A tree cemetery

I love trees, they shape my thoughts and feelings and connect me to the wonder of a living universe.  So when we came across this bizarre scene in Glengarry , West Highlands, Scotland, we took a double take.  It had a very eerie atmosphere, creating a possible backdrop for a Dr Who episode. Should I let them know?

Prompt: Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge, unusual

 

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weekly photo challenge – Earth

 

Morning

I went out on an April morning
All alone, for my heart was high,
I was a child of the shining meadow,
I was a sister of the sky.

There in the windy flood of morning
Longing lifted its weight from me,
Lost as a sob in the midst of cheering,
Swept as a sea-bird out to sea.                          Sarah Teasdale

https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/earth-2017/

My spirit home is Scotland where I return again and again.

Nightingales sang by day

Then broke the spring. The hedges in a day

Burgeoned to green; the drawing of the trees,

Incomparably pencilled line by line,

Thickened to heaviness, and men forgot

The intellectual austerity

Of winter, in the rich warm-blooded rush

Of growth, and mating beasts, and rising sap.

How swift and sudden strode that tardy spring,

Between a sunrise and a sunset come!

The shadow of a swallow crossed the wall;

Nightingales sang by day. The pushing blade

Parted the soil. The morning roofs and oasts

There, down the lane, beside the brook and willows,

Cast their long shadows. Pasture, ankle-wet,

Steamed to the sun. The tulips dyed their green

To red in cottage gardens. Bees astir,

Fussing from flower to flower, made war on time.

Body and blood were princes; the cold mind

Sank with Orion from the midnight sky;

The stars of spring rose visible: The Virgin;

Al Fard the solitary; Regulus

The kingly star, the handle of the Sickle;

And Venus, lonely splendour in the west,

Roamed over the rapt meadows; shone in gold

Beneath the cottage eaves where nesting birds

Obeyed love’s law; shone through the cottage panes

Where youth lay sleeping on the breast of youth,

Where love was life, and not a brief desire;

Shone on the heifer blaring for the bull

Over the hedgerow deep in dewy grass:

And glinted through the dark and open door

Where the proud stallion neighing to his mares

Stamped on the cobbles of the stable floor.

For all were equal in the sight of spring,

Man and his cattle; corn; and greening trees,

Ignorant of the soul’s perplexity,

Ignorant of the wherefore and the end,

Bewildered by no transient ecstasy,

But following the old and natural law,

Nor marred nor blazing with a royal excess;

The law of life and life’s continuance.

taken from the poem ‘The Land’ by Vita Sackville West

Photography Anne Corr.

Kopong

This seems particularly pertinent and moving at a time when the world is watching the displacement of people from all over the globe.  Perhaps we need to ritualise a little more, eat together, work beside one another to feel we are all living the same history.

Among the Ku Waru people of New Guinea, for example, children become kin through an essential substance called kopong (grease) which originates in the soil. The Ku Waru call both father’s sperm and mother’s milk kopong, and it is through these two sources that conception of a child is said to occur. However, sweet potatoes and pork also contain kopong, and when people share these foods, the same fundamental connection emerges between them as does between parent and child: they become kin. The offspring of two Ku Waru brothers, Sahlins says, are ‘as much related because they were sustained by the same soil as because their fathers were born of the same parents’. The children of immigrants to the community become full kin with those who share no genes with them by carrying out socially inscribed practices around kopong.

Barbara J King is professor of anthropology at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia

Like to like

RSA Animates with Manuel Lima

This wonderfully drawn slide from one of the splendid animations by RSA  Animates demonstrates how wonderfully similar the patterns of very different life mechanisms can be – it reminded me how powerfully I felt the implications of that similarity when I compared the visuals from different ends of the telescope in the ‘Powers of Ten ‘video, which is well worth visiting here:  http://www.eamesoffice.com/education/powers-of-ten-2/

What I viewed as I turned the pages of the vintage book was the astonishing similarity between the patterns from the telescope when it was viewing the universe at the scale of 10  to the power of 10 positive, compared with the patterns of the view when under the microscope the make up of the atoms viewed at the scale of 10 the to power of 10 negative. Totally bizarre.

It seems implausible that the patterns from such vastly different scales of what we experience as life can almost replicate each other – there is poetry in it , a mystery of import which mankind has not yet fathomed. It excites me to find that sort of synchronicity which perplexes and offers the possibility of discovering more exciting knowledge, more depth of human understanding exists beyond current comprehension.  It suggests that the route of interconnectedness may be the one to follow, and even more so today after reading about the ‘wood wide web’. (many biologists have started using the term “wood wide web” to describe the communications services that fungi provide to plants and other organisms.)

Eastern philosophy, poets and Science seem to be united in their preoccupation with the interconnectedness of life’s machinery, and as D.H .Lawrence wrote

     ‘I am part of the sun as my eye is part of me.  That I am part of the earth my feet know perfectly, and my blood is part of the sea.’

Show me more examples of pattern synchronicity – those occurrences that make you shudder with possible delight and expectation. I am deeply interested in knowing more.!

The RSA animates video I referred to in the top image can be found here rsa animates and in this particular one Manuel Lima discusses the power on networks in a complex world.

Trees have long thoughts,

‘Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.’

We came across the beauty and magic of Glen Affric last year, and it was am experience I will never forget. I know I will return because it will pull me back – I haven’t spent enough time in the company of the flora and fauna there.

When I came across this project, http://treesforlife.org.uk/work/woodland-projects/ I was delighted – it is an inspired and inspirational effort that deserves our attention , and our  care!  I hope you go over to the YouTube link as it is breathtaking. 

http://bit.ly/1CISfQk

What was the question?

Life’s Rich Tapestry

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

from Wallace Stevens poem, ’13 ways of looking at at Blackbird’

Image Digital Painting by Anne Corr , Attenborough Nature Reserve

Smooth

Walking the dogs this morning,  I was considering the complexity that belonging to the human race involves.   I am feeling ‘smooth’ this morning, an expression used by our housemate over breakfast and one that sums up my current frame of mind. Smooth.  That may not appear that surprising to any of you readers out there ( are there any?)  but it is. Because all of my life I have lived with a realism that results in a constant battle of dealing with an imperfect world. I tend not to catastrophize events in my own life, which is  a plus, but the negative aspect is that any joy is tempered by the knowledge that somewhere a war is being fought, or torture is continuing to be applied in areas of the globe I know nothing about. So it is.

It was serendipitous then, that I ventured upon this short video by Cognitive, which expresses so well the importance of realism in everyday life, in the politics , in the economics of living in the 21st century.  We have no excuse for not looking clearly at the challenges we face as a species, and today the Rosetta space mission is attempting to land Philae on a comet;  once settled, Philae will begin to reveal secrets about the solar system and maybe even give us clues about the origin of life. We have to hold close the hope that is the catalyst to any investigative project, and while we hold it, simultanteously understand the difficulties and hazards that are the barriers to success.  Our actions will govern the sustainability of ourselves and our co-habitants of the planet, and it is why we need to be realists in our own endeavours, whether that be managing a family, directing a company, guiding a country, or running a space mission.  Realism has to lead to fortitude, and hope has to be our guide.

http://www.wearecognitive.com/videos/rsa-animate-smile-or-die

Rock of ages.

 

Digital painting from Elgol, Isle fo Skye . Anne Corr

Six Significant Landscapes
I
An old man sits
In the shadow of a pine tree
In China.
He sees larkspur,
Blue and white,
At the edge of the shadow,
Move in the wind.
His beard moves in the wind.
The pine tree moves in the wind.
Thus water flows
Over weeds.

II
The night is of the colour
Of a woman’s arm:
Night, the female,
Obscure,
Fragrant and supple,
Conceals herself.
A pool shines,
Like a bracelet
Shaken in a dance.

III
I measure myself
Against a tall tree.
I find that I am much taller,
For I reach right up to the sun,
With my eye;
And I reach to the shore of the sea
With my ear.
Nevertheless, I dislike
The way ants crawl
In and out of my shadow.

IV
When my dream was near the moon,
The white folds of its gown
Filled with yellow light.
The soles of its feet
Grew red.
Its hair filled
With certain blue crystallizations
From stars,
Not far off.

V
Not all the knives of the lamp-posts,
Nor the chisels of the long streets,
Nor the mallets of the domes
And high towers,
Can carve
What one star can carve,
Shining through the grape-leaves.

VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses —
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon —
Rationalists would wear sombreros.
— Wallace Stevens