Icelandic Sunset over Graveyard Print

Across Iceland, you can find many, many local churches. Sometimes a church is close to a large home or farm, sometimes in a town. Others, like the one whose graveyard is pictured here, are between towns, situated among pastures and fields along a highway. The small churches being spread generously among the local communities, the cemeteries are not large, and the dates on the crosses and headstones may cover large spans of time. These three weathered, white, wooden crosses seem to be watching the sunset from their grassy, snow-dusted hill, a calm lake accentuating the sky and dark mountains heavily contrasting with it. In peaceful solitude they watch the sunset amidst their rugged landscape -- and long they may watch: Late autumn sunsets in Iceland tend to last multiple hours because of the low slope of the Sun's path. The apostle Paul refers to our bodies as seeds that are sown in the ground, and from these seeds will grow new bodies and life. If that's true, this image is not of a cemetery, but rather of a garden.