Look at this lovely patterned ground on the path to the waterfall Glymur. Glymur was hidden behind a flood river, but the way that far was beautiful and austere.
Patterned ground is created near glaciers, where ground freezes and thaws dramatically. Stripes in patterned ground are created by slopes of 2 to 7 degrees. This is ice talking under the ground. Think of it as a balance between water …
… stone …
… and frost.
In Iceland, life doesn’t just come from heat.
I’ve been thinking about walls. What are they for? For shelter, yes, and seemingly to keep sheep in, or out, but into or out of what? I mean, look at the pastures under the Snaefells Glacier.
There’s precious little for sheep in the neighbouring pastures below, and any shepherd is likely to break a leg stomping after sheep in this stuff, and why? There’s as little grass on one side as on the other.
Assuming that in the past Icelandic farmers were as sensible and economical with their energy as any others, might there be a reasonable, but lost explanation? Could the walls be to direct sheep, not to make pasture but so that they herded themselves, a kind of large sheep fold, like the one at the edge of the lava (below)?
Driftwood helps. Is drifting the principle here? To reap the benefits of summer labour in the winter, when labour is just too exposed on the open earth?
Or is it to direct the snow, to bare some slopes for sheep and to bury others with snowdrifts, to provide fresh water in the spring and early summer? It could be. I don’t know.
It wasn’t a fence to guide human walkers in the fog and the dark. Cairns were used for that.
Might it have been to separate the fields by the shore from the fields by the mountain…
… to keep sheep from drifting away from survival food, winter’s seaweed…
Sheep Pasture at Dritvik
…into perilous holes in the lava?
Is it, in other words, about thinking with the land? Is this the wealth that Gunnar Gunnarsson said was at the heart of poverty? Is this an extension of the principle “when you run out of hay anything is hay, anything at all” to land itself, on the lines of “when you run out of pasture anything is pasture,” even if it is only an extension of the poverty of one man over another? Could this be love of land?
In a country in which only a landowner could wed and have children, the impetus to own any kind of land, in any kind of poverty whatsoever, must have been intense. Is that what we’re looking at here? Love?
The stubbornness not to disappear of a people from whom the benefits of community were continually removed, often by foreign traders?
Is drift a way of holding on by bending the way a path goes? I don’t know. Is it still going on?
Is this the principle of drift? Are some fences made of the mind and duty?
Is this how 1,500,000 tourists are safely guided through the cold every year by a few hundred front line Icelanders?
I bet the sheep know.
The sun goes up and down, we’ve had a sandwich or two, storms have come in and out, but the Ogre of Dritvik is still out there. She never stops waiting.
This energy that has been frozen in stone has more than human endurance, even though it is human observation that gives it bodily life. Here are the bits of her that time has worn away:
That is pure Ogre, that is. It squeaks under your feet, calling out its name: “Pebble.” You can pick it up in your hand. Suddenly you are holding stillness. The whole energy of the volcano that made this coast is in your hand. Will you throw it out to sea? Will you hold it? Will you set it down? In this moment of stillness you become the world. The question all of us who have touched her ask is: What then?
It’s a good thing we’re not alone in the rain as we try to figure it out, because that might, ultimately, be the answer.
Don’t be alone in the rain.
What are we waiting for?
What if the Earth were a sphere, continually focussing the sun into moods of light, like these in Breiðafjörður in November, with a very low solar angle…
… or these in Okanagan Lake, between the Rocky Mountains and the Coast Mountains on the North Eastern Pacific Shore, in December (today!)?
To know how the planet was feeling, we would need to gather information globally and integrate it into a unified image.
With arts and sciences of dissection, we wind up talking about the arts and science of dissection, which does the planet no good at all, nor us. Let’s not forget the Icelandic sculptor Ásmundur Sveinsson, who saw his task as reducing the complexity of surfaces to elements the eye could see before the mind, and then the construction of technologies that the eye, not the mind, could think with. Things like this:
Of course, he kept the mind busy at the same time, which is always polite. Following his principle, are two eye-poems for your eye, which I showed you yesterday. They are not word poems:
Jökullsárlón
And because we are hospitable here and like company, here’s something for your mind. It is not an eye poem.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
Book poems and mind poems are different things again. Poetry, though, ah, that’s a thing of the world.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
It is our home, but would we not be blind to call it our own? Let us just give praise.
Kirkjubærjarklausstur
And thanks.
Breiðafjörður
And help with the braiding …
Solheimajökull
… and the weaving of the fibres of this poem …
Rushes in Lower BX Creek, Okanagan Lake
… together.
Don’t look behind you.
You’re not here to enter nature.
Or are you?
It’s your call.
Just a few metres away from a ruined farmhouse.
…some people cross the line to make images of themselves…
… or of nature…
… but not of how to live in it…
… not of how to be home, or of how that continues when you leave.
Or of what it means to stay.
The earth is a social space.
Human society is something different.
Nature becomes a space of disobedience. This is called freedom.
Isn’t it time to go home to the earth?
When you live there, there is no nature.
There is a different freedom.
Obedience.
Not everyone can leave for the city.
Some farms in Iceland are in the most marginal patches of grass in the midst of lava fields. Here’s Thor’s Shield, the mother of all shield volcanoes, at the peak of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where it crashes into land underfoot. There’s a little bit of grass here in Thingveillir, but not much.
Lots of wind, though, which makes it a great place to take some of that grass and build a house.
Sandgerði
Beautiful, isn’t it. Every farm in the country has ruins of turf houses like this. That’s the thing about Icelandic views: it’s the fact that people live on this land that makes it beautiful. The hard work of warming the land has been done. After all, the story here is one of settlement, not of conquest.
This is what it means to be at home.
This light comes from the earth.
For almost four hundred years, hundreds of men camped at Dritvik, on the extreme west coast of Iceland, for the spring fishery, and set out in tiny wooden boats into the open North Atlantic. On a ferocious, rough coast, this troll sat in the sea and made a safe harbour. For hundreds of years he looked out to them at sea and when the men came home they came in on the beams of his gaze.
He is still watching, still making the harbour, still waiting, and whatever is out there on the Atlantic is still coming in — just not men, and fish. He’s not alone. Trolls rarely are. They are herdsmen, after all. Turn around slowly. You are being watched.
You don’t need an expensive camera in Iceland. The sun is so low to the horizon that the atmosphere becomes your lens.
What you need to do is to place yourself in its way.
And in its focal field.
Forget the telephoto lens and the filters and your bag of tech. You don’t have time for that.
And don’t be mesmerized by your journey.
The sun and the earth and the air and space between them is your journey. 
The mountains focus this light too.
So do you.
What else did you think you were on this earth for?
Ah, the Northern Lights.
Well, it doesn’t matter. Iceland will focus you with its lens. 
Just wait.
Be ready at any moment. This is not your journey.
This is the planet’s dance with the sun.
You are this planet dancing.
A Farm in Iceland 