Tag Archives: spirit

Only in Iceland

Here in Grundarfjörður, a horse trailer and a boat are both parked together in the harbour on an Autumn day. Fish and horses, eh. That’s the Icelandic way.

Does that not suggest that this country is a harbour, or a series of them? Are not both journeys, into the sea of the mountains or the sea of the waves, the same journey? And this third journey, up?

Life here is a shore.

It is a dangerous place of passage, a place of setting down, departure and return, and a place of harbour and shipwreck at once, but it is the only one there is. It is a tidal zone, for humans.

Reading Iceland

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Here are some poems that the land wrote.

The land reads them, too.

Even the sun reads them.

It helps with the writing as well.

It is best to consider reading and writing as the same act.

They happen simultaneously.

You have the capacity to read along.

You could call it a map, if you like, for a voyage.

There and back again.

Jökulsárlón

Now for a novel.

Svartifoss

Northern Lights in Iceland

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The view from Grundarsfjörður.
The other view from Grundarfjordur.

The view from Stykkishólmur.

The view from Grundarfjordur again.

Every night is longer, every day shorter, but that will change.

In Iceland It is Possible to Photograph the Dark

In 1940 Gunnar Gunnarsson wrote that the long months of darkness were as treasured a part of Icelandic consciousness as the long months of light.

Wise words! Look how the darkness of this un-named fall in the Whale Fjord radiates vision, stronger than the light.