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I am often struck by the different ways we use words.
Rereading a favourite book of mine recently I found myself marvelling at the author’s ability to evoke particular experiences and emotional states. Her unusual choice of words drew me into her world, but equally, caused me to consider their meaning. I had to read slowly and in reading slowly found myself consciously appreciating the craftsmanship of her writing. Continue reading greetings
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the force
of what lives us
outliving the mountain.
Last week I was delighted to come across this animal.
Part of my pleasure was that I thought I could identify it. Even though it was now in the front herb garden, and no longer among the camellias at the back, I presumed it was the same fine grasshopper with which I began this series of blog posts.
I don’t think this recognition was at the heart of my response though. The best clue to this are the words I said to myself at the time. If my response had been recognition of the same individual, I would have thought ‘Oh, it’s that same grasshopper‘. But this wasn’t my response. The delighted thought that came to me was ‘Oh, it’s you‘. Why did I say You? What did I see that made this a You and not just ‘that same grasshopper’?
This isn’t a minor grammatical quibble. There is a world — an ecology — of difference between the two utterances. Continue reading This is not a grasshopper
When we decided to have a stream built in the backyard, the landscape gardener asked two questions. What sound did we want from the small waterfall? Did we want moss on the rocks? He returned with metres of pvc pipe, rolls of pool liner, and truckloads of bare bushrock and river pebble. He was finished in three days, and at first his stream looked as artificial as a water feature in a shopping centre.
‘Now you wait’, he said.
And we did.
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In our garden there are seven plantation pink sasanqua camellias along the back fence, five dark pink hiryu camellias down the side fences, and there is one prostrate hiryu which will eventually reach across the pond. We planted most of the plantation pinks over 25 years ago, telling ourselves that we’d prune them every year. These trees are now up to ten metres high, taller than the peppercorn tree, the Chinese pistache and the jacaranda which complete the canopy. Each has a trunk circumference of 60 centimetres. Continue reading Camellias
To learn to take photographs is to relearn how to see. Whereas the selfie and tourist snapshot are confirming, the viewfinder and focus dial on a camera force you to reconsider what you are really seeing and how you are framing the world. They probe both the world and your unconscious preconceptions.
The focus dial, in particular, tests out relations of scale. Working as both microscope and telescope, it allows you to see things that are too small or too large or too distant or too close for you to normally see. As you test its possibilities, you glide between macrocosm and microcosm, part and whole. What is your focus? What is your detail detail of? What are you really seeing when you look at this or that? What are its wider implications? Dare you acknowledge a scale that you would usually brush aside?
One of the delights of our garden is the wild and sudden appearance of fungi. Of course there are always fungal cords, moulds, mildews and lichen on barks and leaves and leaf litter, but in the last four months, more than a dozen types of conspicuous fungi have emerged. Having done most of their growing underground, they pop up overnight, in unexpected places, and, if not eaten first by snails, slugs and caterpillars, have often died away within a few days. Continue reading Fungi
For the past few months, since beginning this photographic project, I have been uploading photos every day to an Instagram account. There are now many hundreds there. Every photo is different but every one is also the same.
Take this image. What do you see? A fist? An embryo? A fern? A mother and child? A helix? A shell? A heart in a rib cage? A mathematical formula? Continue reading What do you see?
Sometimes from far away
They sign to me;
A violet smiles from the dim verge of darkness,
A raindrop hangs beckoning on the eaves,
And once, in long wet grass,
A young bird looked at me.
Kathleen Raine, ‘Exile‘
The film Smoke centres on everyday mysteries and on the friendship between Paul Benjamin, a novelist with writer’s block, and Auggie Wren, the manager of a Brooklyn cigarette shop. One day Paul is surprised to discover that Auggie doesn’t just sell cigarettes. He also has a vocation. He takes photographs. More specifically, he has taken a series of four thousand pictures, each of them shot at the same time of day and of the same place: the corner of Third Street and Seventh Avenue, where his shop stands. He cannot explain why he does this. “It just came to me”, he says. “It’s my corner, after all. It’s just one little part of the world, but things happen there, too, just like everywhere else. It’s a record of my little spot.” Continue reading Everyday Mystery
It was a cold and drizzly day when we visited Pieve Santo Stefano, a town some 15 kms north of Anghiari, near the source of the Tiber, which runs right through the middle of the town. Pieve is close to the birthplaces of both Michelangelo and Piero della Francesca. It was almost completely destroyed by the retreating German army during the second world war, and the non-descript postwar buildings contributed to a bleakness about the day of our visit. By contrast, what awaited us was yet another experience of the gracious hospitality we had been shown while staying in this part of Tuscany. Continue reading National diary archives, Italy
