I’ve concentrated on detail for most of the week, so today I thought we’d look at landscapes to get the bigger picture. The photographs were taken in the Gorge in 2016 before the fires of this year, in the coast range and recently on Sauvie Island, now familiar to my faithful readers!

I picked the poem The Silent Heavens by Victorian poet Richard Watson Dixon shortly after the news of yet another mass shooting, this time in Texas. It reflects a sense of loss, not just of youth, of faith, of lives, but of the ability to connect; to connect in order to find answers. In secular terms perhaps even answers that could be pragmatically turned into political action.

 

For a long and insightful analysis that places the poem and the poet in their historical context as well go here:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2017/sep/25/poem-of-the-week-the-silent-heavens-by-richard-watson-dixon

 

I explore nature to escape thinking, more often than not. The part of me that “sees” the world, in ever lasting gratitude for the beauty around us, is mostly able to shut out the part of me that “thinks” about the world. Until it isn’t.

 

Taking pictures along the Columbia river, for example, makes my heart beat faster, first in awe, and then in anger, because I remember this: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/national-politics/article181771226.html

It brings back the theme of the poem, translated into our modern, secular realm – the lack of humanity when we ignore the faces of the dispossessed.

 

Captured, of course, by Mahler im Lied der Erde, at his best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeghTtEcreM