Huldúfolk | A Farm in Iceland

The road along the coast behind the farm Borg races on past the Cross on the cape that keeps the ogre at bay, on to the puffins in Borgarfjörður Eystri, and back.

Few stop anymore to walk in this emerald, or to see the path this water makes as it hides itself, as all creatures from the other world do, on to test the walls of the houses of men. It is the greenest fjord in Iceland. This image is made from the old Stapavik trail, the right way to come upon it, unless you come by boat, of course. Imagine the first long boat that touched this beach, and the people that stepped ashore in wonder. They are your ancestors as soon as you get out of the car. And then what? Well, friend, then you are lost. And then you are found.

If we can set aside the re-creation of European indigenous life

as fairytale during the romantic period, in which elves and dwarves, trolls, ogres,

witches and other organic understandings of human-Earth relationships took on sentimental human form,

and life was removed from the Earth

and given to biology,

we should still be able to read the rock as something more than mineral. It is the nature of being indigenous to be of a place.

This does not mean that one inhabits it solely as an isolated biological body,

but that the place and you are also one. One of the consequences is that you will see your mind and body around you and read your thoughts out of the land

By moving across the land, you really move through it, and really are moving through yourself.

You can stop sometimes and have a look at what you, as the Earth, are thinking.

The simplest way is to read the stone, such as the cliffs at Ásbyrgi. It’s easiest if you remember that before a troll was a mythical, romantic being…

… it was a stone, or a person, anchored to a place and defining it. The understanding was that place has power.

And not just as a romantic artform called “nature”.

That is beautiful enough, but it has a lot in common with romanticized, humanized elves and looks, most of the time, like fairyland.

It is, of course, but not literally. What is literal is the rock, and how you can read your thoughts there.

Complex thoughts of many kinds.

Once you have seen through the romantic veil to that, you can relax and read the trees.

Such observations are usually called pre-modern thinking, but it would be both more fair and more generous, more respective of human nature, to call it non-individualized consciousness, or even earth consciousness.