Time and again, Gunnar wrote that poverty is the greatest wealth. Here’s an example from his childhood fjord. Here, every farm i needed a source of fresh water. The smaller the farm, the more precarious the source. Here’s the water source of a small croft near Bringubakki.
Look how the water flows with life within the remains of winter’s cold, just as the life flows through the family that brings it into their house. This small, austere pleasure of this correspondence is a great richness.
Well, it’s freezing in Hallormstaðir, and the Lagarfljót isn’t, shall we say, a great place for swimming today, but while the weather stations are warning of heavy snow and ice ahead, let’s remember the ice of April, as it breaks on the shore with the music of a flock of 100,000 tiny birds. The ice is the birds, as it shatters and lifts, and refreezes and tilts and falls, and washes in on the waves, all written with the record of a year.
What wondrous runes telling of every moment the winter through.
It’s beginning now. If you go down to the lake, you might catch the first words, but do stay safe on those slick roads.
And if you can’t, well, there’s April, when the ice plays its recording, just once, in birdsong.
Sure, you can go spelunking in a cave and see a few columns of stone, but nothing beats a bit of sinkholing in April.
There are mysterious worlds just under the ice.
They only last few a few weeks.
Like viewing fall leaves or spring plum blossoms, really.
Just as beautiful, too.
Aw shucks, it’s May. You’re too late!
But the magic will come again next year!
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
Iceland was a warm place once, until the Cold War. Elephants roamed. Now they’re hibernating.
Actually, they look a lot like elephant seals. Hmmm.
The horses are still cold in the wind, though! No hibernating for them. But hay. Hay is good.
They’ll stay for hay.
Global warming carries the old ones away in pieces.
We follow, in the confusion our machines recreate for us as beauty.
Two codfish go to sea.
Definitely time for a visit to Jökullsárlón!
