A cute lamb on Raudanes above Kollavik in the Þistilfjörður would appear far less cute if not for the warm colours of the July light just after mid-day, looking East.
It is so thick in the air, it’s as if you could scoop it up with your hands, or swim through it!
It’s worth a five hour hike.
It brightens the day.
~
Raudanes
For elves. Very modern elves.
In Borgarfjörður Eystrim , the puffin nesting grounds are covered with netting, so that the puffins don’t ruin their home by being too, well, puffinish.
At Raudanes, they are free to do as they wish. As you can see below, the result is quite different.
There are fewer puffins, but they are wilder. Ain’t that the thing, eh.
A simple farm in the East, far from everything?
No, at the centre. This was the heart of some of Icelands greatest modern poems. Reykjavik is the wasteland here. What caught my eye was the oddness of this sewing machine and this bone, honoured on this picnic table.
What held me was this poem by Krystján Einarsson. Just say it out loud. The sound is enough.
Know that when you drive away, you are leaving the heart for the hands, and you’ll have to come back.
One of the seductive things about Iceland (for outsiders) is that the possibility of being completely alone with the Earth, in a completely simplified life, seems to be promised.
Here on the Skagafjörður in mid-December it seems so accessible, too. It’s just an illusion. Sure, you could achieve it, but you would have to change your life, and if you did it would no longer be simple. Do you dare? Do you dare stop and stay there forever, and let everything else go? Well, Icelanders made that choice 1100 years ago, and look how simple their life is, making you feel at home:
Will you walk into the dark?
The thing about a midwinter trip to Iceland is that the bluer it gets, the more black becomes a shade of blue.
Syðrivogar, Myvatn
And the deeper it gets, the more it shines. It’s counter-intuitive, and inside out, and very cool to meet a colour you feel deep in your chest and suddenly realize that your whole body is an eye.
In elf country, off in Borgarfjörður Eystri, you can never be sure. Is it a cat? A mouse? A cat and a mouse? Elves playing at both? Or a whole elvish family, complete with cat and mouse, all sharing a long tail?
It was in these dells that the boy Johannes Kjarval herded sheep and slowly became a painter.
Kjarval at Work and Play
No wonder.
The foundational principle of Iceland is “settlement.” after 1100 years of it, we see that nothing has changed. In Olafsfjörður (for example), everything still comes from away.
And buildings are larger than they need to be. They too are settlements.
Even the driftwood, even the art, even the temporary housing made from shipping containers, comes from away.
Or so it seems to someone from away. However, to an Icelander, I think it comes from the world, which is synonymous with the sea.
And you can’t see it.
The result is Reykjavik.
Lóndrangar looks out over the Atlantic at mid-day, in the dim light when the darkness shines as brightly as the sun. It is a time for going inside things, for going in the deep intimacy of a human bodily connection with the Earth. Everything is hushed, and the world is full of memories and future plans.
It is those you walk through, and they look like heather and rock and snow and they feel like wind and cold, and yet you are warm. You are a fire, cupped in a sheltered spot. You make yourself. When summer comes, you walk out into what you have made, and the fire is everywhere. It is now, too, but you must walk very softly. You are inside the sleep of the world.
A Farm in Iceland 