light.
Even the light is darkness.
You can see by it.
You have only a few minutes.
Begin.
A Farm in Iceland 