The farm is gone …
…but the sheep still come, hefted to the mountain …
… and to the sea. (To them, the road is nothing.)
The sheep of the sea? Ah yes, these are stone farms.
Very tasty.
Winter barely has a grip on the Reydarfjörður shore.
But… sheep of the sea? Is that correct?
No, they are oyster catchers of the land!
If we moved back, they’d still be there to receive us.
Before the Ring Road, this was the highway to the East.
It is now easy to forget that Iceland is many different countries united by isolation. Sometimes the way forward is the way back.
And this is the high-tech version.
Road crew.
Watch your step.
If isolation can be connection, can connection be isolation?
Roadside Inn.
When a country becomes a road…
… what then?
This is not a B&W image. This is the sun pooling on the earth. That’s liquid sun there.
It’s black pupil is Iceland. It is watching the night sky. People walk across the eye, this way and that. Some take boats across the sun. They drop lines and nets and pull up the fish of the moon. In Vík, on the South Coast, eternity is never far.
With flowers, grass, wind and rock. That’s the way.
Þingveillir.
Always with a porch light burning.
Hveragerði
The instant I saw this stone, I was able to read it…but I will never be able to translate what it says into words or language. It is not diminished for it, nor am I.
At the Side of the Old Trail to the South, Sóleyjarbotnar
The windows of Iceland are for neither looking in nor looking out, but for display of earthly objects in the light of the sun, which makes them sacred: talismans, spells, and prayers. It is an exquisite and complex art form, quite separate from the 1960s New York art that saturates the Harbour Gallery (and which is also beautiful.) In their windows, the people speak; in their galleries, they create a window for the world, based on this style.
Tomorrow, let’s go for a gallery tour.
It is a form of poetry. This is the oh-so-secret, oh-so-public favoured art form of Iceland. Here’s a sample anthology.
Reykjavik
The Wright brothers had a great idea, but even greater is the technology of flying in place.
When a bucket no longer forms a magic mouth to carry a well from a hand, it becomes a mouth for the mind, or an eye. Buckets like this (at Skriðuklaustur) were Iceland’s first cameras.
A Farm in Iceland 