On top of the cliffs at the great dry waterfall of Ásbyrgi, high above the ocean, the tide leaves its pools. The water comes with the rain, and the pools aren’t filled with crabs and anemones, but bog cotton will do.
It’s always a thrill to come across life thriving in hostile places, including here, trod upon by so many human travellers trying to get to the cliff edge without slipping over in the muck. Perhaps the bog cotton is thinking the same thing!
If you’ve ever heard there are no forests in Iceland…
… then it’s time to go to Ásbyrgi.
Forests literally as far as you can see. Oh happy day!
It’s always a great day to walk out on the shore of the sea, where the seals and eiðars once swam. The sea might change its level, but that’s a bonus for us.
Neskaupstaðir
And the eiðars demonstrate just what it was like here long ago.
Easy does it!
Wildflowers taking the place of eiðars.
Icelanders started playing around with imported North American lupines a couple generations go, to try to stop erosion. The things do stop the land from blowing away, and they are mighty beautiful, for sure, but they’re also a bone of contention, as they change the colour palette of the landscape profoundly and reduce the number of species that can thrive. Nonetheless, it remains an uncertain tradeoff, with some people planting lupines and others tearing them out. One of the species that doesn’t mind is the Icelandic Troll. Here’s one who seems to be thriving among the beautiful weeds.
Strutágil
If smoke is the outpouring of a geothermal plant, such as that here below in Reykholt …
… is it pollution? I’d say, yes. What, though if it is art? What do you think? What is it?
Sandfjall
A Farm Road in South Iceland
One jolt of hormones lasts centuries here.
In Iceland, the major architectural monuments from the past are also way-finding cairns of stones passing across inhospitable terrain. They were essential for commerce and the maintaining of a low technology culture in a harsh environment. They are now essential links to the past, as important to Icelanders as, say, the pyramids in Egypt or the Strasbourg Cathedral in France. In other words, they led somewhere, and still lead somewhere important, even as people continue to try to read them.
Aimlessness at Þingvellirvatn
Unfortunately, many contemporary visitors to Iceland, being humans and liking to make their own presence into lasting magical gestures, a signature of their kind, obscure the landscapes with their mark-making. Please don’t. It’s ugly and aimless. They don’t let you do it in Paris. Respect goes a long way towards creating beauty.
It used to have trees, and it is eaten by sheep. A little bit of replanting has been done. Here are some Siberian larches in East iceland, placed in like a quilting block.
One works with what one knows. Everything else is a compromise. Spiritually, as I showed you yesterday, the compromise is between paganism and Christianity. Environmentally, it is between earth before and after settlement. Below is an image of Iceland flowing to sea, which is called the force of wild nature.
Well, yes… wild nature with sheep and shivering humans. Iceland is not an indigenous nation. It is a nation of settlers. Settlement is an ongoing process. It is at the root of the country’s past and future. This is what it looks like.
Baa-aaaa!
It also looks like this:
Reykjavik
And this:
Kirkjubær
The point is, when you live on a sub-arctic island, and keep sheep, everything is hay, as the Icelanders say, meaning that when the hay runs out in the middle of the winter you will feed your sheep anything — anything — to survive. Even this:
Yes, in Reykjavik even John, Paul, George and Ringo are hay. And danish beer is hay, too.
Baaaaaaa.
Yesterday, I surmised that the Nordic eye that is neither thought nor memory, and thus not consciousness, is the body, looking out, and asked what it was that we are looking at with that eye. I suggested vision, a presence of being rendered physical.
If that is what we are looking at, it is quite foreign to the contemporary world. Today, human eyes look out to see the social, at all times.
But in a one-eyed landscape, is it really social, or is that just a contemporary, North American word placed on a far different manner of presence? 
At any rate, it’s quite different from a human/non-human relationship of being, such as Iceland-outside-of-Reykjavik:
But, here’s the question: is that relationship social, too? But not “social” in terms of human-to-human interactions? 
And so, we come, as we seem to always do, to another question: if there is a non-human social relationship, what is it with, or, perhaps better put, what is a human social relationship when it includes non-peoples?
And what does that say about interhuman social relationships? Something to dream about overnight!
A Farm in Iceland 