Here’s an Icelandic road at winter solstice. A powerful black thing, it is.
But don’t be fooled. The volcano, Snæfellsjökull, in the background, faint as it is, is the power here. She can harness the North Atlantic herself. It is a lesson that remains for us all to learn.
First, you sit on a troll’s head at Midsummer, when even the stones come alive. If that sounds fantastical, you should really go to Iceland at Midsummer. You’ll see. In this way of the thrush, you get to hang out with a troll. Nice.
The other way of the thrush is to be the living thought of the troll, not in words or ideas, but in thrush. Nice, too!
Remember, trolls aren’t animate beings from fairytale, but places where rocks are made into home and mind through attachment. It could be you. It could be the thrush. It could be the thrush leading you into the Earth, where you find yourself.
Iceland’s great mountain is not on the Ring Road, which is an arrangement of highways across the width and breadth of the main chunks of Iceland that allow tourists to flow through the country on “road trips” and, with luck, meet only professional tourism operators. This allows the country to get along with things and to pay for its roads. When you’re off the Ring Road, though, you have to be clever. The people of Snæfellsnes have hit on a couple of solid ideas. They won’t tell people that the name of the town that hosts their tourism marketing staff, Hellissandur, means The Sandbar from Hell, and they promote the daylights out of the idea of day trips from Reykjavik to view the sites. No overnight stays necessary. Clever.
Welcome to the Centre of the Earth
It makes a lot of sense. If people come for longer, they won’t leave, and if they don’t leave, they won’t need a tour bus, and if they don’t need a tour bus, what then? These are the big questions. The mountain and its snow spirits (I mean, look at them up there!) do not need to answer. It is an inspiring purity of presence.
The beach at Hellissandur showed her spirit this morning.
As you can see, it doesn’t take a lot of light, or, better, the light goes inward rather than out. So is it with the long, low angles of the sun on Christmas Day. Look at the water erupt from the sand and say its name in this light.
It is a day on which the whole Earth is alive. We found that around this mountain at Midsummer.
And now, this force is just as strong. What welcome energy!
What life! This time, it’s not just the Earth that is alive. Look at the sun going down over Melariff at 2:30 in the afternoon!
The view is from the 1100-year old Viking Farm at Saxhóll. A few minutes later, the sky revealed a dragon.
And just after that, many stories all at once, enough to meditate on for a year.
As the sun left and rain fell across it in the West, the energy lingered, not in the sky but in my self that was the sky.
And so we carry ourselves, just as the Earth, the Water and the Sky carry us. It is we who are spirits of Earth, Water and Sky.
Gerðuberg (foreground), with Ytri-Rauðamelskulur in back.
Spirt takes many forms!
At first, dawn is pure light.
þingvellavatn
Then it reveals another world.
Then it turns blue. The other world is still there, but white now.
Then there are colours, and mountains, as the two worlds join.
When you count the houses built at þingvellir each time Iceland enacts a new constitution, that’s three worlds. Well, four if you count the ice.
You can be of two minds, at once. They are not in conflict. A forest full of quick life to take you there, through the web of your thoughts?
Or a forest of slow, enduring life, the cliff of ghosts that awaits and towers above you, your body given face as memory?
At Botnstjörn, the windless pond sheltered by birches deep in Ásbyrgi, you can be both at once. They are not in conflict.
Surrender, and feel yourself lose all weight.
First the beam, then the body, then the man. First the birch, and then the bone.
Like these birches in Hvalfjörður, we are not metaphors. We are all the original Huldufolk, the people of the earth. The lovely stories of elves are memories startling us awake out of sleep.
ð
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.
A Farm in Iceland 