Banded Demoiselle by the River Avon at Christchurch
A bejewelled Banded Demoiselle, aka Damselfly, pauses by the Avon riverside. This flash assisted shot is an ambition at long last realised 📸
I am proud to have taken this close-up of the Mayfly. Most of the photos I take out in the open, in the Big Green, I carry home together with a small cloud of instant recall. This is one of the main reasons I go “pic-nicking” in the first place.
For most photos, I can recapture my location, the sensations of weather, lighting and skies, my position facing the subject and the flavour and soundscape of my immediate surroundings.
More than these, I can often clearly recall, very many years later, my emotions and thoughts at the time of pressing the shutter. If I see and hear the “crackle of place” in my photo, and sometimes even enjoy the scent of the place, these are not gifts to be taken for granted.
The word Camera originally means Room. It’s a Time Machine for my wanderings. As “Doctor Who” says about the Tardis, “It’s bigger on the inside than in the outside”.
When I am at worship of the natural world, I am part of an ever deepening mystical experience, and I love to share far and wide. No picture of mine belongs to me after I share it. Anyone can share it for themselves.
The act of taking a photo of beauty brings me into Love’s Presence EveryNow
The Wheel of Life is a most energetic circle. And it is brought from the glorious broad untrodden lanes of the Cosmos straight into the human scale of our earthly Standing Stone circles thus…
Swinside / Sunkenkirk Stone Circle
IMAGE Sunkenkirk in Cumbria. Gratitude to @EdwardFoster, artist, musician, poet for his gift of seeing in one of his favourite places.
… Once, a very long time ago, they came, the people, full of murmers, and on foot, to stop and understand under the new overlooking stones.
They arrived to understand how these sentinal stones circled them without circling. They understood what it was to be moved without the stones themselves stirring at all, at all. It was truly, truly it was, the new normal.
Then the word like seedcorn was spread far and wide. They began to arrive in this place with the new word.
They came many times, many people from wide and far. Along their hill tracks and through their wooded places. Down the generations they travelled. In the season they walked, to find uplift in the new normal.
Listen to the men talking low. Hear the women urging their children to quieten.
Great crowds in their seasons. Fires and Feastings. Music making and Solemnities.
Year after year, harvest upon harvest.
Oh, they murmured, those crowds, flowing like the sea at peace with itself.
They played simple music, like the sounds of the open-eyed laughter of new lovers.
They took themselves away and back again!
Later, time out of mind, on the grassy wooded pathways between the holding on and the letting go of memories, the youngest forgot what the oldest had spoken. So they turned and learned instead the word from the stones. The same sentinel stones.
The dancings and the silences of the stones, in a circle all around.
Every single one of those who had walked, who came and went, now are melted, gently melted under the forgiving ground.
Look. The stones are here now. Yes, in their sacred uprightness. Yes, so clear.
Stand. Listen as the stones gravely intone the awe of the worshippers. Crowds and crowds who are lying today deep in earth, far and wide, scattered and blind and deaf and dumb.
They truly are mighty, these populations under the ground, over which the silent stones are standing still, spreading their power over them all. And spreading their power over me, as I stand and stand and listen today!
~~ ~—~ ~~
~20161117 The peoples of the so-called past, of the Renaissance, of the Middle Ages, the Ptolomeic, the Uyghur Khaganate, those men and women of the Indus Valley Civilization, the Jomon period generations and all of our earlier and earliest forebears, elsewhere and everywhere, including especially inhabitants during those eras named with arrogant paradox as “before history”… Not one of them is “other”.
Not one is other, nor different. And not a single one but hasn’t my heart, my soul, my spirit now and at this time of my saying-tongue and of my writing-finger.
They are the bringers of my DNA. They said the sayings I say. I can see them, hear them, yes and converse with them, any and all of them, because they are my mother father sister brother from inception directly to my now-incadescent brain!
They are dead, but they are me in myriad form. They give, take, sing, wail, swallow, bleed, sweat, spit with me!
Their time of birth is my time of birth. We share all we are and all we any of us ever have in common.
Time, their time, my time, and yours too, does not exist. Simply put, when I drop my the guardianship of my ego, I can openly accept the origin of my sentient humanity as Swarm, as Collective.
There’s always plenty of time to waste or to cling to.
But stay a most precious while among the Circlestones. The Avebury, The Callanish, the great Henges, the Sunkenkirks. Hear and converse with our brethren as easily as you would to your friend
My grown up heart yearns to share and be a worshipping witness at the peak time seasons of living and growing.
As a toddler, I wandered with a sky full of joy in my wild little heart to discover clear and present magic all on my own, knee deep in flowering grass meadows, cow pastures, shaded ancient ditches, corn stukes, hay ricks, trickling streams, marshy pools, brackish puddles.
So many insects in my arms’ reach, all displaying such amazing colours, patterns and variety!
Every one has eyes to see with, feelers to probe, legs or wings or fins to go with, brethren to relate to.
And my first wonder as a little boy outside in the Big Green — wonder which has stayed strong with me all these days of my life — was to ask, “Who are you? What are you doing? Of what are you aware? What drives you? How alike are we?”
The answers to these primordial askables have come in precious glimpses, one at a time, like surprised butterflies on my path, all along and down my heavy decades.
These connections for me in the grasses under the sky were outside of time. They were made in heaven, and were strung like microcosmic beads along the silent, simply-furnished corridors of my childish thought between breakfast and lunch, and between lunch and teatime.
This was long before the relentless progress across the pastoral landscape, like a ghastly creeping shadow cast by no light at all, of systemic pesticides and selective agricultural weedkillers.
Here in the bliss of first contact, my love of the natural world took root. Here that child then, this white haired man now, entered into fellowship with life and sentience.
The yearning is always present. To abandon my will, and join in with the wild unselfconscious juiciness of everything that grows, moves, seeks, greets and dances life
The View at 72+ 