Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in – Mary Oliver In all things, the Way does not want to be obstructed – Chuang Tsu Before undergraduate university I read preparatory books. Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Thomas Hardy, Steinbeck, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I […]
Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we! – William Shakespeare I watched the Detectorists for the first time a few months ago. Then again, and a third time, and I’ve now watched the Christmas Special twice. When the jokes arrived I smiled on two levels. At the joke, and with the recognition. I laughed […]
The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories ― Carl Jung Landscape pictures can offer us, I think, three verities – geography, autobiography, and metaphor ― Robert Adams It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves […]
There is something about winter which pares all living things down to their essentials – Moya Cannon, Winter Paths There’s quite good local walking where I live. River, woods, lake and nature reserves within reach. Kestrels occasionally, kingfishers rarely but memorably, perhaps once a year. There are owls in the woods. In the pandemic lockdown […]
I find it heartening that we use these coded phrases as a kind of acknowledgement that we’re all in the weather together. Of course we should be preoccupied. It’s the one circumstance of life which we share in common – Richard Mabey, Turned Out Nice Again I’ve camped and walked in Scotland eight times […]
In the mountains, there you feel free – T.S. Eliot Some years ago I met two ladies in a Lake District pub. They were animated and interested in whatever was happening and who was there. I was enjoying food and drink after a walk. They’d been exploring valleys, not the high places, as a weekend break more than […]
It can stay silent a lifetime. Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live – Mary Oliver Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us – Susan Sontag The Lascaux paintings are some of the oldest art we have. Palaeolithic, […]
But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time – Nan Shepherd I barely noticed this line in Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain until recently. It’s a book worth reading again, with observations you might not immediately absorb. She describes […]
The word for this effect is landskein. Over the years I’ve made numerous similar shots but not quite like this. The view is towards Eskdale while climbing Pillar. It was my final big discovery in the Lake District. I walked there several times in one year, enjoying it very much. It was a sombre day […]
There’s an idea about nature we might call encounter. We encounter it, without complete understanding. Encounter it, outside the parameters of society. Encounter it, because we see forms of life not ours. It’s a good description, and there are books about it. Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Elli Radinger’s […]