Tag Archives: shore

The Thing About an Island

Where there are waves, there is a shore.

They are all different shores.

Some are within you.

You are within some.

Some are bits of drag from the sky moving off the sea and over the island.

Others are the sky taking the island to sea.

These are the shores of life. Gunnar used them as a symbol of Christianity and the hard choices of ethics.

He refused to accept that they were in our control, as strongly as he knew we must cross them.

But that’s why you go to Iceland, right?

To learn your place?

Where the Sea Speaks

Here in Reydarfjörður, the Atlantic has strewn the tidal zone with treasure. Let’s call that speech.It is the same gesture, and all North European ancestors knew it, for to strew is to speak, and what one speaks is scattered, like bird tracks on the shore, on the edge of the place where ocean speaks, the strand.

Presence can be speech.

Death and Life in Iceland

The sea and the land have teeth.

p1310144The Ölfusá Meets the Atlantic at Óseyartangi


p1310194The Ölfusá Meets Tides and Waves in the Wind


p1310065… they stand nonetheless.

p1310064Church in Laugarbakka

Barely. With a lot of improvisation.








p1310163We need help help both going out and coming back.