Category: nature


Dec
2017

thing 9: ‘married to amazement… taking the world in my arms’: a murmuration of starlings

Categories: celebrating the everyday, mindfulness, nature, reflection, wildlife
Extraordinary, mysterious and beautiful. And happening live, in front of us, right here, right now.

At the beginning of part two of his autobiography, Clive James comments on his first sight of snow and the English cityscapes, noting: ‘what I was seeing was a familiar [sight] made strange by being actual instead of transmitted through cultural intermediaries’. Replace the word ‘strange’ in that sentence with ‘make-you-weep wonderful’ and you have something of what it was like to see a murmuration of starlings. I’ve seen them on TV and youtube, seen the images reproduced (more…)


Sep
2017

thing 4: ‘world enough, and time’: a water-pilgrimage (part ii)

Categories: celebrating the everyday, mindfulness, nature, poetry, reflection
So: we walked the 25ish miles from Frome to Bath, stopping to swim, eat and pour water at various points along the way.

Sounds like a kicking weekend, huh? But this turned out to be one of those experiences where time seems to expand to accommodate all the stuff its brings. I think of this as herniated time—time which bulges sideways and intrudes into eternity, or timelessness, or both (if they’re not the same).* All this to be obtained merely by putting one foot in front of the other.

The morning’s walk on day one took us across fields, past poplar-copses (we stopped to listen to the wind in the leaves) (more…)


Sep
2017

stocking the bookshelves…

Categories: nature, poetry

I’m having a lovely time beginning to fill the bookshelves at what the afternoon knows.

A few posts ago I hit upon the happy idea of linking each post about a Thing with a poem (or sometimes even poems) which would then go into the wtak anthology. Pleasing, don’t you think? So I have today just put up a page about ‘Water’, the poem linked to the first post about thing 4. And I’m already excited about which poem is going to go with the next post. It’s like having access to a sweet shop, but one where the sweets only do you good. How marvellous is that? How can you resist? There’s not a huge range up there yet, but it is growing. Have a look!

The second post about thing 4, part two of the pilgrimage, will be with you in a few days. For the moment, I’ll just mention that I’m hoping to go and watch murmurations some time over the next few weeks or so, as one of my Things. Anyone want to join me?


Aug
2017

thing 4: ‘so pricketh hem Natur in hir corages…’: a water pilgrimage (part i)

Categories: celebrating the everyday, mindfulness, nature
There must be some kind of equation for packing.

If N=number of things you’d like to take, C the number of things you feel you can carry, and P what you can actually fit in your pack, the initial relationship between N, C and P can be assumed to be something like N>C≥P. After that it gets a bit confusing; but the net result is definitely F, which is what you say when you pick it up for the fifteenth time that day and your shoulders are very, very angry.

I was off to Somerset for a two-day water pilgrimage from the Holy Well at Frome to Aquae Sulis, the springs which feed the baths in, well, Bath. (more…)


Aug
2017

thing 2: ‘named by sunlight’: the morning walk

Categories: celebrating the everyday, mindfulness, nature, poetry, reflection, wildlife

Marooned on a far-away planet, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker, Arthur Dent, wakes up and gives ‘his early morning yell of horror’.

A Martin Amis narrator talks of ‘the difference between cosmic reality and how you sometimes feel when you wake up in the morning’. Doctors (and obsessively-Googled medical sites) refer, more blandly, to ‘diurnal mood variation’. But whatever you call it, how you feel in the morning is not always good.

Or at least, how I feel in the morning. I shouldn’t make assumptions, though I suspect I’m not alone in frequently finding myself struggling, on waking. There’s a greyscale (more…)