More specifically concerning: forest
immeasurably
30 January 2014, around 7.00.
J. Drayton, ‘Pine Forest, Ore.’1 Just something I found one day – a pebble as it were, to generate ripples of thought. Later (March 2022): After checking the original of Wilkes’s Narrative of the United States Exploring Expedition (vol. 5), it appears the original sketch was by Drayton; the caption has been updated accordingly. [↩]
punchbowl
20 September 2014, around 9.35.
another walk
1 May 2016, around 15.00.
none intrudes
3 September 2016, around 10.26.
mistook
12 August 2017, around 12.00.
A view (48)
15 January 2020, around 15.27.
trees and snow.
consolations
6 April 2020, around 14.27.
Reading odd bits of books in the evening as consolation for not being able to manage a satisfactory photo of any of the nurse stumps on the short walk through the woods I love the wind even if, exactly, my imagination tends to give it ferocious shapes and colors. Battered by the wind, I go […]
13.x.2020
13 October 2020, around 14.11.
Uncanny walk through the woods, jumpy at the metallic rattle of leaves, the tinny sound of rain, the echo of my own footsteps, the distant yip of a dog. At each step the sensation of being watched, perhaps only by a wren, but watched – and warily.
high places
22 September 2021, around 10.47.
They have started to appear along the forest path. First there was one, and the precarity was amusing; between one walk and the next the stack usually would have toppled, either gravity or other passers-by objecting. Now they line the path, darkling signposts, and the sight unnerves me – one such is charming, but seven or […]
up the road
25 October 2021, around 9.22.
mellowing
24 November 2021, around 9.47.
Knowledge of values, in fact, is a matter of direct insight, like seeing that the sky is blue, the grass green. It does not consist of pieces of information that can be handed from one mind to another. In the last resort, every individual must see and judge for himself what it is good for […]
A view (56)
3 January 2023, around 9.29.
rixator
19 July 2023, around 10.05.
Quis est enim tam conpositae felicitatis ut non aliqua ex parte cum status sui qualitate rixetur? For who is so completely happy that he does not find something to quarrel with in his own condition? —Boethius (Consolation…, trans. S.J. Tester, II.iv.41ff.)
gathering
8 August 2024, around 16.13.
You watch the light turn yellow, not from newly hung curtains, but from smoke some two or three mountain ridges away; not enough particulates to make a Jacob’s ladder but enough to carry the echo of a scent. You read the daily reports, to see where lightning has struck, though acts of god and man […]
applied economics
19 August 2024, around 18.18.
The tree service came today to do the brush chipping. It was rather a large pile of deadfall and branches trimmed in a haphazard attempt to meet fire safety standards. It took hours and hours (of good, healthy exercise, naturally) to gather everything together, and I imagined it would take hours and hours (or an […]
the elf of plants
10 November 2024, around 14.36.
We shall by morning / inherit the earth —Sylvia Plath (‘Mushrooms’)