Black sand beaches are fun. You can watch the glaciers melt away to nothing there. This is endlessly fascinating. Most Icelandic tourism is based around twinning this melting…
Diamond Beach
… with a bit of human heat…
Blue Lagoon
Perhaps now you’re ready for the Beach of Blood?
Maybe you’re ready to go north?
Whale Beach
You won’t be alone.
If we want to end global warming, we will have to resist it and discover cold.
Notice how little attention the seals are paying to either global warming or humans attracted to global warming and seals.
There’s a lovely crowd of them off of the mouth of the glacial river flowing out of the glacial lagoon these days, but, to tell the truth, if you go the the Selfljót and look for them in the estuary at the tide change you will have a lot more fun, even if you don’t see a single one.
This was the Iceland that Gunnar left for Denmark, and the one he returned to when war threatened the world. It’s still there, if you look for it, because even if Gunnar didn’t find it again, and you aren’t likely to, either, with a little luck the search will be the finding. Iceland will change you, if you work at it.
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.
I thought I’d look up from the Glacial Lagoon …
… show of humans being beautiful for themselves and for each other by posing (warmly) within luxurious images of humanly-initiated global climate change…
… to see what the glacier thought of all this. Ah, well, look, I’m glad it did. The cheeky thing…
… was sticking its tongue out at us! Just a tiny bit. Between compressed lips.
It never gets far.
The Jökullsá Enters the Atlantic
It’s not easy to leave Iceland. Usually you just wash up again on the beach!
But only after they have no words for them any more.
Such bittersweet irony at the Jökulsárlón! Just imagine if these powers could still speak to each other!
Whether you find power in a single wave breaking out of the sea of the sun…
… or, turning around, in lines of thought, humble beneath the ancient forces of ice and gravity …
… or in a glacier setting to sea from the Jökulsárlón in the last hour of light …
… may you find the mountain where you are home.
Thor’s Shield, from Skogarkot in Thingvallasveit
And may you burn like a birch tree in the cold.
Happy New Year. Thank you for all of your inspiration!
Two codfish go to sea.
Definitely time for a visit to Jökullsárlón!
He might be only a force of nature now, but he’s still doing good work.
Jokulsárlon
Art: the spirit of the earth breathing us alive.
A Farm in Iceland 