Sticking out its tongue and everything.
A troll is what your mind looks like at root level. You can walk through it and tell stories. If you look closely, there are dozens of trolls here, not just the one at the centre left, with two eyes and the broad, down-turned mouth. Look at the white, ghost-image of one at centre right. The stories are consciousness; you are more than that.
I swear, Iceland is alive.
The late season light changes so quickly that the flow of gravity and time across space, and your body, are one. Only the photograph is still. Try opening the image in a new window. I think some of that directional energy and movement is captured in it, especially when seen a bit larger than here.
Either that, or confronting elemental nature makes a human alive.
Here’s the trail for me.
It leads to Buðaklettur, and then west into the November sun.
But make no mistake, it passes through the mind along the way. 
Imagine, walking through your deepest thoughts. 
When I walked here last November, it took all my strength to put one foot in front of another. 
I found it nearly impossible to keep walking. 
I wouldn’t call it being lost, or being in danger of being lost. 
I wouldn’t even call it being found. 
It sure was good not to be alone. 
I’ve never made a journey like this, although this was only a small part of the journey that is to be made. What that journey is, I don’t know. 
Well, “I” doesn’t know, but the rest of me sure does. This is the path.
This is a dangerous place.
A place where the path travels where wakefulness and sleep take on different forms.
If you step off the path, what then?
The question is nonsensical. To stay on the path is to step off of it. To step off of it is to lose it.
Go with someone you love. Go together. 
Hold on to each other. 
You are your line back home. 
I’m not from Iceland, but I know home when I see it. The wind blows there. At 45 m/s. Well, sometimes. This time.
It is a place to lose yourself, and then, as a completely different person, to lead it back home. I can’t explain it. I am only drawn there, like a beast on a line.
On a narrow path. Of blood. 
Of mind.
I can’t explain it. I don’t want to.
This is poetry when it has left all words behind.
This is the Buðahraun.
This troll is marked on no map, yet so many travellers have found it that access has been blocked — an unusual thing for Iceland, but necessary. I leave it for you to find it yourself. Note the old house site to the troll’s left. Yeah, on the grassy slope, and at its base. People used to live closer to trolls than they do now.
Still, take a look in the troll’s ear to the right above, and then to the goofs chatting in there, as if they were on the set of a silent movie.
How can you block access to what doesn’t belong to you in the first place? How can you stop a conversation that has no sound? You can’t, but you can give it space.
Some trolls love the wind.
Others laugh at it.
It’s a good thing, because the wind is everywhere when you live in the sky!
The sea is cold up north on the Öxarfjörður.
I suggest sticking in your toe before committing yourself completely. 
Even if your horse has gone ahead. 
It can wait. 
Above Hrafragilsfoss
Nerve tissue is everywhere, lying around on the sand. If you lose your mind in Iceland, there’s always another one to take its place. Good to know!
Elf House, Church, School, Playground. Out of these pillars, the country is built.
Þorgeir’s balance from the Þing (the parliament; Þorgeir was the speaker of the house, tasked with deciding the spiritual future of the country) in the winter of 999-1000, in which he decided that the country would be Christian, politically, and either pagan or Christian privately, continues to this day. Intriguingly, the Álfar, “the other people” of pagan tradition, remain hidden. One can see their homes (above, for example), as one could see pagan homes in the Christian Iceland of late 1000, but the pagan content is as hidden now as it was then. But it is OK for children to play there — children who are the foundation of the state. So, it’s not that hidden!
Yesterday, I surmised that the Nordic eye that is neither thought nor memory, and thus not consciousness, is the body, looking out, and asked what it was that we are looking at with that eye. I suggested vision, a presence of being rendered physical.
If that is what we are looking at, it is quite foreign to the contemporary world. Today, human eyes look out to see the social, at all times.
But in a one-eyed landscape, is it really social, or is that just a contemporary, North American word placed on a far different manner of presence? 
At any rate, it’s quite different from a human/non-human relationship of being, such as Iceland-outside-of-Reykjavik:
But, here’s the question: is that relationship social, too? But not “social” in terms of human-to-human interactions? 
And so, we come, as we seem to always do, to another question: if there is a non-human social relationship, what is it with, or, perhaps better put, what is a human social relationship when it includes non-peoples?
And what does that say about interhuman social relationships? Something to dream about overnight!
Oðin, the wanderer, threw his eye into the pool at the root of the world tree, to gain wisdom.
The Icelandic Green Party Reassembles the World Tree in the Election of 2013
The nature of the wisdom a supplicant received was determined by the quality of the gift. For an eye, he got two ravens, Thought and Memory, and what else is consciousness? That’s it, for sure. Here are a few pictures of Thought and Memory in Iceland, to show you how it works.
Church, Battery, and Water for Horses.
Sheep and World War II US Army Surplus
Abandoned Cruise Ship and Fish Bins, Lagarfljót
Thought and a Door… Or is That Memory and a Mouth? 
Window Remembering the Sky and Thinking of the Wind
Forest, Remembering, in Front of a House Thinking of a Waterfall
The Cow at the Hamburger Factory, Remembering Its Days as a Reality TV Show
Pretty cool, for sure, but here’s the haunting thing: what is the other eye doing? The one that is not consciousness? This?
This? 
Not at all. If it’s a human image, it’s conscious. The other must have been the eye of vision. The one that doesn’t stop and notice, but flows on.
There is, at any rate, something that’s not conscious, that is aware. So often, thought speaks of the Huldufolk, the elves and trolls that “live within the rock.” Are they the other eye? Are they us?
What are we looking at?
A Farm in Iceland 