To those of you who loved my pics of a snowfall on the beach in Skagafjörður, well, here are some more. What glorious light!
Every wave is an artist!
When The Tide Meets the Snow
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Tag Archives: Beauty
Everyone Can be a Faded Polaroid at the Harpa and Dance with Yoko Ono Now
There is beautiful light in Iceland…
… and I mean really beautiful light …
… but tourism survives on images, so the great opera hall, the Harpa, allows anyone to view others as if they are in a faded Polaroid shot from the 1970s …
… or an Agfa shot from the 1960s.
This retro thing, this notion of quoting the landscape in the very moment one observes it, is something the Icelanders learned in graduate school in New York, London and Berlin. It’s charming, but remember …
… every wave that goes to sea in Skagafjörður leaves behind a space for beautiful light. It’s like the sun is right there, you know.
Hólar in the Spring
It is.
What You Need Right Now Might Just Be an Icelandic Rock
After a long time between languages, it’s time to go down to the shore.
And pick up magic rocks and hold them in. your hand.
And put them down.
And leave them there to talk to the sun in their nonhuman tongues.
And walk back up through the library of the birch forest.
And the lair of dragons.
Give one last glance to the lake.
And go back to the skáldverk in silence.
And begin again.
The Most Beautiful Thing About Hengifoss
Well, first off, Hengifoss is cool because to get there you have to walk at the top of this 80 metre high cliff, and you don’t see it, which is good.
And then you get to spend a couple hours, and finally you get to walk up the river.
You never reach the falls.
Distant views are good, though.
And a bit of dilly-dallying along the way.
And the sandstone, like, that’s cool, too.
And, well, this stuff:
Not to mention a bit of cooked seabed. Very shiny!
You’ll never get to the falls, though. Here, let me show you why:
Sinkholes! Worth a peek. All this ice is hollow like this. Tricky.
And not just that. No path to the left:
No path to the right:
The whole time, the falls are calling out with the sound of artillery going off as boulders are bonking down off the cliffs. You can’t get close to the cliffs or the water, but who cares.
You can just sit around waiting for the sun to get out from behind a cloud.
Definitely that. There is, you see, a mystery here, and I don’t just mean how gorgeous these falls really are, but, well, dragon blood:
And the best of all is you don’t get to the falls. That’s key. The cliff along the way plays a part in this. That’s it in shadow at the left of the image below. 
Here, maybe the following image will make it clear. The water doesn’t matter, except to focus your body and your eye. The mountain makes a space, and in that space water has no floor. It falls straight towards the centre of the Earth.
And you are in that space, falling with the water. You are in the centre of the Earth.
You can’t go further because you are as far as anyone can go. In the heart.
Icelandic Psychology
In Iceland, you look at the flow of life through a subconscious mind of ice from beyond the edge of the world, or …
…in Iceland, you look at the flow of the mind through a (melting and freezing) barrier of ice from beyond the edge of the world.
One could easily think about lesser things.
~
Bessasstaðaá
The Meaning of Dawn in Iceland
In North America, we look East to see light sweep away darkness.
Hofstaðakirkja
Not so in Iceland. There it daily sweeps away the inhuman world and makes the world safe for human life… precariously. Darkness, as the church and the fenceposts show, is a more inner thing, not without but within.
In Iceland You Are Never Alone
What, you wanted human company?
Highway 76 On a Good Day
A farm among energies older than the gods, will that do? No? Well, there’s a road, so you’re good, right?
The Land of the Wind
The dunes of East Iceland are pure environments of wind. The black volcanic soil is sculpted by the wind, the grasses are blown in by the wind and anchor the soil by it. They use the wind to pollinate their blooms and to disperse their seeds, as well. And the snow is blown across the dunes by the wind, forming dunes of its own, and echoing the forms of the land, as you can see in the exquisite mirrored half moon of dune and drift below.
It is the place where the air above the sea becomes the air above land, a powerful place of transformation and extreme energies. It makes dunes a dangerous place for humans, a place almost simultaneously expressing the edges of human life and their absolute, grounded centre. So it is with the shore of the sea. So it is with the shore of the wind.
An Icelandic Road’s Open Secret
The road to the sky leads through the Earth.
Dawn at Skriðuklaustur
At first you can drive, but then you have to go on foot. You’ll know when you’ve arrived.
April Light on the Lagarfljót
Ice contains wisdom, of the year behind and the opening wisdom of the year to come. You can see it in the perennial sunrise and sunset colours of winter, but. April brings brighter tones, while snow storms still take the rest of the world away. It’s breathtaking. Bring your camera. Go East in April.
Leave the crowded south and its tourbusses. The great secret of Iceland is that it’s everywhere on the whole island. You don’t have to go to the crowded places. You will find there a sense of honouring and ritual. Out in the simple places, where no one else goes, you will find your self.
A Farm in Iceland 