Worried about ash blowing around in the wind? It’s beautiful and mysterious isn’t, and makes your photographs, well, blur.
Seljaland
But if you go closer anyway, look who you will find dancing in the wind.
Bog Cotton!
So, blurriness, you see, is something to walk out into in the wind. When I did, it made me think I was a child of the wind myself. Oh, wait. I am.
One could be forgiven for calling the place Atlantis.
As Gunnar (who was from the East) did.
In the cold high desert of Northern Iceland, the water that has fallen from the sky holds it to the last of the light.
You feel it flowing through your veins and lose all weight.
You want to stick close to it. What you want to avoid is water and ice.
Southeast
Let the sheep risk that stuff. Such is the knowledge of a people whose origins are in “settlement” and not colonization — a people for whom “land” is a “landing”, a being lifted out of the sea. You don’t forget a thing like that. The darned thing keeps coming back.
North
Iceland teaches a sense of human scale…
Farm below Myrdalsjökull (Covered in Volcanic Ash)
… and human strength.
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.
In November, when sunrise and sunset colours continue in unbroken unfolding light from dawn, near 10 a.m., and dusk near 2 or 3 p.m., it comes so quickly that you can see it open and close through the spectrum, as if you are inside a film, a really, really wide-angle 4-D film.
Here is a fraction of a second of its wonder over the volcano in early November, as I walked through flaming heather and pink snow at þingvellir. I shot the image with two much sky to illustrate how unsettling it can be. One feels at times that one can fall right off the Earth and drown in air.
Walk lightly on your way home. (It might be best to avoid the road.)
Seljaland
Perhaps it’s called Svartifoss (Black Falls) because it shows itself on a black basalt cliff.
Bad Light Helps One See Clearly Here
Perhaps it’s because the red autumn birches turn black with distance, and still the fall flashes.
Autumn Rain Really Brings Out the Light of This Land
In either case, it’s not the cliff that is named but the water.
It seems that when blackness falls it is visible. Of course, that means it’s not black at all…
… or that whiteness is also a blindness, beyond human life. We marvel. Life, it comes from nowhere, flashes with life, and then returns to mystery.
Svartifoss in Its Pool of Birch Blood
~
Svartifoss, Skaftafell National Park, South Iceland
It is easy…
… to be distracted …
…by ice …
… and its romantic stories of loss and the fleeting nature of experience…
… and to miss the light …
… and the darkness …
… together …
… in the eye.
Glaciers come from another world.
It is a world of light.
~
Jokulsárlón and Skaftafell
A Farm in Iceland 