Nature

Dreaming, while snared, of murmurations.

I have been working on a project that, once again, tries to express the feelings associated with our current predicament: longing for freedom of movement and togetherness with others while being forced into spatial isolation. (I wrote about my last one along those lines here.)

The most recent exploration was initiated by watching a clip about those eerie kinetic artists, starlings, swooping through air in energetic and coordinated murmurations. The freedom of movement combined with a sense of communal action seemed like the perfect symbol for all that we deprived of right now during (in)voluntary quarantine due to Covid-19.

Artists have, of course, taken an interest in starlings for centuries. A contemporary one is photographer Søren Solkær who has observed the flights for many years now and published the images in a series called Black Sun. It’s worth clicking on the link below (Colossal) to see a spread of what he captured, some etherial beauty of stark landscapes in addition to the murmurations.

This project has taken me back to the landscape of my childhood and youth in the marshlands of Southern Denmark. A place where as many as one million starlings gather in the spring and fall, prior to onwards migration, and set the stage for one of nature’s most spectacular phenomena. As the countless birds congregate in large murmurations before collectively settling in the reeds at dusk they put on an incredible show of collaboration and performance skills. And now and then, by the added drama of attacking birds of prey, the flock will unfold a breathtaking and veritable ballet of life or death. The starlings move as one unified organism that vigorously opposes any outside threat. A strong visual expression is created – like that of an ink drawing or a calligraphic brush stroke – asserting itself against the sky. Shapes and black lines of condensation form within the swarm, resembling waves of interference or mathematical abstractions written across the horizon. At times the flock seems to possess the cohesive power of super fluids, changing shape in an endless flux: From geometric to organic, from solid to fluid, from matter to ethereal, from reality to dream – an exchange in which real time ceases to exist and mythical time pervades. This is the moment I have attempted to capture – a fragment of eternity.

BLACK SUN: Amorphous Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands

One of my favorite paintings of a young starling is by Dutch painter Jan Mankes (1889 – 1920) who, come to think of it, deserves his own YDP one of these days.

Starlings are often snared – they are perceived as a nuisance when they descend in great numbers onto cities, Rome being a case in point, where 5 million of them spend the entire winter before flying to Scandinavia to nest in spring. The city, no longer allowing nets, now has taken to releasing falcons to hunt them and places loudspeaker with starling distress calls and calls by other predatory birds near their roosting sites. Why such efforts, you wonder? In one word: Poopocalypse….. More than a nuisance are starlings at airports, endangering safety when they get caught in the jets of planes – Seattle’s airport SEA TAC catches over a thousand each year.

In any case, I had to combine, for my own Covid response purposes in my montages, a sense of being snared with a sense of symbolic murmuration. You tell me if the sentiment is adequately captured.

Music today is in honor of Mozart’s starling – a bird he held as a pet. Details on that in an interesting interview here. Apparently Mozart’s piece Musical Joke was part of their collaboration….

“Mozart’s Musical Joke was completed very shortly after his starling died in 1787. And I’m not the first to make the connection between this starling and this piece of music. That was Meredith West in a 1990 piece for American Scientist magazine [co-written with Andrew King]. She noticed that musicians hated this piece because it made them sound really bad — a lot of disharmony, fractured phrases, very odd key changes. Finally, she noticed that if you overlaid some of the most disconcerting parts over the song of a starling, there are a lot of similarities. You find the same kind of fractured phrases and general playfulness.”

The Dream World and the Real World are the same.

Art, Nature
Nov 12, 2020
1 Comments

There I was mid- afternoon, back to my old haunts, this time Oaks Bottom. Looking one way, a fall landscape of etherial beauty, separated by a mirror-like body of water, still as can be. Looking the other way, I was surrounded by throngs of people trying to catch the last sun rays before the upcoming storm, getting their runs in, having outdoor school, setting camp for the night, ever deeper in the woods that shelter the unhoused. Busy, noisy, alive, but not exactly a retreat into undisturbed nature.

Made me think of something Spanish-born artist Remedios Varo once said: “The dream world and the real world are the same,” although she, of course referred to the content of her paintings, her art in general, that “alchemically combined traditional techniques, Surrealist methods, and mystical philosophic inquiry into visionary dreamscapes.” (Ref.) It was also the mantra of the surrealist movement – André Breton declared in his essay The Manifesto of Surrealism,”surrealism is a movement that seeks to display the thoughts of the unconscious mind in a conscious manner, linking the dream-world and reality.”

My dream world and my real word yesterday depended on where I pointed my gaze, while hers’ originated with her inner eye. Varo had joined the surrealists when moving from Spain to France in the late 1930s before she fled fascism and emigrated to Mexico in 1941. Her art was a reaction to both the misogyny she experienced in Paris among her fellow painters and the political repression, also squarely directed at women, that made her stay in Mexico during Franco’s rule of Spain after the Spanish Civil War ended in 1939.

Having grown up in the 1920s to the achievements of a women’s movement that was espoused in the liberal Second Republic, she saw those rights trampled, including the right to divorce, use contraception, have an abortion or simply have a passport or a job (your husband had to sign.)

In 1934, a very conservative fascist group founded a new branch of government named the Sección Femenina. Franco later redesigned the mission of the Sección Femenina to encourage women and teach them how to be the ideal woman, as described by Franco and the Catholic Church. Women had to take classes at a young age to be “cheerful, supportive, self-sacrificing wives, waiting for the return of their husbands to a spotless home and happy family.” Maybe Lindsey Graham read the instructions. This is what he said at a campaign event beginning of November almost 100 years later: “I want every young woman to know there’s a place for you in America if you are pro-life, if you embrace your religion, and you follow a traditional family structure — that you can go anywhere, young lady.”

Varo became a highly successful painter in Mexico before her death of a heart attack in her mid 50s, although much less known than her male surrealist counterparts. Just think Salvador Dali, her contemporary, attending the same art schools in Spain as she did, and part of the movement that she joined in Paris during late 1930s.

Art critics have often described the two as surrealism’s extremes, representing shock and wonder, respectively.

And yes, there is much wonder to be found in her work, much admiration for nature (birds are ubiquitous, reason alone for me to be enchanted,) and mysticism and magic, but there is much more to it than that. There are clear feminist expressions found in the way women are depicted, strong, self-determined, explorative and intelligent. Equally important, she understands the Orwellian implications of mass movements centered around a snake oil salesman, having sacrificed their personal identity for being members of a cult, yearning for mystical fusion with the conjurer.

Here is The Juggler. (The Magician) (1956)

I think this painting could not be more apt for our times. (A lager version can be seen in the MOMA link attached at the bottom.)

The juggler, on the one hand, seems to represent enlightenment, his face painted on mother-of-pearl, in nature a protective layer, here a mask protecting who from whom? He is painted in the style of Hironymous Bosch (one of Varo’s role models) with red, shimmering robe, and metaphysical objects rather than rings thrown in the air, a light show to distract and/or blind the acolytes in front of him, although sold as enlightenment.

His cart, like a little ship that could sail away any moment when his manipulative task is done (or he lost the election,) contains a woman with closed eyes (no enlightenment here!) and all matter of domesticated critters, tame lion included. That’s what autocratic figures pull off.

The most interesting part is of course, as Varo herself declared, the uniformed mass of beings. “… a kind of unenlightened individuals who were awaiting a transference of enlightenment from the magician so that they can wake up…”

If you look closely, they seem to be wrapped all in the same cloth, a cape that reminded me of those fairy tale invisibility cloaks, about to be triggered. The people are rather androgynous, although upon close inspection you can see still hints of individual expression, some hope or differentiation. Not all is lost. The dystopian future of psychic fusion with the magician might just be averted.

Let them wake up to the real world, not the dream world, and tackle its healing without the help of witch-hat spouting quacks. And have eagle eyes to be on the look-out for the next one….

(Note that the MOMA interpretation of the painting is rather different.)

And here are jugglers at the opera.

Here is the full opera, a master piece.

Thoughts in Yellow

Art, Nature, Politics
Nov 9, 2020
2 Comments

I figured we’d celebrate the wave of relief felt by more than half of this country with a color that stands for enthusiasm, positivity and enlightenment. Or so the color gurus tell me…. conveniently ignoring that yellow has often had different connotations.

Just think of its association with sickness – yellow-fever, hepatitis, yellow-jack (a flag on a ship that is under quarantine) – or associations with excess – yellow journalism. Then there are yellow-dog contracts which deny workers the right to join unions. And my own yellow-bellied (cowardly) manner towards a personal nemesis: yellow jackets.

Oops, I announced a celebration, so let’s look at the positive side: yellow daffodils are one of the few bulbs that are absolutely resistant to being devoured by critters, and who bring brightness to spring. And yellow is certainly the color in late fall, early winter, that captures, mirrors and reflects the last of the light, reminding us of escape from the darkness.

Yellow mums bring cheer, modeling patience for long winter days given the eternity they last even in a vase or through first frost. The vivid contrast between yellow and the dark surroundings in the fall woods feels energizing, no hiding here, no shyness, a sturdy presence, at least when it comes to mushrooms.

——————————————————————————————————————–

Yellow was van Gogh’s favorite color. Speculations abounded what could account for his “yellow vision.”

It was his abuse of absinthe, the alcoholic drink he favored! No, he suffered from xanthopsia, a state where everything in your sight looks yellowish, the result from exposure to toxins, including poisonous foxglove tinctures prescribed by his doctor in the asylum at St. Remis! It was subacute angle closure glaucoma that accounted for the yellow ‘halos’ in his paintings!

Basically all of these arguments are put to rest here. The use of digitalis from the foxglove plant was well understood in the 19th century, and by the time van Gogh would have reached sufficiently toxic levels (from absinthe as well) to exhibit xanthopsia he would have been unable to paint. Furthermore, he did not display any of the other symptoms associated with the kind of assumed glaucoma (brow ache, blurred vision,) never once mentioned in his otherwise detailed thousands of letters home.

His vision was also tested by his Doctor in 1889, using the kinds of color vision tests available for railroad personnel in safety tests, and found to be normal, as was his short- and long-distance vision. The guy was in his early 30s at the time, remember?

In contrast, we have his own thoughts in letters about his use of color, of his experimentation with color (yellows were almost always off-set with blue and white, a white he could not have distinguished from yellow with xanthopsia) and the fact that the use of yellow was already dominant in his very young years in Holland, before any of the potentially poisonous agents appeared on the scene. (Here is an invaluable source for his letters, searchable by key concepts.)

Last but not least we also have the assessment of his colleague Paul Gaugain:

‘Oh yes, he loved yellow, this good Vincent, this painter from Holland — those glimmers of sunlight rekindled his soul, that abhorred the fog, that needed the warmth.’

Now why do I bring up so much of this debate, in my view solved by looking at scientific facts with an eye on the whole package of historical data?

I have been thinking of how arguments are flying around in the Democratic party post-mortem of the election, claiming this or that or those being at fault for losses, for gains, on all sides. Often the loudest arguments win, or the ones that jive most with our own closely held beliefs (confirmation bias,) or the ones that are repeated most often. Now more than ever it seems paramount to wade through them all and really test the veracity of claims, not just their plausibility.

This is important because we will not prevail if we do not learn from mistakes. I am all in favor of celebrating today – but the work of tomorrow has to begin with honest assessments of future moves. And a good start is to look at the differing voices. We can contemplate what AOC had to say in an interview with the NYT yesterday, pointing to the fact that we urgently need and utilize the help of marginalized communities, but then tend to drop them and their demands once we’ve won, giving plum political jobs to anyone but progressives. Or we can turn to a thoughtful, intelligent essay in the Atlantic about what it would mean for democracy to simply go back to the status quo ante 2016. (Highly recommended reading.)

We can look at the argument of many that a centrist Biden, or down-stream candidates like him, overall outperformed the more progressives, even if those won in their own districts. We need to ask, if those claimed differences (we don’t even have yet all the numbers!) are based on message content differences (Medicare for All/Defund the Police) or were inherently driven by misogyny or racism (the more progressive candidates also tended to be POC, many of them women.)

There has to be an assessment of the way messages were conveyed – did we match the skillful bite-size narratives of the republicans with our more complicated stories, did we match their community engagement (democrats did not do door to door canvassing because of Covid)? Did top-down regulations and media approaches hamper individual democratic candidates because they were not appropriate for their communities?

Was there a failure to nationalize attacks on Trump for fear of scaring potential republican voters ready to jump ship – a population that did NOT materialize? After all, campaigns that accepted top-down funding were obliged to run under basic strategic maps brought to them by the DCCC/DSCCC/DLCC and this was their strategy.

Was lack of skill or funding or awareness for the need for social media dispersion a factor? There are so many variable to be taken into account beyond the core issues of progressive demands versus centrist calls for reconciliation and moderateness, that it will take time to isolate them and analyze them all. Most of all it will take the will to do that, otherwise we will not stand in 2022.

Reward yourself for due diligence in exploring these issues with a walk in the woods showering you with exuberant yellow. It will lift your soul.

Music today is by Michael Torke who has composed a lot around colors, including bright blue and its opposing color on the wheel: YELLOW. (Yellow Pages are not the only industry to flag that color. Think Nikon, National Geographic, McDonalds, and CAT and Caterpillar…..) Someone knows what they are doing.

“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time.”

Art, Nature, Poetry
Nov 6, 2020
1 Comments

“Finding immortality, one pumpkin at a time,” was reportedly uttered by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk in response to the work of the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers, Marc Evan and Chris Soria. (I am skipping his newest book published this September, The Invention of Sound, all about mortality in its most sadistic forms….)

The Brooklyn, NY-based duo has been carving pumpkins for many years. One of their approaches, carving famous works of art into their pumpkins, has been recognized by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. MoMa has ordered an annual pumpkin devoted to a piece from their collection for the last 7 years, so has the Whitney and the Queens Museum of Art. And now Chuck Palahniuk.

Here is a sampling of their work, done these days in cooperation with 12 other carvers, using tools from different trades, including kitchen knives, hardware tools, such as small saws, serrated knives, linoleum cutters (typically used for printmaking), and clay loops (used for trimming in pottery). (Photographs from the website.)

The pumpkins, internally wired with little lamps, can cost up to $800. That is a lot for a fleeting pleasure, and not much if you consider the skill that goes into it and the fact that this is probably a one-shot-per-year business.

To put the word immortality and pumpkin into one sentence requires some chutzpah. I cannot think of another organism widely available to observe, perhaps with the exception of sunflowers when they go dry and black, that reminds me so visibly of death and decay. Who hasn’t thought about the fleeting of existence when watching the crisp pumpkins melting into pulp and slime, on one’s doorstep as much as in the fields come winter?

On my visit to Sauvie Island yesterday, the fields were ready to be picked, the greenery already gone, the pumpkins bare for the take. It poured, I could not even leave the car, photographing out of the window. My favorite willow tree had finally collapsed under its own weight, pieces stacked along Reeder Road.

The ponds were dry, not good for November when so much traveling water fowl needs a place to settle.

(The red dirt is where usually the pond resides)

As a result a universe of hunters concentrated around one of the few remaining wet spots, killing scores of ducks by the unrelenting sound of the shooting.

Mortality was on my mind, not immortality. Beauty, of course, as always is the case in nature, visible even in the stark reminders of transience.

Then again, the quest for immortality, or ruminations about it, have also created some – literary – beauty. The ancient Greek texts come to mind, or Wordsworth, but also something decidedly contemporary. Here is Brian Culhane.

THE IMMORTALITY ODE

Bill Evans is quiet, fingers still above the keys,
But ready to begin again and again and again
The first twelve bars before the drums come in,
Just as I am ready for inspiration this evening,
Fingers rehearsing an entrance above the keyboard
Of the Olivetti Lettera 32 I pounded years ago
On Charles Street, nights I wore my father’s
Black cashmere overcoat whenever the steam
Failed to make it up five flights, and back then
Evans waited, too, for his entrance, rain on glass
Waiting to accompany him, and on the B side?
Everlastingness is still there, and all Camus
Said it was, the boulder, the hill, the boulder again
That we come to over and over, pushing—
Quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua
As Lucky said and which my annotated Beckett
Traces to the Latin (qua) for in the capacity of.
As in I qua Sisyphus, I quaquaquaqua greybeard
Old father shuffling along in black cashmere:
The Child is father of the Man, a looped immortality,
While happiness, per Camus, if patently absurd,
Nonetheless may rise with the struggle to old heights
And just might be enough to fill a man’s heart,
Even as Evans once more lifts his fingers for
“You and the Night and the Music,” his solo fresh
As when he first sat down, and the night is young.

And here the referenced music by Bill Evans. Stay alive for now, folks. We need to be around for the official calling of the election…..

Crissy Field, San Francisco

· Today's YDP is dedicated to my friend Mecchi who never ceased to be homesick for her childhood San Francisco. I begin to understand why. ·

Nature, Politics
Oct 29, 2020
4 Comments

If you drive north along palmtree-lined Bay Road, passing the Bay Bridge,

the Piers,

and somewhat confusing public art,

you’ll eventually end up at Crissy Field, a large expanse of park, with a bit of marsh enclosed, and sandy beaches to walk on.

The views of the Golden Gate Bridge are postcard material, and as such sold in every tourist trap in town. That said, the views are gorgeous.

Walking in those green meadows and along the pristine beach you wouldn’t know that the area was for the longest time one of the major military air fields on the West Coast if not the country. Parking lots and concrete- plastered runways covered the area since 1921, with barracks on the infill of what was once a marsh housing enlisted men, and other buildings serving as administrative offices and officers’ quarters.

Fog made for difficult flying conditions, as did the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937. After World War II the field was primarily used to received MedEvac flights bringing wounded Vietnam soldiers from Travis Air Force Base to Letterman Hospital. It closed eventually in 1974.

In 1994, Crissy Field and the rest of the Presidio became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, under the care of the National Park Service. Three years later they started enormous restoration efforts, the results of which are now enjoyed by throngs of people, tourists and neighbors alike.

About 230,000 cubic yards of soil had to be removed from Crissy Marsh alone to transform it from a parking lot back into a habitat for plants and animals like herons, egrets, crab and fish. The rest of the area had to be cleaned from decades of accumulation of hazardous materials, an undertaking that was supported by millions of dollars in donations from citizens and organization alike.

Here is a detailed history provided by the National Parks Conservancy, with remarkable before and after photographic footage of the transformation. A true restoration.

Have we learned anything? Cargill Inc., the nation’s largest privately held company, recently wanted to develop nearly 1,400 acres of the shoreline along the San Francisco Bay in Redwood City, destroying existing marsh land. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency tried to give the green light, ignoring both it’s own agency regulations and the Supreme Court’s decision on the Clean Water Act.

Save the Bay, an energetic environmental protection organization, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, and three other environmental organizations sued the EPA and EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler over the agency’s March 2019 decision not to protect the salt ponds under the Clean Water Act. A federal judge has now ruled in favor of the environmentalists, but one wonders, of course, what will happen if and when the issue winds its way up to the newly configured Supreme Court.

Judge Tosses EPA Approval of Bay Area Wetlands Development

Why is it that every bit of nature has to be ripped out of the maw of forces trying to destroy it in these urban environments? Why do always either the state or private business reap the economic benefits of their strongholds, while the damage removal has to rely the generosity of citizens’ purses or the tax payer stepping up? And are people even aware of the work and time and money and sweat and tears provided by conservancy organizations who try to rescue what they still can? Rhetorical question, I admit.

Let’s end with this, then:

Here is music from Crissy Field in 2013.

The Golden Gate

Nature
Oct 26, 2020
1 Comments

Before there was the bridge there was the strait. Its name was chosen in 1846 by Captain John C. Frémont in analogy to the Golden Horn of the Bosporus (Turkey) when he hoped for rich cargoes from the Orient arriving through the strait.

The treacherous water channel connects the Pacific ocean with San Francisco Bay, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin river system. From 1 to 3 miles wide, it is frequently shrouded in fog. Humid air from the Pacific Ocean floats over the cool California wind current flowing parallel to the coast. The fog stays low to the ground and then the warm, moist air condenses as it moves across the San Francisco Bay or nearby land.

The fog was probably the reason for a relatively late European discovery of the strait – it was first seen by a land party of Spanish colonialists in 1769, and first sailed by a Spanish ship in 1775, giving the native Ohlone tribes a bit more time before death and destruction descended upon them.

The fog has not been kind to sailors. Estimates claim that between 100 and 300 shipwrecks are buried in and around San Francisco, some truly deadly. A fascinating map of the buried ships (some under the city itself) can be inspected here. These days there are fog horns, situated mid-span and on the Southern end of the Golden Gate Bridge – the most photographed bridge in the world, they say – that guide maritime traffic to safety.

On the other hand, the fog is kind to the coastal red woods who get half of their moisture from the fog during the summer.

The history of the the bridge itself can be found here. No longer the longest suspension bridge in the world, it is still a thing of beauty and technological magic, considering it was opened in 1937.

Photographs of the strait and the bridge today were taken along the Lands End Coastal Trail, which was close to my apartment, sometimes foggy, and sometimes in full sun.

It is a beautiful, well maintained path, but too crowded for my spoiled taste groomed by Oregon’s empty spaces. Homesick, that’s what I am.

Music in honor of 75 years of the bridge (2012-competition.) Something different from our usual fare.

Life

Nature
Jul 7, 2020
25 Comments

Life has thrown us a curve ball. One of my boys had a serious accident and is going through a series of surgeries. I cannot concentrate or focus on writing. Will be off the blog for a bit. Hope you’ll all be there, when I resume, likely next week.

Breaking Silence

Nature, Poetry
Jul 3, 2020
4 Comments

I had to think about this amusingly sarcastic poem, Breaking Silence, by Whitby yesterday, when a gorgeous hike along Mirror Lake trail and up to Tom, Dick and Harry mountain yielded all kinds of beautiful vistas – but no silence. The car noises carried heavily over from US 26, and the trail was populated by all kinds of not so silent people, some blaring loud music no less. Kids happily screaming at the lake

found their counterpart in screeching Gray Jays, also known as Canada Jay, Camp robber, and Whiskey Jack, as I learned yesterday.

We made our Goretex exodus through ascending crowds of people in flip-flops and slippers later in the afternoon…. no longer silenced, in some fashion, by masks, which had been rigorously worn by the early morning hikers we encountered during ascent at 8 am.

The trail is probably the most heavily trafficked wilderness exposure close to the Portland area, and many conservationists are eager to develop alternative plans to protect the environment in the long run while allowing people to hike along these vistas.

The brooks gurgled, branches made the occasional odd noise when moved by a bit of wind, leaves shaking off the raindrops from previous showers.

The crinkly plastic paper from a devoured power bar rustled in my pant pocket, annoying enough that I had to transfer it into the backpack.

Loose boulders along screes rumble under your feet, and you wonder what the one large rock cairn you encounter would sound like if climbed. I could not figure out, after the hike, who built that cairn, or the rock stacking walls on the overview. Native Americans used cairns either for religious purposes, or as markers to show the way, but there is no information to be found if this cairn comes from a time before their land was stolen.

On top the clouds provided a bit of eeriness, no views of Mt. Hood. The mountain only appeared later in the day.

Even the chipmunks started to vocalize, when chasing each other in competition for the crumbs of my lunch. Rapid, high cadence sounds of chip-chip and cluck cluck in alternation, it seemed. Here is the real thing from National Geographic.

My knees creaked.

Only the raven on the summit kept his silence. A blissful day.

And since it was such a popular and populated trail, let’s have some popular classical music guide us into the weekend, inspired by landscapes, forests, and a river coming down from the mountain, Ma Vlast.

All is transformed

Nature, Poetry
Jun 19, 2020
3 Comments

For the Lobaria, Usnea, Witches Hair, Map Lichen, Beard Lichen, Ground Lichen, Shield Lichen

by Jane Hirshfield

Back then, what did I know?
The names of subway lines, busses.
How long it took to walk 20 blocks.

Uptown and downtown.
Not north, not south, not you.

When I saw you, later, seaweed reefed in the air,
you were grey-green, incomprehensible, old.
What you clung to, hung from: old.
Trees looking half-dead, stones.

Marriage of fungi and algae,
chemists of air,
changers of nitrogen-unusable into nitrogen-usable.

Like those nameless ones
who kept painting, shaping, engraving,
unseen, unread, unremembered.
Not caring if they were no good, if they were past it.

Rock wools, water fans, earth scale, mouse ears, dust,
ash-of-the-woods.
Transformers unvalued, uncounted.
Cell by cell, word by word, making a world they could live in.

I wrote about lichen and moss about a year ago, unaware of this poem then, otherwise it would have been added.

In some ways fortunate, because it gives me opportunity today to bring together those words with new pictures. I have, of course, no clue what the lichens are called that I saw this week, much less do I know if any of them appear in Hirshfield’s listing. But I love the sentiment of her words, the observation that a world can be made to live in, where life is possible, and that not all agents of transformation call for recognition – they just provide.

Music today celebrates a master of (thematic) transformation: Liszt.

Here is another take, by a master of (Liszt) interpretation, Lazar Berman.

Nothing is Clear

Nature
Jun 18, 2020
2 Comments

Leave it to me to choose a title that in itself is easily disproven: it IS clear, that speaking in absolutes soon forces you to make room for exceptions.

It was just what I was thinking when we approached the Pacific Crest trailhead yesterday on Lolo Pass for a hike up Bald Mountain.

“Nothing is clear…” the valleys and peaks around us were shrouded in fog and mist.

“Nothing is clear,” again when we reached the top, looking into a bank of clouds, ragged breath from the last bit of steep ascent joining the universe of damp droplets around us. The promise of views of Mt. Hood in all its glory, once the sun lifts the veil, empty. Or more precisely, filled with swaths of white and grey, moving, stretching and consolidating with the bit of wind.

Oh, but everything WAS clear, once you stepped closely, within the woods. Some things were clear along the ridges as well, if you waited patiently, as long as budgeted time allowed, for warmth to rip the clouds apart and offer glimpses.

In sum, we saw the forest AND the trees, all just a matter of proximity and time.

Perhaps it is a helpful analogy to our current circumstances. We have a choice of perspective. The future is diffuse, in some ways shrouded. We can focus on the things at hand, though, revealing beauty, or sustenance, or at least things tolerable, rather than dwelling in fear of being swallowed by the clouds. Shifts, brought on by winds of science, will rip the fog apart, at least in places, allowing clearer views.

And if you want to roll your eyes or slap me for waxing philosophical right now, too bad. It is what nature does to my head. When I see usually domesticated flowers in the wild, spreading with abandon,