Njarðvík
So often in Iceland, words fail us.
Sometimes You Just Need to Look Out to Sea
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Tag Archives: Atlantic
One of My Favourite Icelandic Roads
This one knows where it is going and goes there with conviction!
Don’t Bother Looking for the Horizon in Iceland
There are too many!
Öldulón
The Amazing Icelandic Light
At that time of nightfall, when the icebergs look like this as they wash up on the sand …
…the Atlantic looks like this.
Your mind works like this, too.
People Come to Iceland for the Nature, but…
… I come for the cities.
Welcome to Vik, sprawling metropolis of 291 people on the floor of the sea. For Gunnar, this was a last remnant of Atlantis.
Welcome to the Vik suburbs! Well, urban sprawl, eh, but, still, the Atlantic drop straight off and smells only of iodine and salt, so that’s ok, then.
And the waves of the Sea of Atlantis splash up over the bones of the world.
I like it that it does that. I just wanted you to know that tonight. Whatever ladder you use…
… to climb out of the surf…
… and make land.
The Best Way to Approach the Sea
Sideways, so sly?
Or head on, so bold?
With a house for company?
With a fence for (ha ha) protection?
Or with a sandbar to still that water down until it turns to swans?
In snow?
In the midnight sun?
From halfway down a ridiculous cliff called, for some reason, a road?
From the land of the dead at the bottom of the cliff?
Among muck-raking sheep?
From the city?
From a place on no map?
From a boat?
From a coal mine?
With a lighthouse?
Through a gate while tipping over in the wind (a common affliction)?
On a lazy evening when horses come to visit and refuse to eat your apples because they’ve never encountered such a strange thing before?
At the end of the road?
Without a road at all?
When the sea turns to silver?
When silver turns to the sea?
When the sky rains gold?
Over the mouth of a river?
Or when the sea flows into a river’s mouth and speaks of deep mystery?
These are the mysteries of people who live after the landing that makes firm ground out of waves that, wouldn’t you know, is not so firm after all. Yeah, best, maybe to just wade out with the trolls.
Waiting for whatever comes!
Glacier Headed Out to Sea
Global warming carries the old ones away in pieces.
We follow, in the confusion our machines recreate for us as beauty.
How the Land and the Sea Create Men
In the understanding of people who live off their land, water is not a substance but an expression of the live-giving quality of slopes with certain qualities: not to collect water, exactly, but to amass it, like gravity. It is this coming together of forces which is water.
An ocean is a different thing altogether. It, too, is not water, but, if the expression of a water out of the land can teach anything, I think it’s that the image below is identical to the one above, with one exception: in the image above, the ocean below is transformed by the lens of the land into the concentration of energy called water.
This ocean, Gunnar Pointed Out, is the great sea of undifferentiated life and death. They are only sorted by passage through a shore.
In effect, this passage is the same one created by the forms of the land that created the small lake above the sea I showed you above. Here it is again, so you can compare.
The product is the same: you are looking at human life being formed by the land.
A Farm in Iceland 