I've been thinking of starting this thread for a few days now, but kept postponing it. Now I've just read Ath's incredibly beautiful description of the spiders in her garden over in the Nature Pics thread, and I thought we need such a thread urgently!
I love to see, feel, experience really in words the beauty of things that are normally rendered in pictures.
There are many beautiful texts available, and, like in Ath's post (which I hope she will copy over here ), they can be put to wonderful effect in combination with one's own words, but I'd prefer it if we reserved pure quotes, without addition of our own words, for a separate thread and used this one to express our experiences with nature in our own words!
So, if you are thrilled with something you see, hear, feel etc - come here and share it by putting it in your own words, be it prose or poetry!
I guess, I should make a start, having been so bold as to ask everybody to get creative.
A few days ago, I sat late at the PC. My desk is right next to the balcony door and window, and I look out on my plants there, some trees and the gable of the house across the street. But at night, with some lights on, I mostly just see the reflection of my room, with a pile of stuff on the floor or the laundry drying on the clotheshorse.
It was already past four in the morning when I finally tore myself away from you guys. I shut down the PC, switched off the desk lamp, got up to switch off a small reading lamp next to a chair by the window, after which all was dark inside. I turned and faced the balcony door - and outside all was wrapped in a white mist, reaching up to the nearest tree. It was just thick enough to dim the lights a bit, but not too thick not to gleam like snow in the whiteness of the streetlights. It was quite unearthly, like having been transported out of this world into some Elven realm.
And like everything Elvish, there was something scary about it. Or maybe it was just the awe of the early morning hours, when the world is there for itself only and on its own, and we are just intruders.
Hobby, this is very much the type of thing that I had in mind.
Yesterday, Beth and I took a hike in the woods above. We do this on virtually every major holiday because it is usually very uncrowded. The peacefulness of being alone in nature always helps us see things in new perspectives.
I will have more to say later about this, but I wanted to thank you for starting this thread.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
Hobby, its really hard for me to put this in words that have any real meaning. I grew up a city boy. Well, worse then that, really. A suburban boy, with blah surroundings and a blah attitude. I think that is one of the reasons that I fled the east coast for the west coast. Not that there are not beautiful places on the east coast; of course there are. But the western part of U.S. is still more open and 'untouched' then the east, and I think I really needed to go some place with a little more space to breath.
But it is no accident that we ended settling here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Redwood trees touch my heart so deeply; even more so then there even more awe-inspiring cousins the Giant Sequoias. There is something that is just so calming to me about their graceful beauty, the way they stretch up to the sky straight and tall and full of honor.
Walking in the small old growth forests that are still preserved in my area always helps to give me a sense of perspective. After all, these are beings that have stood for a thousand years and more, some almost two thousand. But even just driving down Highway 9 to go down to Santa Cruz to go to work every day, seeing the second growth trees on the side of the road and on the beautiful hills on the horizon (the great old growth forests in this area were largely destroyed to fuel the lime kilms for rebuidling San Francisco after the great 1906 earthquake ) gives me a calming feeling.
But when I REALLY need perspective, when I REALLY need to calm my jaded nerves, I drive down to the coast and look out into the Pacific Ocean. What a well named thing! I grew up on the Atlantic Ocean, and I love it, but there is something about the Pacific that just settles my spirit.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
There is something that is just so calming to me about their graceful beauty, the way they stretch up to the sky straight and tall and full of honor.
That's beautiful!
I've always wondered whether there was a visible difference between the Atlantic and the Pacific - so that's another thing I'd just love to see for myself sometime!
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.
I've seen the Pacific like that, myself, up on the west coast of the Island, near Uclulet. Or on the Oregon coast.
We had cold weather and snow for a week or so, but today the temperature is about 5 degrees Celsius, and everything is soggy and miserable, snow melting in inconvenient places, ice rotten but still slippery.
It's like after a party. The lovely streamers are drooping, and someone had better pick up all those empty glasses.
Bare brown dirt and dead grass on my lawn, where two days ago were snow angels. The cedars seem to miss their frosting. The noisy, quarreling Stellar's Jays are being mean to the Chicadees. Going out to get the paper this morning I hurried, I didn't want to stand and look about me. If there was a dawn, it was a scrambling affair, no rosy fingers, no golden glow, just a sullen sort of undarkening; the sun wanted to sleep in, I think. He's not shining, he's just moping behind those clouds.
That's such a true analogy, vison!
And here, if it snows, the party is always very short, but it takes days and days for cleaning up - so I'm usually quite happy that we only get so little snow in the first place.
Loved your description about the moping (hungover? ) sun, too!
but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.
We have been enjoying a longish spell of fine chilly dry weather, something we don’t often have here on the Wet Coast. It’s not cold as the rest of Canada knows cold, dipping only to minus 5 or 6, warming up to 2 or 3. Cold enough that we still have snow on the ground here, 2 weeks after it fell. Cold enough that the fog freezes in the gullies, coating every blade of grass, every twig, every dead leaf with fuzzy white.
Seldom, too, do we get these limpidly clear evenings. This was such a one.
I was leaving Costco, pushing that enormous buggy to my car, and I happened to look up as the 5 o’clock Westjet left Abbotsford airport. Only, I forgot the plane, wonderful though planes are, when I saw the western sky.
(Costco sits on a flatland that was once the bottom of Sumas Lake. The lake was drained in my father’s day, turning a poor lake into good farmland. There are stories of Sturgeon, stranded by the engineers’ pumps, that burrowed and struggled for miles through the drying lakebed to the Fraser, months and even years after the lake was drained. There are even stories of ploughs turning up Sturgeon decades after that, and that the fish miraculously came back to life if taken to the muddy river. As to that, I don’t know. I think it’s a good story, to think of the great white canoe-sized fish, whose longfathers were coeval with dinosaurs, lying in wait in the mud turned to loam, breathing once every six months maybe, eyes closed, listening in slow puzzlement to tractors and engines above them where once had been only still, brackish water and Herons too wise to try a Sturgeon for dinner.)
So now on the prairie are highways and farms and shopping malls and the quick straight line to the Border. West of the Costco parking lot is a finger of rock, a little outthrust from the closeby mountains. On the other side is the gravelly flat where the airport is, and that is where I had looked to see the jet rising over the rocks, lights blinking, heading east.
This rocky outcrop is crowned by a long, straggling line of Alders, not handsome trees, nor very useful. But against the evening sky they stood straight and finely drawn in black, stretching from the south to the north, from the blinking sentinels along the border to my left, to the streetlights climbing the first slopes on my right.
There is no way I can nail down the colour of the sky. To say “blue” is so woefully inadequate. I look for a new word, a word suitable and precious enough to say it. The kind of blue they use behind the altar of a great church, only darker. Not Madonna blue, nor cobalt nor lapis, but all of them at once. And it begins at the ground, at the roots of the Alders. There it is paler and there is the certainty that beyond, where the sky is somehow lit, the land marches flat and broad to the Ocean. The Sun is over the ocean now, his glow is still burnishing the waters and that glow is reflected back onto the sky in my west, my rocky hill, my line of black alders against the glory of the western sky. From root to treetop the blue darkens, yet is still not black, and there is still a light in it, the memory of the sun.
I stood quite still, and wished I was a camera, the kind of camera that could take the scene before me and turn it into words that would make you see what I saw! But I had to move, of course, I couldn’t stand enraptured for too long, there were hungry folk at home.
Only my rapture wasn’t over yet. For as I drove through the exit I looked up again, and now with the massive building behind me I could look a bit more to the South and there was Venus high in that sky, Venus as white as diamond, glittering alone, a little planet outshining all the stars that were too dull to come out when she did. Now I pulled off to the side of the road and got out of my car so I could look without being a danger in traffic. This was wise, and my wisdom was rewarded when I turned my face to the northeast and saw the moon just rising over the mountains.
I was pinned there, by some line of wonder that gleamed from Venus to me and from me to the Moon’s golden-white face. I understood why someone would dance, spinning, spinning faster and faster to try and see them both at once, Venus and the Moon, both lit by the sun that was gone rolling westward across the sea. I thought I might dance, if I only had on a long swirly skirt, and yards of golden chains about my neck, not jeans and a turtle-neck!
The moon was veiled in mist, yet his round face was as bright as a lesser sun. I know that science says the moon is not larger at the horizon than he is at his zenith in our night sky, but science is wrong!
Over me was the black dome of the sky that became midnight blue nearer to the earth. No stars yet shone in any quadrant. The lingering brightness in the west, the glittering gem of Venus, the cool yellowhite light of the Moon were too strong just yet, the stars would wait to show themselves until Venus was lost in the glow over the western city, until the Moon was high and small, until the Sun was surely below the Earth, hurrying to his rest in the East.
I had to hurry home. The little noisy city all bright with headlights and tail-lights and shop fronts had to be got through, swiftly, my car one in a long foolish chain of machines, going and going and going ahead and ahead as if getting somewhere was more important than being somewhere. Out of the town and over the hill and onto the flats. Now I am going toward the river, the broad brown muddy Fraser that slides down through the farmlands and towns to the delta, then to the sea. On the other shore is a town spread jewel-like on the dark hills and I would admire it, but I’m rushing to get home, to go up to our little mountain where man-made lights are fewer and farther between and the lights of the night sky will be clearer and closer.
The glamour of the sky and the Moon and Venus are faded as I write this. The moon is clear and quite bright, the mist now is faintly rainbowed and entirely encircles the moon, signifying a change in the weather the old folks say. There is a star between the ring of mist and the disc of the moon, now Venus is only the brightest of the stars in the west. The Big Dipper is full in the high northern sky, the other constellations grow plainer as the evening wears on.
One more marvel awaits. If I go out on the deck in an hour or so, the moon will have moved Southward and be right over Mt. Baker. Between me and the mountain is the blackness of the neighbour’s woodlot; beyond, the land falls away to the flats again. I can see no lights, no roads, no cars or trucks or buses to spoil the darkness. The moon will shine on the high slopes, the great mountain will gleam softly, softly. Wisps of cloud will float above the glimmering snow.
Such nights come rarely here. Maybe that’s best.
What beautiful writing, Vision. I love the elegant, poetic simplicity of your prose.
About a month or so ago, I was on a train travelling from London Paddington to Oxford. (I work for a Christian charity in London and my department was having a Team Day at a retreat centre near Oxford.)
It was about 9.30am. A cold, frosty and sunny morning.
I looked out of the window. By this time the train had just left Reading and was speeding through the Berkshire countryside ... there was a modest swell of hills on the horizon, with the silver band of the Thames winding beneath ... gleams of silver between the trees. A familiar view - one I've seen countless times.
And every tree and every field was thickly painted in a sugar coating of hoar frost. Brilliant, sparkling silver-white. Like fairy figures on a child's birthday cake.
And every white tree and every silver field and every sugar-coated hill was gently draped in a delicate veil of sunlight and mist.
The sky glimmered, softly blue, through the silver-gold haze.
Winter has her own austere beauty. She is capable too of kind moods.
On mornings like this, the world is transfigured by the gentle touch of silver Winter.
I'm off now for the weekend. I leave you with this gift.
"Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could ... " Letter no. 246, The Collected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Avatar by goldlighticons on Live Journal
Thank you for the gifts of your words, vison and Pearl.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
I love the way vison and Pearl speak about nature. It's even better that a photo, because in the words I can see, not just the beauty of a landscape, but the beauty of people who are writing about it. If that made any sense.
About stars. I stepped out on the balcony... excuse me, lanai... in our hotel in Hawaii. There were the palm trees swaying in the breeze, and the surf giving its 10-gun salute to the shore every few seconds, and all the other tropical trappings. And there were stars like I haven't seen them in ages, city girl that I am. Stars the way Tolkien wrote about them. Dusting the skies, covering the heavens like a spakling gauze with diamonds caught in it. Constellations so bright and vivid, I could almost see the lines connecting the dots. Only in one spot on the horizon the stars were wiped out by the yellowish glow over Wailea.
It occurred to me - the time being 2 AM and my brain clinging to simple thoughts - that perhaps this is our problem in the West. We don't get to see stars in our bright cities, so we chase after dull baubles. With the stars wiped out by electric lights, we have no reason to look up to the Heaven.
If there was anything that depressed him more than his own cynicism, it was that quite often it still wasn't as cynical as real life.
Every October and early November, when the sun rises about at the time I leave for work, there are mornings when I wish I had a camera with me. I drive past a piece of meadow, on which the grass and faded flowers are wet with dew, and there's often mist just above the ground. On sunny mornings, it's almost impossible to describe how stunning the whole meadow looks like when the rising sun makes the dew glitter like millions of diamonds!
Before we moved to our current house, we lived in a place where there was a natural pond in the forest just a few hundred meters from the house. The forest was used as a recreation area, and a jogging/walking route got past the pond so, it was no isolated place, and I often walked there with my younger daughter. The pond was swampy and eutrophic, and a paradise for many lifeforms. In the summer, it was white with water lilies. On some years, a couple of waterfowl - usually wild ducks - nested at the woody end of the pond. And in late summer and early autumn, there were masses of dragonflies flying around, hunting and searching for a mate in the reeds. One day, I was sitting on a rock near the water's edge, keeping an eye on my daughter who was playing nearby. Suddenly, a big green and black dragonfly landed on my knee, and sat there as long as I could keep unmoving.
See the world as your self.
Have faith in the way things are.
Love the world as your self;
then you can care for all things.
~ Lao Tzu
funnily enough I was thinking of these few lines of verse before I realised that this thread existed spooky eh
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; 5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: 10
Praise him.
I did post this elsewhere but thought it fit in here as well.
It never rains in Southern California...
But it pours. The plot of land outside the library has several inches of water in it. Each night I hope the frogs will come but I can only hear their song in the distance by the river.
The rivers are running high and muddy. The swallows that usually skim the surface chasing insects are holding fast in nests built underneath the bridge, hoping that the river doesn't rise too high.
And I sit here, listening to the rain and thanking the Creator that my house is warm and dry and not at the bottom of a slope.
Britain has just had the coldest March for decades. We had an exceptionally mild, warm, mellow autumn, a true Indian summer, and winter paid us back by prolonging her stay.
Now at last the spring has come. And it never disappoints.
Two weeks ago, over Easter weekend, most trees were still leafless but the blossoms had come out: pale prunis and pear. Beautiful.
Last weekend I was staying with my housemate and my elder sister in a National Trust cottage in Worcestershire that Jane (my sister) had booked for the weekend. Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Shropshire seem to flow into each other. This is the border country, where England meets Wales, the Marches where the English and the Welsh fought bloody skirmishes a thousand years ago. And it's beautiful. Rolling hills, ancient oak woodland, vistas that unfold in the distance ... blue horizons of hills rippling on into infinity. It's a very ancient part of England, much less industrialised and built up than the rest of our crowded little isle, and it feels old and magical. This is the country of Elgar and Shakespeare ... it's also the landscape of Tolkien, for it was the scenery of the Midlands that so inspired his visions.
Our garden was bordered with damson trees. Down in the valley, by the 15th century moated farmhouse with its ancient Norman chapel (now in ruins), there was a whole orchard full of damson trees. The delicate white damson blossom was like lace. In the Middle Ages they used the fruit of the damson as a base for dye, and the dye was exported from the Midlands up to Lancashire and the North.
We heard and saw plenty of wildlife. Wrens, chaffinches, swallows (the first sign of summer!!), great tits (yes, I know, great name ), long-tailed tits, skylarks, buzzards - big birds of prey with a wonderful wing span - and, my favourites, two pairs of bullfinches who just adored devouring the damson flowers. Male bullfinches are gorgeous little things with their salmon-pink breasts and slatey-grey caps.
The fields were full of ewes and lambs. Some ancient Herefordshire breed that was popular in the Middle Ages, when England grew rich on the wool trade. England had the finest wool in Europe, and East Anglia in particular boomed. This all came to an end with the devastation of the Black Death in the 14th century, decimating the population of Europe and laying whole communities waste.
Now, in the last week, spring has hit the capital. As I commute to London each morning (a mere 25 minutes on the train from the 'burbs), I see the cherry blossoms have exploded - pink and white lace everywhere, in parks and suburban gardens. That electric green mist - leaves uncurling and unfolding - has spread everywhere. The air feels soft and damp and moist. Daffodils are everywhere, daffodils and primroses and forsythia. We saw wild primroses and violets on the estate in Worcestershire ...
It's spring.
And it never, never disappoints.
"Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could ... " Letter no. 246, The Collected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Avatar by goldlighticons on Live Journal
Sassafras wrote:Thank you, Di. That gorgeous post had me drunk on the memories.
Thank you Sassy, that's lovely to know.
You grew up near the South Downs?
I live 20 minutes away by car from the South Downs!
Where I live, I have the best of both worlds ... a mere half hour from central London by train and 20 minutes by car into Real Countryside. You know, with sheep and cows and stuff. And nice pubs.
Kent is very built up, esp. my part of it - there's the M25, the M2 and the M20, major arterial roads carrying traffic round London and down to Rochester, Canterbury and Dover. Lots of very nice villages near the motorways. The roar of traffic is never far away ... but there are plenty of villages, stately homes and gardens in the area.
Glad to have given you happy memories.
I have forgotten where in the US you live.
"Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could ... " Letter no. 246, The Collected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien Avatar by goldlighticons on Live Journal
), they can be put to wonderful effect in combination with one's own words, but I'd prefer it if we reserved pure quotes, without addition of our own words, for a separate thread and used this one to express our experiences with nature in our own words!
) gives me a calming feeling.
I looked up their German name, but didn't know it either. 
But it's a very beautiful name in German!