This early april view of trolls Goðafoss is for all of you who are caught in the heat of the south. Time to plan that next spring trip, for sure.
Cool Trolls
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The Shore of Life
Gunnar Gunnarsson published “The Shore of Life” in 1916, as a protest against the First World war. He had in mind the ring of surf around the Island, through which all life had to pass.
All goods coming in and all goods going out, he argued, passed through the hands of Danish traders, or through the vicious surf, which easily turned life into death. He offered an unusual role as writer, but fitting to the Battle of the Somme: sniper. One by one he made us love his characters, then killed them off. It is an amazing and enraging book, as he intended. The metaphor is by no means dead. Note the red surf here facing down the aluminum city of Reyðarfjörður.
Gunnar’s world is far from past.
Forget Black Lava Jewelry
It’s time for a spot of yellow.
That’s also the Icelandic way.
Getting Off the Ring Road in Iceland
Before the Ring Road, this was the highway to the East.
It is now easy to forget that Iceland is many different countries united by isolation. Sometimes the way forward is the way back.
And this is the high-tech version.
Road crew.
Watch your step.
If isolation can be connection, can connection be isolation?
Roadside Inn.
When a country becomes a road…
… what then?
Falling to the Centre of the Earth
When I first saw Svartifoss, a waterfall in Skaftafell National Park, I fell in love. When I approached it in late fall four years later, I fell in love again. It was darker now, and somehow even more glorious.
What’s not to love! Just to the left of the fall, the earth reveals the fall’s real story, though:
It’s not the water that falls here, but anything that enters this space, even the earth.
Even me. Even you. That is powerful earth magic for sure.
Dark Trail to the LIght
Sheep Trail to Mýdralsjökull, Hofdabrekkaheiði
Elf Power!
It’s the original green power.
This elf stone beside the road in Skagafjörður not only becomes a snowless whirlpool in the wind, but it melts whatever snow manages to get in close. Now, that’s great tech!
Water Paths in Iceland
There are vertical paths.
There are horizontal ones.
In a gale, they can be both at once.
We see these falls as paths because we are pathfinders. See the path to the right in the image below? Can’t resist?
Of course not. That is the human spiritual trace. The sheep is an elaboration, and exquisite for that. These creatures are not paths but warmth, hearth and home. Their other form is this:
That is a sheep and a human family, spiritualized as one, in time. This is the water path that makes it possible:
It is one with them, because of human path-finding. That is the spiritual path at the edge of the known world.
Beyond Literacy in Iceland
On the south coast of Iceland, the world is being made out of primary forces. It is not happening in the past. It is happening right now.
These forces of wind, water and air are like primary colours.
Which are primary ways of seeing: moods of the day.
It is possible to live within this palette.
Power structures will be expressed in its physical terms.
Once those terms form a new palette, they become a new language.
It turns the earth into a place from which technology is the shelter.
It tries to cast light on this place, because that is what it knows. There are ways.
The world may not be approachable by language, but it is still there. In it, even water is light.
Even light is water.
Out of the loneliness where there are no words for such light, Icelanders snuggle into the dark and write novels. Then they live in them. Sensible, really. A defensive strategy, although a bit transparent.
While they are at it, they invite foreigners to meet the old world of this book…
… for which they have no words except some old manufactured rubble they read in novels: nature, beauty, wonder, the old carny shows. It is enough, though. It is sweet honey.
Words like this allow people to come here to meet themselves, often for the first time, between the lines or right in them.
While Icelanders wrestle with batteries in the mist then give up and go in for a cup of Nescafe.
The mixing goes on, regardless. It braids old battlefields …
… and old shores of grief and shipwreck …
… into that place where the only difference between sea and sky is not made by land but by wind alone and the human capacity for being present in the wind.
Here a man is wind. If you want to speak with him, you will find him there in the ruins of what can no longer be spoken: like a collection of Grecian marbles in the British Museum.
The image above and the image below are the same.
And again.
And again.
They are all books. Look at them shouting for attention.
There is, however, still a world.
It’s not what we think. Let us dare to use the old word again.
The one the eye sees before the mind.
Playing Chess with Water in Stykkishólmur
In Breiðafjörður, the wide fjord of West Iceland, people know a lot about water.
They live with it.
One can presume water knows a lot about people, too.
In Stykkishólmur, halfway to the far west, where land ends, people know about harbour, where land and water and people mix and voyages begin.
On the hill above the harbour there is an old library.
From it, you can read people reading the water and read the water writing the world.
You can also play chess.
This is the Library of Water.
Water from Iceland’s glaciers is here to be read.
To reveal itself.
Shelved with the shelves of the world.
Among houses for water.
And houses for people.
Water reveals itself here.
People come to be written by it.
And to see their world with new eyes.
They come to see with the eyes of water.
And to play a little chess.
Your move.
A Farm in Iceland 