dappled and seabourne

out of a front

2011-11-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

Mmm, been thinking of clouds lately. Yesterday, we zipped home from Cumberland Island in a Cessna 206 and flew out of a front. When we looked back behind us, a sheet of white cloud on an otherwise gray day was floating along behind us. Someone said "A Morning Glory!" and for a moment I was back in Burketown in that blue and white Grob. But this one had no lift. We were jostled and jerked, "like we were in a bottle that was being shaken up" I described to someone.

Now, home. It's home to the rain, the leaky roof, the busy present-preparing workshop in my square yellow room, on my square yellow table. And lots of friends to make me merry and celebrate this wonderful time of year.

p.s. - This photo was originally posted here, from a walk in Lost Cove. No connection, just a pretty thought.

Mumsy's swamp

2011-11-09T14:07:00.001-05:00

Mumsy wears white every day. Her lips are the same shade of pink as they were forty-five years ago. Once, they discontinued her lipstick color and her grand-daughter made her a new tube by melting down the stubs of her old lipsticks in the microwave and pouring them into a new lipstick mold. She eventually found another color that was similar.

Mumsy has lived by the swamp for about thirty-five years. When one of her sons was in high school he built an 800-foot boardwalk that leads straight into it and almost to the other side. It took him four years. Her husband drew with colorful pastels. He built her house. His name was Neil Nehrbass. Hers is Janet. Everybody calls her Mumsy.

where clouds begin

2011-10-05T23:05:00.003-04:00

To get there, we had to paddle through a cloud. When we reached the far side, the cloud had moved on.

Williams Island Farm is located dead smack in the center of the Tennessee River just after it swerves around Moccasin Bend. The River begins near Knoxville where the Holston meets the French Broad (hidy, Suttree would say), and ends on the Kentucky line where it is swallowed by the Ohio. A couple miles from my house, she shears downtown Chattanooga in two.

Chattanooga itself is a city of conjunctions - three mountains, three valleys, a snaky gorge, a river cutting through the center, and railroad tracks and interstates playing tic tac toe all over it. So what do its residents do? They build bridges over the river. They cut railroads into the mountains. They hanglide out over the valleys. And the oldest practice: they farm the island in the middle of the Tennessee River.

A thousand years ago, people did the same thing. And they've been doing it on and off ever since. Today, it's cultivated by my brother and a couple other farmhands who grow vegetables there. Beets, turnips, radishes, eggplant, chard, kale, collards, peppers, squash, carrots, okra, arugula, herbs, shiitakes, sweet potatoes, parsnips, cabbage to name a few. I go there every other week to hoe my fair share, but really it's the island feeling that I savor. Paddling across the river. Gazing south to Lookout and north into the Gorge. The clouds never lie the same way twice.

Off, and back on again

2011-09-15T16:03:00.045-04:00

For a while, it seemed too big.

There was too much.
Too much to sift through.
Too much to think about.

It was a denial - was it a denial? Whether my return from the Watson year was an eager casting off of the title "foreigner" or a wholehearted embrace of familiar language, culture, and community, I'm not sure.

Please don't misinterpret that. I believe with my whole soul in the value of seeing and experiencing and learning from other cultures. I don't for a millisecond write off the year's experience as anything but the transformative and mind-blowing year that it was.

Yet life-changing is not easy. Life-changing means subjecting yourself to experience. It means putting yourself out there. It means not being invisible. It means...difficulties. Joys, hard work, laughter, failure, success, rejection, confusion (lots of confusion), frustration...is there any way to describe a year of traveling alone? I don't think it can be rattled off in a list.

After that year - 365 days of constant exploration and discovery, of entirely new places and faces, languages and music, clouds and landscapes - I was worn out. I was craving a familiar face, a familiar place, the everyday intimacies that we take for granted: the chipped red paint on the front door, the smile of a neighbor, the familiar pothole on the road (I'm imagining that scene from the film "It's a Wonderful Life" where George Bailey, upon returning from the haunting dream world to his real life again, desperately searches for a scrap of familiarity and, finding his daughter's flower petals in his pocket shouts "Zuzu's petals...Zuzu...THERE THEY ARE!") Okay, it wasn't that dramatic. But wow, it felt good to be home!

The return was fantastic. Overwhelming. Stupefying. I have so much stuff. Clothes. Books. Possessions. For one year, I had a backpack. The next day I had a room full of things in a house on some land. But the biggest shock was family. Friends. They were all there. Doing their thing, being their wonderful selves. And I was a part of it.

(That's probably the most meaningful gift anyone could ask for. I felt so grateful. I still do. I swore not to take that for granted anymore, not to take any detail for granted. I was a part of a community of people who appreciated me and loved me and occasionaly let me know it, although most of the time it was through subtle signs like saying "good morning" or asking me if I would please cut the grass or sharing a meal. )

So why all this writing? Why now?

This blog is a story. It began as my cloud story. It began before I received the Watson Fellowship, when I was formulating ideas about how I see the world, wanting a place to express those ideas and wondering if there would be an audience interested in listening. This blog is that vessel. That medium. The ideas continue, but for a while I had to not think about it. I felt pressure. I had returned with a load of wonderful experiences, experiences that still come out in stories here and there and that I often surprise myself with by remembering. I have over a dozen journals from that year and thousands and thousands of images.

They are valuable. There is a lot to be learned from them, a lot to be shared, but it must be done thoughtfully and relevantly. I want these ideas to live, and I want to continue to share my thoughts on the clouds, to move forward with a grateful nod to the past and a passionate eye for the capacity to change the way we think in the future. This is a place that lives. Thanks for listening. The clouds today are beautiful.

hop, skip, and a jump

2011-09-08T16:06:00.001-04:00

the adventures continue. I started a new blog here:

http://samaraplace.tumblr.com/

late evening amble

2011-03-04T15:48:00.000-05:00

I love the long walk home through the short houses. The dirty muddled road chipped like an old ax handle, washed out and worn in low places, puddling and glinting in late daylight. It’s peaceful there. It’s straight, but you can’t feel it because of the hill, the hill that doesn’t appear like a hill. It’s long and curved, subtly, unnoticeably, like the surface of an eggplant or the contour of a smooth forearm. Unnoticeably, because there is so much else to notice. The trees – the entire street length – shade the road in scraggly patches pieced together like stacked webs of twig and bough, no pattern, plenty of empty places for air, light, sky, whatever tint that may be today. And past the last road sign, the forty-first street, the end of the state road, the asphalt simply gives way. Things grow there. Dirt, soil sprout fingerlings of green hints stalwart in their presence: life here, too, will persist. Walk on. You’ll see. Or not see.

The turnaround is always a gamble. To proceed to the end, to the unromantic, less-than-majestic, unheralded by shady oak hands point-of-no-further-stepping, or to wheel around before the bitterness sinks in, to tiptoe up to the end of the shadowy lines on the ground and not even for an instant ponder the bright beyond, unknown. Usually, I make the turn before then. Past the barrier, beyond the pavement and baby grass, but before the isolating mid-road stance that begs question and neighborly concern. I turn back before curiosity does. The road rambles on. Into one gulley, through the culvert, shot out into a ditch, somewhere near a Georgia chemical plant, abandoned railroad tracks, weedy bridge-crossings, coarse gravel. Rain pools in places where rust rims the dirt. Footprints hold back. Grasses grow tall. The sky there is like glass, waiting for someone to shout its name, to shatter it into a thousand vanishing pieces.

night, the fish caves, Heimaey

2011-01-24T23:24:00.000-05:00

Day one in Vestmannaeyjar. I set up my tent inside a circle of mountain. Volcanic walls surround my cloth home on a field crowded with dandelions. Swarming above the scattered tents are as many birds as there are people in Reykjavik. Thousands of seabirds squawk about, lighting on tufted nests that look like messy green mustaches. Near the sea stands a shelter constructed with the volcano's crumbs, a four-walled, turf-roofed abode, a hole in the rain. This is where I write.

They call this place fiskehellar, the fish caves, because of the hundreds of dry pockets worn into the mountainside. When the island was being fought over, fiskehellar is where the women and children kept safe. Tonight, it cradles me to sleep, too, as I flatten dandelions into pancakes beneath my back and pray that my tent is spared the steady fall of ammoniac rain that artfully speckles the ground.

The flight here made my heart leap. Heimaey and its little siblings rise out of the water like emeralds set in asphalt. A late evening light cast them in an oblique, golden hue. The runway reminded me of the airport in Pulaski, except instead of a quarry preceding the landing, we lipped a bungled volcanic cliff covered with birds and giant waves. There was a young soccer team aboard -- about a dozen ten year-old kids wearing their uniforms and grass-stains proudly -- and when the wheels touched down smoothly, they let loose a spirited applause.

The rain has stopped, the birds haven't. One slight shadow falls when camping in around-the-clock sunshine - aside from being hard to fall asleep at first, the birds are never quiet. All hours of the night they squawk and sing away. But perhaps they do that back home, too. I cannot remember. I am looking forward to darkness again, even if I spend it mostly asleep...

excepted from a letter written on Heimaey, the largest of the islands of Vestmannaeyjar, off the southern coast of Iceland.
July 3, 2010

remembering

2011-01-03T23:39:00.000-05:00

Kiruna, Sweden
January 2010

after, early

2010-12-26T12:28:00.000-05:00

snow fell Christmas night.
this morning the pasture cuts glowed
white like soft avenues of arctic pelts
rabbit, bear, clouds
scuttling past in huddled clumps
southeast towards the coast
out to the broad blue
catching light and the clarity
of early morning after Christmas
snow

Christmas Creek

2010-12-02T10:39:00.000-05:00

Would it be better to sit in silence?
To think everything, to feel everything, to say nothing?
This is the way of the orange gourd.
This is the habit of the rock in the river, over which
the water pours all night and all day.
But the nature of man is not the nature of silence.
Words are the thunders of the mind.
Words are the refinement of the flesh.
Words are the responses to the thousand curvaceous moments—
we just manage it—
sweet and electric, words flow from the brain
and out the gate of the mouth.
We make books of them, out of hesitations and grammar.
We are slow, and choosy.
This is the world.

Mary Oliver

tower wisdom

2010-11-23T10:14:00.000-05:00

Empty window panes cut out identical square patches from the day's white beginning. From this perspective, it's the only color there is. Bullet holes burn in the roof like constellations in a steely sky. The sun is arriving. Glowing. Growing.

I used to come to this fire tower when I needed that glow or when I needed to give it to someone else. It has been the subject of geology papers and love poems. It has appeared at the beginnings of friendships and marked the end of others. For me, the tower is a centering place. Up here, you're everywhere, you're nowhere. You're floating above the treetops, swaying with the wind, mediating between the pileateds and the blue jays, the sun and the treetops, the clouds and the plateau. The color orange doesn't exist anywhere but here a few breaths after sunrise.

Flocks of passerines swoop and duck like schools of fish through the air, the deer steps cautiously in the leaves, and the blue jay persists. The wind picks up and all of a sudden, you realize that you're 100 feet in the air, in a metal box peppered with bullet holes, abandoned long ago by any badge-wielding Ed Abbey imitation.

There is a line now above the crater of South Pittsburg where the sunlight has taken refuge and sequesters all the color from the rest of the sky. The wind has weakened. The blue jay now mimics a hawk, but betrays itself with a signature rasp. The day swims on.

I come up here for silence, not of the world, but of myself. I pause at the top not a thought in my head and watch. (Meditation, western imperialist-style. Find the tallest tower and climb it...)

Who gets to see so many miles otherwise, listen to the day begin, witness the orange glow and question the integrity of a creaking tower? (The wind is back with some gusto.) All of a sudden, I have a lot to think about, but none of it matters. The day grows. I watch and take note.

It is mid-November and the treetops wear hats of color but nothing else below. The poplars are yellow, the chestnut oaks and hickories, a duller version and the beeches gave up long ago and turned brown, although all of their leaves remain.

Brighter. The thin line above the horizon has spilled onto the other rim across the gap of the town. Every time the wind picks up, the creaking commences and the tower swoons like an unwieldy toddler on stilts. I watch. There is no other option but to be a sponge. A servant to sound, light, hunger.

The first time I climbed these steps, it was a September morning five years ago in the dark. I sat in this same spot, in silence, for nearly three hours. There were more railings then, less rickety boards. Or perhaps I just imagine it that way.

There is nothing to do but to be patient. Even as I try to stuff the silence with words, I realize the futility of the endeavor. The day grows around me.

I will be absent from this place tomorrow morning, but the day will unfold nonetheless, whether I play witness to its color or not. The tower may creak, but chances are no one hears it.

I go to the fire tower to learn patience and the transience of light, of sound, of life.

dawn from above

2010-11-21T23:00:00.002-05:00

I have no face
I am two eyes, and the land rolls away beneath them.

The world has no history - some roads, odd trees and absent animals, the folding and eroding of rock in the distance, and the shoes I wear on dangling feet - but I am not
in Tennessee, off this so-named road or any amount of feet in the air
the wind is nameless and so am I.

Memory is the the spine of a hollow cave I slept in last night, the bony disc of a full moon setting as I ascended stony steps this morning, and the vague familiarity of a sun rising from a hole in the forest.

Clouds swing on strings lightly like puppets, old voices are no voices, and we all lose our humanity to politeness when she demands it.

The top floor slats, rotten boards, a penny in a crack on its back. E pluribus unum. Who else? I see no one.

Silence arrives as a humble wave, indivisible, too scarce to remember how to embrace. Even eyes have become rare enough for words.

But eyes or no, the echo of the rock, the sway of the tower, the sound of dawn munching apricots and spitting its pits into the valley - the world spins
and dawn tears apart time and history and direction in an ancient ritual rise.

Arrival

2010-11-13T17:31:00.002-05:00

returning words, Williams Island, late summer.

As wind withdraws in dying light,
we fold our wings post fledgling flight
and perched, gaze perspicaciously
at ruffled clouds here gathering.

The evening swells with silence cleft
by rheumy notes on insects' breath.
Our feathered burdens of the day,
let darkness fold and tuck away.

The stars adorn their skyward rim
like a burnished diadem
and as moth caught in a web
the moon flutters on a rippled bed.

Anon a pacifying rain
relieves the day's expectant strain.
While nightjars spin a cryptic song,
the river ambles humbly on.

Our antiquated island host -
a shape-shifting, alluvial ghost -
rests now elongate in her pose
between the banks, beneath the crows.

A year investigating sky
ended as the evening died
and hands recalloused in the toil
of an old, familiar soil.

Ferried to this watery loft
adrift with caddisflies and moths
I gently land the fugal glide
and slumber on the other side.

Tapestry

2010-11-07T22:36:00.000-05:00

It hangs from heaven to earth.
There are trees in it, cities, rivers,
small pigs and moons. In one corner
the snow falling over a charging cavalry,
in another women are planting rice.

You can also see:
a chicken carried off by a fox,
a naked couple on their wedding night,
a column of smoke,
an evil-eyed woman spitting into a pail of milk.

What is behind it?
--Space, plenty of empty space.
And who is talking now?
--A man asleep under his hat.

What happens when he wakes up?
--He'll go into the barbershop.
They'll shave his beard, nose, ears, and hair
To make him look like everyone else.

Charles Simic
(1999)

I love the sequence of disparate scenes opening this poem. It reminds me of the numerous worlds we enter everyday - the worlds in books, in the newspaper, on the internet, the radio, and then our own physical world, of our hands, the things we smell and eat, the space we create. Modern technology and media seem to be pulling and twisting us into places that are often difficult to define, and sometimes it feels a bit like this poem, like we're flashing through disconnected spaces without stopping to consider the consequences of our participation. In an introduction to a collection of Wendell Berry's essays, Norman Wirzba writes:

What the purveyors of conventional wisdom often fail to ask, however, is whether the social and economic transformations they facilitate lead to an improper or inauthentic sense of human identity and vocation.

Although Wirzba in this passage refers to the mass migration of farmers to urban centers, similar effects can be observed from the mass migration of human minds to social media outlets. While there are obvious benefits to the ease of communication created by these outlets, the result he describes - the inauthentic sense of human identity - echoes with an eerie familiarity to a generation whose friends include scores of people they have never shared a meal with, much less even met in person.

"What is behind it?" "Who is talking?" Simic asks us. In a society where we are encouraged to communicate with just about anyone anywhere at any time, these things might be worth asking. Sure, it may be gratifying on some level to know that we can instantly connect from anywhere, but that connection seems awfully tenuous when placed beside a physical one. There are trees in it, cities, rivers, small pigs and moons. What does your tapestry look like?

Land in light of clouds

2010-10-20T11:22:00.002-04:00

Space. We need space. So much of everyday life unfolds inside a feeling of tightness, a tightness that we've created to promote efficiency and up our output. Buildings, cubicles, cafés with tables so close together you can't scoot your chair back without bumping into someone else. Hostels with 6, 8, 14 bunks to a room. Portapotties, rows of portapotties - they're always standing in rows. Like they'd be afraid to stand alone, staggered - HOLD RANKS! Parking lots, where so many paint-scratching mishaps occur, tempers boil, the speedbumps and brakes alerted suddenly to pedestrians marching obediently over asphalt walkways, painted to denote the place where walking is allowed, where stopping is allowed, where fire engines are allowed.

It's all about organizing space. The chair you're sitting in? Space. Comfort and space. Even writing has come to be confined. Our thoughts, as they hit the page, are prohibited from tumbling wherever they please. They are hemmed, margined, top and bottom, line after line - the blue ones, not the red. Space. Since when were we ever freed from this sense of outlined, projected space?

Space becomes a funny thing when you step outside. Outside the boundaries of wall, ceiling, window, suddenly you have...well, space - but not entirely devoid of limits. Trees, houses, buildings, people, clouds. The space is not bounded, but filled with presence. You feel it more than you notice it. An open field feels a lot different with a single tree in the middle; an open horizon feels a lot different with a full moon above it. And the sky - the endless shape and pattern and movement of the sky creates an endless number of different senses.

Watching a giant cumulonimbus billow out into a thunderstorm feels markedly different from watching the fragile filaments of cirrus clouds shoot across the blue. It's the difference between feeling hemmed in or utterly free. I never fail to feel this overwhelming sense of liberation when I see wisps of mare's tail cirrus splayed out across the sky. I don't know why, I just do. I want to leap, I want to sing, I want to read poetry all day. That is mare's tail cirrus for me. I remember speaking to someone who thought that a gray sky - that ubiquitous, enveloping gray - was the most beautiful of all the sky's colors. I had never considered that before, but now I can't help but think about it when I encounter a sky that color.

Some people say that we think of the weather as a projection of ourselves. A foggy day may be depressing to the depressed and beautifully mysterious to someone more adventurous. American artist Roni Horn did this project called WEATHER REPORTS YOU, which plays with the idea that the weather is a metaphor for energy - the social and physical energy of a person and place. I think she has a point. I find myself doing this sometimes, deriving my energy from or blaming it on the weather.

But I also can't ignore the fact that a certain pattern of clouds across the sky reliably produces a distinct feeling in me every time, no matter how I felt beforehand. Like the mare's tail cirrus. Many a gloomy day has begun for me that has transformed into a beautiful one at the sight of those clouds. I say sight, but really, it's that sense. The feeling produced by their presence. The simple arrangement of space.


both photos - All Saints' Chapel, Sewanee, TN

Reunion

2010-10-07T00:01:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow, I visit 5 other Watson fellows. This is what was on my mind when I re-entered the country two months ago, after a year of absence:

Without the sky and without its eyes, without the solicitous peace of the sail, no sound of waves kissing the bow, no cutting wake to watch disappear, without the quiet and without the calm, without the weight of an empty horizon, no birds to watch and ponder how, no chart to plot or knots to count - the return is one small death, dreams half-sown, watered, and left to the mercy of the sun, to the sea, and any vagrant wanderer who happens to pass. I'm diving back under to fish for something - something else, something more...

When the daychild runs out

2010-10-03T13:24:00.002-04:00

When the daychild runs out of laughter
and the riley wind rounds the corner
from summer and plunges headfirst down
the steeply graded hill to autumn -
Who, then, will giggle back the stormclouds
before their ire erupts and embrace
each tender wave of darkness washing in
the day's dismissal with two lungfuls of air
and a lullaby so sweet and final
that even the stars struggle to keep
from blinking out and drifting away
into another trillion year slumber?

When the daychild goes, trust your bones
have rattled so thoroughly with her glee
that you never have to remember
how to laugh, to grow older, to sleep.

word strings

2010-09-30T22:06:00.000-04:00

I find myself in a funny place. I could go anywhere. I could be anything. I could go back to school to specialize in Pleistocene megafauna or to learn how to design websites selling at thousand dollars a pop.

But the part of me that values simplicity knows, deep down, that those choices won't change anything. The dreams that tug at my soul aren't intricate or complicated. At the end of the day, I am happy if I've sung a song, read a poem, written a letter, let myself be transformed by a string of words or the landscape of a melody.

In a world in which you can choose from scores of ways to communicate and interact, I still feel impelled to choose my methods carefully. Perhaps it's because I ride the terminal cusp of a generation that was born listening to Fisher Price LPs, learned its first songs from cassette tapes, amassed a CD collection in high school, and now tosses around mp3s like penny-candy. (The MiniDisc, I should add, deserves an honorable mention between the CDs and mp3s.) We witnessed the blossoming of the internet, the rampant spread of cell phones, and the introduction of a hundred all-in-one camera/phone/computer PDAs that can't stand to remain pocketed for too long.

I believe that what we invest of ourselves in the medium of communication comes across in the message. A phone call, a letter, a song, a tweet. I don't think it obtuse to consider some media more substantial than others. Yesterday, I called a person in a remote town on the north coast of Australia. I also opened a handwritten letter from a friend in Tennessee. It will be a long time before I forget either one.

A couple weeks ago, I finally extracted myself from facebook. There's something to be said for simplicity, for time spent communicating directly, meaningfully, deliberately. I'm not trying to lead a stomping Luddite brigade through the backyard of social media. But I am pulling the plug on a desultory way of communication I found myself nodding to more and more often. And I am making simple decisions now that will affect the way I interact with the world in the future. I want my norm to be different. Give me a letter over an email any day. A song over a tv show. A voice rather than a silent screen. Here's one less soul plugged into that space and one more for the type of world I want to belong to.

Photo from a dry lake bed near Burketown Australia, October 2009

and seek

2010-09-17T20:56:00.001-04:00

We go to seek new songs. Landscape. Silence.

To follow our rabbits, hope the hole never ends, just gets too dark too know.

We go to seek new origins.

Think of me as a sound, as a peculiar type of wind, as a shade of darkness in the unknown contours of a cave. The path of a water droplet. The after-twang of a banjo.

Nothing stays the same for long.

A leaf-beetle's dance,

the ache to become a song.

nacreous clouds

2010-09-12T18:49:00.004-04:00

January 11, 2010
Institutet för rymdfysik
Kiruna, Sweden

sometimes it all comes

2010-09-05T09:18:00.007-04:00

Sometimes it all comes pounding back to me
like a flash flood writhing and twisting through
an empty river bed, swallowing every remnant of dust
and turning the world into a velvety slur of carmine
and deer leather brown, as if to convince the desert
that water exists. And water can still win.

Sometimes it begins as a far-off drone, like locusts,
and slowly approaches in a gradual growing
buzz that makes your fingers tingle and interrupts
everyone's front porch conversation, ties our tongues
and halts the rockers on their planed oak beds.
We look up, but we don't have to.

And sometimes it just falls, like suddenly a child
too weary to stand up slumps over at the neck
and surrenders to the lull of that recalcitrant cloud,
sleep, lucky that mother stands by to take over
life's secondary details, like transportation and warmth.
Sometimes, it just falls.

"We think by feeling. What is there to know?"

2010-09-02T12:58:00.000-04:00

We start out doing it for our self. Humming. Not because the trees are listening, the walls have ears, but because we do. We are. We go. We make.

And after a while, we learn different melodies, we might learn how to whistle, to trill the ends a little, to respond, add, incorporate, grow.

And after a while, when we can't remember how or why it all began (because why does it matter? who needs to know those things? you hum because you hum) inevitably, someone hears you. And they stop, they listen, and maybe they say something, maybe they say nothing. But now it is no longer your humming. It has crawled into the ear of someone else.

And, after a while, perhaps a handful of people - through whatever medium, in passing or intentionally - have heard your song. And some of them (bless them) have told you. It is beautiful. Thank you. For being. And this is the highest compliment you could ever receive. You hum because you do, because you are; humming is as inseparable from your self as a scent from its flower. And someone said thanks.

Learn where the title came from here.

The photo was taken last year in Burketown, Australia by Russell White and can be found in this gallery on his website.

3

2010-07-21T07:53:00.004-04:00

As much as I despise wrenching cohesiveness from a story and stamping a lesson on top just because it is ending, I have to admit, this one does have a bit of a theme. And there is an ending, if not of thought, at least in time and place. Today is day number 365 of this wild cloud pursuit. Tomorrow, I fly home. So in celebration, in thanks, in reflection, here are three images from three very memorable moments this past year. Here's to wrapping up!

1. Morning Glory clouds in Queensland, Australia. September.

2. South Island, New Zealand. November.

3. nacreous clouds over Kiruna, Sweden. January.

tracks

2010-07-20T07:31:00.001-04:00

we move like glass
words through a tunnel
bow to the wind and away
from sky.

like clouds clotting air
obdurate confidence
and scarce of color
lackluster

wearing things too tight
in places where the wind
pinches us uncomfortably
and whips us into attention

we lull and we stir
awe with saturation
in steps. black rock
beaches

unfinished tunes
distraction and always
the wind

running running running like
it forgot to turn off the oven
somewhere on
the other side of the world

sharing our photos taken
from unsuspecting prey never
to be put back in the right
places

filtering light from water
and wind. we all delve
deep unto the black things between
our hands.

except these machines
are always mercilessly leaving
our fingers bent and our eyes
with a metallic residue, but somehow
lackluster

horizon

2010-07-11T16:57:00.001-04:00

The everpresent perspective in a treeless place. Telephone poles add a bit of dimension, and I've developed a penchant for these wooden processions of wire and glass. Funny how the trees found their way back. Same substance, different space.

between pilots

2010-07-07T00:00:00.002-04:00

Happy birthday, Dad.

soapball madness

2010-07-05T11:27:00.004-04:00

The soapball madness is rolling out of hand
to lengths we could never comprehend
in legs, in hair, forgotten like the wind
that rolls up the years behind us in a great re-raveling.

Re-raveling because we've come undone in traveling.
And soap is never on my list of things
to bring. What I search for I must conjure -
silence and space and places with words that cast shadows.

In any case, we've gone through rucksacks apiece
and what's in them never matters. There's rain,
there's snow and sometimes the birds that rain
to render temporary backlumps useless and spectacular.

And sometimes it's the uninvited we take to most -
the hitchhiker seeds that cling to your shirt,
the small mountain stones that stick in your boots -
because the best parts just fit and noiselessly go

like there's some overarching symbiosis that our bodies know.
So if we had soap, we'd wash it away
and keep memories spotless and fresh and new
and withdraw them often and never let ourselves roll out of hand.

photo: Vestmannaeyjar runway

centre de la terre

2010-07-01T09:05:00.000-04:00

standing before this giant, it's easy to see how Jules Verne's imagination ran wild when he saw Snæfellsjökull.

In Sneffels Joculis craterem, quem delibat umbra Scartaris, Julii intra kalendas descende, audax viator, et terrestre centrum attinges; quod feci. Arne Saknussemm.

translation

presence

2010-06-30T10:37:00.000-04:00

some people claim that the weather is a metaphor for our self-perception. I don't think it's just the weather. conscious of it or not, you notice what you want to notice.

In Grundarfjord, the thing to notice is a mountain called Kirkjufell. It's there, somewhere...

hike!

2010-06-27T13:23:00.000-04:00

Snæfellsnes coast

S. paradisaea

2010-06-26T19:10:00.000-04:00

we all need a good dose of this from time to time. somehow, kids just know and aren't afraid to show it. I learned a thing or two watching these little people in Anarstapi.

2010-06-19T09:05:00.000-04:00

Remembering Burketown.

what's hot and what's not

2010-06-14T12:51:00.003-04:00

Reykjavík's hot water source is covered in moss. And it makes clouds. You might even call it pretty.

In this steamy valley lies Nesjavellir, the power plant that pumps geothermally heated water from the island's volcanic innards, through a 27 kilometer pipe, and out my showerhead. Over the course of that 27 km, most of which runs above ground, the water loses less heat than your diurnal fluctuation in body temperature. That's not a lot. In fact, that's damn efficient. And at what cost? Well, given that the water came from the sky, the heat from the ground, and both of those things continue to produce without any sign of faltering, it's pretty low. The plant even uses the excess steam to generate electricity via steam turbines. As for greenhouse gas emissions, the yearly total equates to what a coal-fired power plant burps out over about five days. Or what the United States's fleet of 614 produces in about 12 minutes. Ouch.

What's the deal, America? Even Hawaii, our own island hot spot, has a coal-fired power plant, and generates 90% of its electricity from fossil-fuels. While our Hawaiian president opposes the coal-chomping beasts, he gets pretty excited about emission-less nuclear plants. He's using your tax dollars to help energy giant Southern Company (the owner and operator of 22 coal-fired power plants) build two nuclear reactors in Burke, Georgia, about 180 miles from my home. The question of where to keep the waste remains on the table. And apparently Obama and Steven Chu have no qualms about paying Russia to be our number one uranium supplier. (Are Obama's efforts to "restart" with Russia grounded in our uranium lust?)

So maybe nuclear is the lesser of two evils, but come on - with the burgeoning development of renewable technology, can't we make a bigger effort forgo these icky questions of mining and drilling and controlling for emissions? The Recovery Act passed last year allocates a chunk ($61.3 billion) of money to clean energy projects, however with our yearly military budget topping a trillion dollars, it's pretty clear where our priorities lie. I know we're not Iceland, but we can do better, and it's painful to watch the U.S. continue to ignore the obvious.

more about energy use in the states

on being a tourist

2010-06-04T09:06:00.002-04:00

Left to the blathering masses we take our time
to take our pick, sifting, as eyes do when pressed
with peddler´s arrays of cloud, mountain, stream...
(after a while don´t they all look the same?)

The sun will set, too, on these hallowed hills
on the dead queen´s cairn, the elves´ hidden rock,
and come winter snow will cover them deep
and eyes then will graze without stopping to see.

The clouds come and go. We breathe and we breathe.
In spring the lupines crowd each mountain fold.
The geyser lets loose every minute or two, yet for most
eyes and hands an instant´s enough. We saw it. We´re through.

Set me down gently and let me go softly. Don´t curl your arm
round my neck or my side. I came here freely and freely I´ll go
when the flowers have said all they have to say
and cirrus cloud feathers blow softly away: tell me a poem

sing me your lines, something to carry without pocket or lens.
How do you whisper to poets and painters and no one
else, though many see you? Why do you call
to a dwindling few? Many who pass by seldom see true.

Take your time giving and I´ll thoughtfully accept,
you bow and I´ll curtsy, we´ll call it respect.
One sky´s enough. Two eyes will do. For seeing,
though simple´s a hard thing to do.

a lucid moment

2010-05-31T20:39:00.003-04:00

I realize my posts have been sparse lately (what a classic way to begin a post, right? I feel like every blog author has to say this at least once, the coming-to-terms-with-ones-blog-keeping-duties post). I think the next line goes something like, "I've been really busy lately (you wouldn't believe the number of clouds I've had to watch) and traveling with no computer makes things tricky, especially the whole posting photos part." Okay, done. Whew.

The real story is this: I haven't put my pen down. It's just that paper is easier to come by than electricity and wifi in most of the places I've lived, and so now that I have better access to both, I've resolved to post some of the bits and bobs I've omitted over the past several weeks. Old posts might sprout photos. New ones will appear. If you are reading this, read on! Like this island's dear (cursed?) volcano, I, too, have been dormant. But don't worry. I doubt my eruption will wreak as much havoc. I mean, I hope to wreak havoc - to let loose! to tear it up! However, my writing tends to be a tad less directly confrontational. So don't cancel your flights. I wouldn't even bother buying travel insurance. But I am posting again, so don't say I didn't warn you...

On trying to reach Iceland

2010-05-23T02:57:00.002-04:00

to play
with air between two countries, suspended
swinging like on a string
close enough to catch
a whiff of either side, close,
almost

smoking suitors

2010-05-05T07:19:00.004-04:00

News of the Icelandic dragon's latest belch has everyone on edge. Crick-necked. I'm still in Scotland, if you can call it that. "Hae du y seh ut?" Orkney, swapping cigarette smoke with bearded old catfish in woolen caps. They spend every lean day hanging around the pier waiting for business. Taxidrivers, fishermen, ferryboat captains. At night (if you can call it that - daylight licks us from 4 to half past 10) the crew dissolves into the pub like midges into heather, folding themselves into darkness in a way that's only natural. Peat-smoke, fingernails, whisky...

There are 28 labelled whiskies behind the bar. I heard from one sly midge, however, that there are ample homespun vareties babysitting the odd pocket. "Du see thet greht loomp in George's syde?" I didn't know they even made pockets there...Orcadians are resourceful folk. Why else would the rest of Scotland be so wild about the way it tastes? Oatcakes, ice cream, porter...

I read in a poem that "folk seem to spark 'wae da wedder'" in this place, which is serenaded by gales and rain and seawater like an obstinate suitor after a lesbian queen. Somehow, it wakes up everyday in the same place - a trait I am growing to admire. Let the cloud drift to you, let the weather spark your fire. Orkney, Iceland, ...

narrow morning

2010-04-18T10:21:00.007-04:00

a Scoraig haiku.

This morning the sun
squeezed my shadow, a string bean
making its way west

a poem of thanks, to dear friends

2010-04-05T15:50:00.005-04:00

How to bend light
around a worn name
-in a helical frame
wrapped like a gift
-but not all the way,
so it's able to grow,
like DNA

How to catch light
at its slippery prime
-without keeping time
or naming moments
-the sink or the rise,
the hanging apex,
or crepuscular slide

How to keep light
in a memory preserved
-not pickled with words
and slapped on a shelf
-but tenderly stirred
and lovingly given
the grace it deserves

How to pass light
on to a dear friend
-letting it bend
so it fits in their palm
-but careful to send
it freely of heart
so it blooms to no end

photo - Callanais stones, Isle of Lewis

hello spring.

2010-03-30T14:07:00.003-04:00

winter still squats on these last feathers of March. looks like April might feel the burden, too. further south, the birches are swolen red. no buds yet. soon, it's goodbye to all this empty-limbed freedom, and spring will send us something new light upon.

do-se-do

2010-03-10T02:41:00.002-05:00

out my window, Oban Harbour
music by Pete Gillies

death of light

2010-03-08T19:16:00.001-05:00

hiding. a stone on two legs. another self-same sky.

no escaping the light.

Svalbard, II

2010-03-06T16:32:00.004-05:00

Out my window nothing but blue. Tall blue shadows falling from dark dolerite pillars standing guard over a fjord filled with abandoned mines and coal dust, crawling with a new kind of explorer - people on snowmobiles and roads dotted with street lights - they make a funny world out of a fjord. But the ground remembers. The blue, they can't shake the blue, nor can they bid the sun to arrive any earlier than it did 3.3 billion years ago. There is something immovable about the rhythm of this place - the plunging of peak to core and the long slow rise of depth to surface, granite cutting through time regardless of what we call it (intrusion? Caledonian Orogeny?) or what it will be called in millennia to come (?). What we see between Sørkapp and Isfjorden is not what the mountains behind our backs or under our feet know it to be - consolidated moraine, glaciofluvial deposits and drop deposits from melting icebergs calved from glaciers 600 million years ago.

Time is just a word. Age could never be classified when crust and plates and ranges are all just stories in your long-shadowed memory. An island, even, just for a moment. The snow, the ice, the unnamed shades of blue - just shadows passing the long afternoon, a single day in a lifetime of color, shape, sound, names. The dark pillars standing sentry will have forgotten it all by tomorrow, and when the light finally comes back, the word blue will have long vanished from the mouth of the sky, and some new brave utterance will be carried by the wind to fill the hollow of a new valley, a different rock standing guard on its edge, a new set of eyes to watch the people run about and classify everything. Without time, no one carries a name, has a place or a color to call their own. But with it, I can stare out my window at a mountain made of 200 million year old rock and smile because it is undeniably blue.

color

2010-02-25T15:12:00.001-05:00

White. All white. The mountains peak like crests of whipped cream sinking into a smooth pool of black coffee, buried to their necks in snow. Our wingtips caught the sun over Spitsbergen, but when we sank to meet the clouds they became ghosts again, white and grey, and I remembered our place not 800 miles from the North Pole. Blue, white, grey - the polar winter in Kiruna bounded back to me, and I even thought I glimpsed a host of polar stratospheric clouds to the northeast. Clouds below, clouds above. The clouds finally won.

No more whipped cream mountains. The peaks that would soon become giants slipped into the stratocumulus like acolytes robing themselves humbly before morning mass. Shortly after, the clouds took us, too. The plane started to shake and when we could finally see again, the summits stared sternly at our jostling craft, unmoving, majestic, and monotone. The pilot turned the lights out inside and everything grew instantly brighter. The jostling stopped. Outside our windows loomed the ice plateaus of Templetfjorden and below us white shards of sea ice on black ripples. The sky still furrowed in streaks of grey, the runway was the brightest strip of ground. The island above us, beside us, soon to be beneath us, entirely and unmistakably white.

on Time, with Irene

2010-02-17T03:14:00.002-05:00

Tall Pines in Georgia stands for more than trunks and needles, resin and fire-signalled seeds. It is a song. And a song can be with you anywhere without the weight of a pack slung around in turbulent flights. Songs pass the time without pages or folded corners, and bus stops reverberate splendidly in dry winter air. Crisp, clean, clear.

One morning while waiting I envisioned a man saddle a horse and cross the Blue Mountains through tall, dark pines filled with mockingbird mimicry - all the way to the Allegheny, and all for love. The same day showed me Sweet William and Lady Margaret flowering beside a bench in musical ignorance, oblivious to seasons, to sunlight. It was winter in the air, on paper and peoples' faces, but nevertheless, Tall Pines in Georgia clung to their needles white-knuckled and didn't mind being the only ones in green. They grow on.

And the song. The song stays in my head like stars in the Arctic darkness, hiding above clouds that pass by below but there all the same, all the time, light years away, and fills me with warmth. The clouds today are lithe, stretching thinly over the Barents like a furrowed field of Mama's white hair. Sometimes the earth needs a gentle covering; sometimes the stars shine too sharply. The ocean needs its islands, as much as it abuses them. And empty bus stops call out for songs from travelers' mouths, even if only in passing.

Irene on Sommerøya, Troms, Norway

on Ofotfjord

2010-01-29T15:15:00.003-05:00

It could be Sewanee, it could be anywhere - snow-surfaced forest floor, rocks, dirt, trees, saplings standing atop tumbled boulders resting halfway down the slope into the water - it just goes, goes without stopping, and eagles swoop out to scare away the ravens and their individual feathers separate and spread like fingers tilted upwards at their distal edges, and over the water they soar, skim the sea, the fjord, the mountain pass bridged only by wind, the sound of a train, and snowfall in the winter, shadowed only by a midsummer's midnight sun, despite the height, softening the shallow soil and sending birch leaves into a salacious frenzy, steaming, while their neighbors in stout-tufted needlestiff conebearing wisdom grow stunted because of too much light, or not enough. Sometimes, they learn, it is never enough. A view of the fjord, the knowledge of wind and flight, the sun in its fullness and absolute absence - even the water rippling so tangibly below, the air clean enough to count the spouts of spray cresting each swell - is not enough. The suspicion of current coming up from below cannot be traced, tagged, understood. For the boulders resting on the slope, it is prosaic. They watch, they wait, they rest under snow. And though Sisyphus left long ago, they still feel the grooves where he placed his fingers in hope of change.

Sometimes you have no idea what lies in front of you.

2010-01-28T08:50:00.001-05:00

Can you ID this cloud?

all that jazz

2010-01-20T06:04:00.001-05:00

Polar stratospheric clouds are astonishing. Nine days ago a whole host of them flung themselves into the post sunlit sky and their freakshow left me speechless. Hence the terse caption dangling from this photo. But in a week and a half, I have caught my breath, relocated my tongue, and will try to sputter a few words in honor of these dumbfounding beauties.

Despite the flashy examples I've exhibited, not all polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) are nacreous, or pearly. In fact, what makes polar strasospheric clouds polar stratospheric clouds is not the color, the shape, or even a specific composition. PSCs are simply concentrations of solid or liquid aerosols suspended between 15 and 30km during the Arctic or Antarctic winter. For a PSC to be iridescent, it must be comprised of similarly sized particles whose size is comparable to their wavelength. The wispy orb-like shape above results from orographic lift, in this case generated by strong tropospheric winds rushing over the Scandinavian Mountains. (As a side note - these mountains are fascinating. You can read about the Caledonian orogeny here).

Yet despite their pizazz, nacreous clouds are not the most common form of PSCs. Lately, the lidar at Kiruna has been detecting a layer of PSCs above us which act nothing like their iridescent kin. Without forceful winds to whip them into a colorful frenzy, they resemble subtle gray streaks, like soapy residue on a poorly washed window. On the right-hand side of the photograph below, the sky appears to have a ribbed texture. These bands are also PSCs, only not nacreous ones.

I must admit, the flare and mystery of a nacreous cloud floods me with admiration, but when I glanced above the trees this weekend while skiing through the woods, I was also amazed to see this warm spectrum of reds and oranges spread before a different kind of polar stratospheric cloud.

ides

2010-01-15T09:42:00.005-05:00

It's the dawn of a brutal day. The type of day that arrives after a spell of fair weather, clear skies, stirring light. The kind of day that signals change in some realm of experience difficult to pinpoint. You open a window or step across an icy roof and breathe a different sort of air, a newness, an arrival.

There was hoar frost on the railings. The fog was back. Only the bulldozed mountain of the iron mine caught direct light, golden, clean, radiant. The smokestacks coughed up lumps of cumulus that drifted over the town, the sky all to their own.

histogram schmistogram

2010-01-12T12:18:00.005-05:00

If you happen to know a thing or two about photography, you may be casting a critical eye on this picture, thinking: there's nothing like a blazing ball of fire to throw off your histogram. And yesthankyou, I am aware of this. HOWEVER, when you consider the fact that this photo was taken by an Arctic hermit whose skin, after last feeling the sun four weeks ago on an island in the South Pacific, has long forgotten all notion of pigmentation, perhaps you will reconsider the value of this image. I had to do it. To document the fact that - YES, THE SUN STILL EXISTS and yes, dear epidermis, you are still capable of synthesizing vitamin D. The sun rises, the sun sets, and the world - at least this small corner of it - is a brighter place.

at last!

2010-01-11T02:57:00.004-05:00

I spoke too soon.

lidars and lingonberries

2010-01-10T03:20:00.006-05:00

I realize I have not yet said anything about where I am or what I am doing. Let me explain. I live at the Institutet för rymdfysik - the Swedish Institute of Space Physics - outside of Kiruna, Sweden, a town which squats on roughly the same latitude as Coldfoot, Alaska, the Kangerlussuaq fjord (Greenland), Lake Gorodetskoye (Russia), and the middle of Baffin Island. Due to the proximity of the gulf stream, winter temperatures average around -15 C, but in the month I've been here, they have fluctuated between -35 and -3.5 (I didn't add the 0.5 to be cute; that data came from the institute weather station). This minute, it is -3.9 degrees, and I'll bet every hill in town is crawling with miniature people chasing after sleds and slamming into snowbanks, turning them the color of lingonberries. Technically, the sun has already set, but twilight will last for another hour or so. It is about 1:30.

My job at the institute is...well, what it has always been. I hunt clouds. The greatest part about living here is that there are researchers here also trying to track polar stratospheric clouds. And they have the world's best technology to do it. Sheila has hooked up a spectrometer to a telescope the size of a small child and hopes to measure the light spectrum of a particularly nacreous cloud. Peter shoots a lazer 50 kilometers into the atmosphere, measuring backscatter with a couple giant telescopes and a tangle of fiber-optic cables. Last week, I helped him realign the mirror reflecting the beam via tiny motors contolled by computer. When in the same room as the active lazer, we had to wear goggles that could have come from Arakis. Since polar stratospheric clouds are usually only visible for a handful of days each winter, the window of opportunity to study them can be slim. So I just keep watching.

For anyone Celsius-impaired, google has a handy built-in conversion tool just for you. Search "-15 Celsius to Fahrenheit" and voila, a conversion. This also works for just about any other unit you can think of, including bushels, cubits, hands...

sun pillar

2010-01-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

Here at IRF I am always looking out the window - every few minutes, if I can. While I tend to glance at the daily forecasts for polar stratospheric clouds, aurora borealis, and tropospheric weather, you never know what you'll see that cannot be predicted, like this sun pillar I noticed last week. A solar pillar is created when ice crystals whose surfaces are nearly horizontal reflect sunlight. In the twenty-five days I have been in Sweden, I have yet to see the actual sun. Any day now!

sky tracks

2010-01-03T15:14:00.009-05:00

degrees of cold

2009-12-30T05:18:00.004-05:00

"When your nose begins to feel prickly inside, you know it's below 15," Peter told me. "Below zero, of course." The moisture in your nostrils freezes. At -20, Peter's clothing crackles. Uwe said that once he stood still for ten minutes watching a weather balloon launch in air 40 below and his cheeks developed white frostbite spots the size of 5 kronor coins. That's roughly the size of a quarter. He admitted that he forgot to move around.

Temperatures in Kiruna are starting to dip below -28 C at night. Last night I walked through the woods for 15 minutes and my eyelashes gathered a rime of frost that looked like the beginning to a good Halloween costume. With the full moon nearly upon us, it is light enough without low clouds to venture out at any time of night. The moon will not touch the horizon for at least another week.

photograph taken at IRF yesterday around 2:30 p.m.

nektonic drifters

2009-12-20T14:12:00.004-05:00

a world snowcoated in silence three feet deep.

I caught the snow and the sky in a game of simon says.

favorite subaerial precipatory transport process, anyone?

midday twilight

2009-12-19T05:07:00.003-05:00

no nacreous clouds yet, but this image was taken around midday in Kiruna.

lenticularis.

2009-12-17T07:13:00.002-05:00

Omarama, New Zealand.

December 7

Välkommen till Arktis

2009-12-15T04:27:00.005-05:00

Sometime on the train we crossed into the Arctic. I woke up with the carriage to myself just north of Umeå and everything was covered in snow. Feet of snow. Thick. Like icing smothering an undeserving cupcake.

Two colors told it all. Black conifers balancing thin white snowdrifts out to their limbtips. A blackblue sky. Ground white as eyes, textured like etched glass.

Kiruna won't see the sun again until after the first week of January.

I left New Zealand Saturday evening with the Pacific scent of summer on my breath. Before the flight, I waited quietly in a park munching my last bit of smoky sausage, my backpack at my feet, beneath two rainbows that appeared briefly before the sky flushed a husky orange.

I flew in the belly of a 400,000 pound beast. Two wings, three wheels, and four Rolls Royce engines licking five gallons of fuel per mile. (That's how many polar bears, Carson?) We lost the sun before we took off, found it near the coast of California, lost it once more over Canada, and finally caught up with it south of the Outer Hebrides. The giant cleavage between Scotland's highlands and its lower half peered up at us until the low clouds took it away. In Stockholm's afternoon darkness, I climbed aboard a train. Seventeen hours later, I stepped onto an icy platform in Kiruna. 2 p.m. The sky a deepening blue. Another eighteen horus before twilight.

My new field clothes. Tomorrow's forecast is -21 degrees C. One winter the temperature dipped to 40 below.

place o flight

2009-11-27T20:11:00.002-05:00

Omarama, New Zealand. 14 November 2009

The first thing you see when entering the township of Omarama is a wooden sign that reads, "OMARAMA: PLACE OF LIGHT." This morning, from a rusty weed-tickled bleacher stand, I counted nearly 50 sailplane trailers lining a field south of the town's airstrip. It is the South Island Regional Gliding Championships, and pilots here are rewarded for cloud-hunting. From my spot on the edge of town, I noticed more than a few lenticulars squirming above the mountains.

Omarama, as far as I can tell, spans an area slightly smaller than Sewanee's central campus. It's a handful of establishments dribbled around a T-junction of highways. A couple petrol pumps, a police station, general store, and two of the most active gliding clubs in this hemisphere.

As the day wore on, I watched 28 gliders evaporate from the airstrip and materialize on Nursery Ridge. They had some help: a couple '70-something Piper Pawnees and a Supercub from the previous decade. The Pawnees were painted red and white, and looked like clowns that someone clapped in the head with a pair of cymbals. Their task for the day involved caressing the neck of Mt. Aspiring, among others in the area. All of this flying makes me think that they got the spacing wrong in their welcome sign. Just bump the F forward, and you've got a proper welcome to Omarama...

the lonely sea and the sky

2009-11-07T18:31:00.000-05:00

near Taieri, New Zealand.

What is it about the sea and the sky that exudes such loneliness, and why despite the hollowness of that theater do we long to fling ourselves into it?

English poet laureate John Masefield captures it well in twelve lines. His poem "Sea Fever" begins:

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sails shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a gray dawn breaking.

I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

While broad tundras and dense forests and empty steppe offer parallel remoteness in some parts of the world, the sea and the sky bend solitude into an untenably alluring arena. Open. Free. Unpeopled. Directionless.

I am reading the autobiography of Francis Chichester, an early aviator and sailor, and I'm aching to fly again. When I first arrived, I stopped by a one-room airport in Oamaru and took a 172 up over the gravelly braids of the Waitaki River in northern Otago. I haven't been up since, although yesterday I received a package from home that contained a balsa wood airplane. Almost as good. Southwesterly winds were blowing a constant 30 knots and gusting to god-knows-what. The balsa wings stayed in their hangar.

Next week, Omarama is hosting the South Island regional gliding championships. I'm headed that way with the only pair of wings I've got.

sea-hopping

2009-11-01T17:22:00.000-05:00

across the Tasman, my mind is aswirl with the possibilities of a new place. Aotearoa. Land of the Long White Cloud. Yesterday, the sky was raked with altocumulus before it bubbled over with shreds of wooly stratus from the south. In the evening, lenticular clouds levitated above the hilltops like stacks of red blood cells. Weather bolts across this place like a jet shadow over the ground. I'm gathering pieces. Today, I cross the Southern Alps to collect bits of the west coast from the Cascade Plateau.

Above, a piece of sky from Byron Bay, New South Wales.

catching light

2009-10-21T18:16:00.002-04:00

I took this photo during a sunrise flight on the prowl for the Morning Glory last month. The fog pooled on the salt flats and flowed around the mangroves lining the river veins. We caught the light as it touched the streaky veneered surface, just before it burnt through. Two pilots. Early spring. The edge of a continent.

Blattodelicacy

2009-10-10T02:48:00.001-04:00

Of the 4,006 identified species of cockroaches, Australia has 428. I spotted this Northern Banded Cockroach (Cosmozosteria zonata) on Sweers Island, in the Gulf of Carpentaria. Definitely the most comely Blattodean I've ever seen. Australia has some of the world's smallest and largest, ranging from 3 to nearly 70 millimeters. The larger ones are sometimes mistaken for tortoises on the road.

dancing coffee and mugs of whales

2009-10-06T07:24:00.002-04:00

The seeping desire to linger in familiarity is something I assume most people recognize. From time to time, a soothing voice tiptoes out from behind droopy eyelids, crosses your temples, and slips into a pair of soft ears, saying stay put, don't venture away, I like it here. Why take to the sky when you've a cozy sheepskin chair , an engrossing book, and a mugful of something steamy? That's a good question. I could see myself perfectly happy scooting from one cozy nook to the next, from mug to mug and book to book. Happy. Complacent. And really boring.

Today, I went flying and was thankful I did. The most easterly point in Australia was a whale fest this afternoon. Tyagarah's runway is a strip of grass hiding in a rectangular hole in the forest, and upon rising out of that hole, the Tasman Sea comes immediately into view. And prancing about in the choppy blue today were scattered pods of jubilant humpback whales. I cannot write with any authority about cetacean-human communication, but when we skimmed our glider over the water and circled the individual whales from 500 feet, I'm pretty sure they were trying to tell us something. Like happy birthday, or I won the Mysticeti lottery. As we swooped over them, they would leap out of the water and crash blissfully on their backs, hesitating on the surface long enough for us to count their white ventral grooves. I dunno. I'm just telling you what I saw. I was impressed.

Tomorrow, I take up my pack for the first time in weeks, and head to Victoria. It will be the first flight in a month that I haven't had to dip the fuel tank, monitor the oil pressure, balance a sectional chart on my knee, or take over the controls when my copilot falls asleep. Instead, I'll probably pull out my book and maybe even enjoy a cup of something steamy.

photo: the mangrove-lined Albert River northeast of Burketown. In the foreground, the motorfalke VH-YHB.

boiling down works

2009-10-04T19:23:00.005-04:00

A couple rusty steel vats at Burketown's boiling down works.

The site sits about 5 kilometers out of town, a heap of abandoned machinery littered among the scrub.

Australian badass

2009-10-03T08:22:00.005-04:00

I know it's only been about 5 minutes since my last post, but I can't hold it in. Here's the deal: I am staying with Morning Glory pioneer pilot/host/friend, curry-cooking, beer-brewing, motorcycle-twirling, mantodea-cultivating, photo-meister Russell White. Basically a rare strain of Australian badass. His driveway is--not shaded but maybe--attended by a crowd of tall banana trees. I think I even saw a trichopteran licking the dust off his BMW this afternoon. That'd be the car, not the bike beside it. He's the one to thank for my trip to Burketown, as it was he who gave me the only seat in his GROB 109A and let me fly a great deal of the time. Russell lives in a town called Mullumbimby (I'm not making this up), which I just ran all over a few minutes ago. To get a good idea of the terrain of Mullumbimby, imagine all of the 150-meter hills you could fit into 50 square kilometers, and then grab that bunch hills around the base and squeeze them together even tighter, and that's basically what Mullumbimby looks like, covered in grass and cows and fern trees and loud frogs and crickets. And today, smoke. Bush fires have been making the rounds these past few days further inland, and we inhaled a good dose of it. So I'm here for a few days grâce à Monsieur White, until the next adventure, which begins with New and ends with Zealand, after a quick trip down south.

photo: another Australian badass. A jillaroo at the Burketown rodeo last weekend.

switching back to CTAF

2009-10-02T22:14:00.001-04:00

"Looks pretty amazing, really," said glider Oscar India. Except he was looking in the opposite direction. On 122.9 ("one-two-two-niner"), it sounded like the glider gang got the shards of a broken Morning Glory. What we saw was pretty amazing, too, but we were tracking 156 towards Cloncurry. Shards of a different glory, the golden spokes of sunrise. It was enough of a sendoff for me.

I wouldn't be far from the mark if I admitted that I took this photo with a lump in my throat. Burketown was growing smaller behind us, and I knew it would only grow smaller in my memory, too. We listened on 122.9 in silence as the other gliders' calls became more muddled and broken 10 miles out, 20 miles out, 50 miles out, and finally heard them one by one switch back to CTAF.

It's strange to live a year like this, building up a community over days or weeks and then one day turning away from it all without a backward glance simply because it's time to move on. It's tough to leave a piece of yourself behind and not know if you'll ever return to reclaim it. At Burketown, the pilots and friends, even the salt flats and the hot sea breezes, made the farewell difficult.

The day before I left, a fellow pilot, Nigel, gave me a thermalling lesson in this Dimona (VH-GYT). It was a beauty to fly, and I managed to keep it aloft for about an hour in the invisible afternoon thermals. When we landed, we ambled curiously among the parked aircraft to a helicopter being disected by a couple men and a forklift. Dangling from the forklift's giant pincers was a 100 kilogram, 500 horsepower engine. The one in the Dimona weighs 80 kilos and is 80 horsepower. Nigel fell silent. He was ogling the motor like a...well, like a glider pilot before a very lightweight 500 horsepower engine. We had just spent an hour soaring with our engine off, and here we were, awestruck by a gently swinging gas-swilling beast. Some things don't make too much sense. I guess it's kind of like saying good-bye. Eventually, we just had to turn and walk away.

blowin in the wind

2009-09-28T01:39:00.006-04:00

The sound of strong wind in the leaves is something I will never grow tired of. Like yesterday, today's wind send us dust from the southeast. No Morning Glory. For the first time since our arrival 16 days ago, we went back to sleep after our routine pre-dawn wake-up. We gathered in the dark between the cabins this morning, discussed the wind, the lack of moisture, made a few tired jokes, and concluded that it was not Morning Glory weather. Later, I wandered down the road that joins Burketown to the next closest town, Gregory Downs (population 50), 150 kilometers away. "Willy willies" of dust rose up and swept across the road before disappearing in the wind. When I returned, I was covered in a fine layer of Queensland's loosely clad skin, and there was grit in my mouth.

Two days ago, however, this was not the case. Another fabulous ride on the back of Burketown's blustery giant took us out to Sweer's Island on Saturday. The Glory was another rippled beauty, and we surfed the primary for a while before hopping over it to the secondary, then the tertiary cloud.

The glider here is VH-YHB, the motor falke I trained in, on the primary cloud. Beside the Glory, it looks miniscule.

speed on the flats

2009-09-25T04:03:00.009-04:00

Yesterday, we spent the "arvo" searching for an abandoned race track. All we found was this. In a couple months, the lake bed will be overflowing.

At dusk, we watched Geoff fly his model airplane across the salt flats. It's a styrofoam getup, with a modified prop and added rudders over the wings, about half a meter long. If only a glider could pull off those tricks. We watched it with the deep longing to be four centimeters tall.

said I'm comin from the south...

2009-09-23T02:30:00.000-04:00

I don't know if there is a musical tradition for this part of the Gulf of Carpentaria, but if there is, the Morning Glory must lilt through it. And if there isn't, I'll write one. But I'd do that anyway. Last night we stayed off sleep later than usual I howled tunes from my homeland until we became too sleepy to see. It felt good. It felt great. And it was probably best that we finally turned in because the cloud took us out to sea this morning for another three hour duel with gravity, sans un moteur. It was the week's third Morning Glory to chase the tail of dawn across the Gulf, this time coming from the south. We watched the giant roll over us stirring up dust and dew, and took off before it's siblings could do the same. They took the darkness with them. It's not very often that they blow from the opposite direction like this.

I shot this photo facing east from the ground as the Glory was directly overhead (the darkness is cloud). It obscured the entire sky for a couple minutes, sparing only two slices of pink twilight on either side. Soon after this one passed overhead, a few others followed, spaced a few minutes apart.

Albert River

2009-09-21T20:39:00.010-04:00

A nine-ribbed Morning Glory leapt over us yesterday, and we were were waxing utopian to think that we could ride another this morning. Dew-slicked wings and water-heavy canopy covers made us hopeful. We climbed into our gliders with damp hands. In a momentary span of motorless quiet, I heard a rooster crow. On the horizon, a faint outline of a thick cloud, but too far out to sea to surf. Instead, we traced the Albert River back to Burketown before the sun sent the fog away.

Morning Glory!

2009-09-20T01:02:00.010-04:00

6:14 a.m. 20 September 2009. Burketown.
Morning Glory hunting. lenticular-crowned cumulus on the dawn's horizon. Jabiru taxiing [runway] 21. We're on deck.

I jotted these notes this morning before we took off. Three and a half hours later, we landed the motor glider on runway 03. We had used 10 liters of fuel. And had soared this:

Morning Glory, running roughly north-south. On the leading edge, we were able to get up to 9 knots of lift at times.

looking the other direction, you can see a gap where lenticular clouds are beginning to assemble

as we approached the "lennies," the lift became a bit more elusive

behind the primary Morning Glory, a secondary cloud rolling only a few miles behind

I posted a couple videos from the flight here.

patterns in the sky

2009-09-17T23:08:00.013-04:00

We took off from Tyagarah just after dawn on Sunday. By the time we reached Burketown the following afternoon, over 1000 miles had passed beneath us. I watched rhyolitic peaks rise out of the forest as we crossed over the Tweed Caldera and the Great Dividing Range, and witnessed them sink again when we traveled west. The green army of beeches and bromeliads suddenly came to a halt at the lip of a tawny-colored soup. Outback Queensland splayed out beneath us as far as we could see from eight thousand feet aloft. Dusty brown roads connected cattle station to cattle station, leading at some point to a town only a handful could call home. Rivers became the great sculptors of the land. Their burly arms writhed like snakes with thin stripes of trees on either side. When a curious finger of a river ran dry, the trees vanished and left naked ruts in the sand leading nowhere. Most, it seemed, were dry. It wasn't until we neared the gulf on the second day that we glimpsed flowing water again.

We arrived Monday afternoon, a bit cramped from almost nine hours in the plane, but happy to breathe the heat-laden air of Burketown. On Tuesday, we rose before five and spun our props by the day's first light. As we climbed from the runway, we could see a line of clouds building on the horizon to the northeast. According to local residents and pilots, a well-formed Morning Glory had plowed across the gulf the previous day. What we saw that morning was a second breath of the same type of system, but not as smoothly rolling as its predecessor. It was advancing slowly south-westward nearly 30 miles out to sea. While not producing enough lift for us to soar, it was nevertheless a magnificent sight.

On the prowl for the Morning Glory, we join a handful of other pilots from around the country gathered here in Burketown seeking a ride on the famous cloud. I'll be here for another two weeks. Hopefully, the winds will send her our way.

Kununurra

2009-09-06T04:38:00.009-04:00

70 kilometers south of Kununurra in Western Australia lies a dam constructed without a speck of bitumen or concrete. There, the Ord River meets a barracade of rock, sand, and clay pulled from the nearby gorges to create one of the world's most efficient dams. The result is a body of water occupying over 1000 square kilometers. That's large enough to be classified as "open water," like the ocean, and also vast enough to generate its own cyclonic weather systems. They call it Lake Argyle. Beyond the dam, the Ord River slithers on through Kununurra and eventually meets the Indian Ocean.

Above, an image taken from Mirima National Park in Kununurra. Below, the river and gorge just after sunrise this morning, about 13 kilometers south of the town. The water is so clean that it can be cupped straight from the river.

unexpecting

2009-08-31T07:29:00.007-04:00

Blazing through Lamington National Park last week, I caught a glimpse of a few things I was not looking for. This Giant Panda snail (Hedleyella falconeri), for one. Others included a handful of sunbathing rough-scaled snakes, a gulley of glowworms, Prickly Tree Fern fronds that could double as some nice lingerie for a citizen of Brobdingnag, the largest erosion caldera in the southern hemisphere, enough strangler figs to make you suspicious, and the Victoria Riflebird through a pair of the most expensive binoculars that will ever touch my face, courtesy of a couple bird quacks-I mean, watchers.

The only downside is that the rainforest butchers the sky, which makes cloudwatching a bit complicated. September is Morning Glory month. So in less than two weeks, I'll be gliding north in hopes of glimpsing that famous cloud in the Gulf of Carpentaria. It has occurred there every year for at least the past 20. To be expected? It's only a cloud.

avian revery

2009-08-20T19:08:00.005-04:00

Five hours with an instructor was enough. When time was up, I popped the canopy, he hopped out, and I flew solo. Back up to 1300 feet, I cooled the engine, and turned it off. Weightless. Well, compared to this agile beast. To ascend any further, the game becomes cloud hunting. A small, squirmy cumulus usually sits on good lift. Or you could just follow the birds. Wedge-tailed Eagles, Little Eagles, White-bellied Sea Eagles, vultures. Thermal experts. They've had about a 150 million year head start.

Rutabaga

2009-08-08T21:27:00.003-04:00

Byron Bay, New South Wales.

Byron gliding club

2009-08-06T18:35:00.018-04:00

Today, I caught my first sultry sight of a Scheibe Falke in action. It soared over the hillock where I was planted running a time-lapse of the bay. The view from the lighthouse hill is unrivaled. Over the course of an afternoon, a crowd of parcelled cumulus gathers over the Koonyum Range and swells up and blows inland, while more puffs congregate further seaward. Some of the more buxom cumulus individuals were even capped by lenticular pileus clouds. Above it all, filaments of mare's tail cirrus drifted slowly, like wisps of fine white hair. Some of my favorites.

I made a two-wheeled trek out to Tyagarah a couple days ago to visit the Byron Gliding Club. The place is pretty bare bones. One room of flight manuals, creased sectional charts, faded pilot certificates, plus the office desk and kitchen sink. In the rear, a doorway leads to a spacious hangar with a handful of motor gliders and an old Cessna. The bathroom is classic outback: a toilet stuck to a concrete pad, encircled by a cylinder of corrugated galvanized iron. I move in next Tuesday.

For a glider certificate, it should take around 5 hours of flight time in a motorfalke. Perhaps the same one I saw graze the hillside today. Upon flying the length of the lighthouse spit, the glider slipped soundlessly into an 80 degree bank and disappeared beneath the cottony fringe over the mountains. Soon, I'll have wings again.

externalities

2009-07-31T19:19:00.012-04:00

In the slant light of morning, this camp is nearly inviting, barring the scent of smoldering "ciggie" butts and the frantic hooting of the extended magpie family above my tent.

In Travels with Charley , Steinbeck says, "External reality has a way of being not so external after all." We perceive the world often as a macrocosm of our own experience. When we are sullen, a grey sky is sunken and drab, vapid and oppressive. In better spirits, the same sky may be mysterious and coy or insulatory and snug.

I am in Byron Bay, which I can best describe as vagrant hippie hobo meets brawny choch surfer meets skittles gone wild. A lot of rainbow kitsch, a lot of haggard dusty-bearded buskers, and a lot of dudes glued to their surf boards. They almost resemble herds of centaurs, marching with their wetsuits peeled down the waist--the nude top half of a long-haired man with gloved legs and a longboard extended horizontally behind. Put a bunch together and you'd think you were lost in Lewis' wardrobe.

Vibrant colors abound. On people, cars, buildings. Something in the air exudes rainbows, I swear. It's tough to say who wears more ink--the hoards of tattooed layabouts or the graffitied hulls of concrete buildings and automobile panels. The only surface not slathered in paint is beaches. In the early morning, they are sparsely peopled and smooth, not yet pocked by bum hewn footprints.

Today, I snapped this photo just after sunrise. The spit of land downhill from the lighthouse is the most easterly point in mainland Australia. The air was beautifully clear, the clouds crisp, and the sky inviting. If the way I saw the coast this morning is any reflection of how I am feeling, then I think it can be taken as a good sign.

Missing Autumn

2009-07-20T10:36:00.010-04:00

I see the comings and the goings...
the trays and platters brought in
and emptied
people growing, people shrinking
excitement for the first time
laughter at the young, naïve

today there are leaves
tomorrow there are none
the night sees them red
by dawn they are done.
there are so many
comings and goings

what does it mean to have stake?
a big bite.
what does it mean to taste them all?
a layer of dust
is all we are.

flipping through an old notebook in search of a song name, I came across this old rambling. maybe you could call it a poem. I leave tomorrow. The only thing that makes me a little sad about this year is missing Autumn.

I took this photo last year at my home in Sharpsburg, Georgia.

pterolicious

2009-07-19T12:21:00.004-04:00

After many many hours in the Skyhawk (45), I earned my wings on Friday.

seeing green

2009-07-15T09:50:00.005-04:00

The sky as seen from the fire tower one evening a couple nights ago. In the tower the world seems to slow down. You hear sounds from animals whose names you can only pathetically attempt to guess. Heavy footsteps, scampering, rustling, hooting, croaking, chirping. Even the wasps that have papered homes in the box at the top of the tower make a strange hum I hadn't noticed before.

One of the most astonishing things about seeing the plateau from there in the summertime is the immensity of the space covered by trees. Trees of all shades of green and endless shapes as far as the eye can see, until the Tennessee River beyond South Pittsburg and until the plateau drops off in the northwest. (Here is a good example.) We live in a beautiful place. The whole world is not so lucky.

Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante

2009-07-13T23:06:00.005-04:00

Sometimes, in a hill town like Orveito or Assisi, one can believe for whole moments in the possibility of a life with wings. Here, in this city of the river valley, stolid and beautiful as it is, no creature but a bird could ever lift up of its own accord, circle once the bell tower of the Badia Fiorentina, where Dante used to look longingly at Beatrice during Mass, and fly away. Nonetheless, however much or little it matters, I am writing this in a small notebook covered with tentative brown wings, touched only slightly by a single feather of blue here and there, every one of them laid down by the hands of the printer Giulio Giannini. It is now late afternoon in Florence, and my head is full of wings.

"In the City without Wings"
Gibbons Ruark

photo of Freiburg, Germany

Species concept

2009-07-12T00:15:00.016-04:00

A drip?

One of my guide books to clouds lists 53 different cloud classifications. On each page, a careful paragraph describes the subtle distinctions between types, explaining how to identify the exact moment when one cloud evolves into another. At some point the entire body of water droplets crosses an imaginary line to be called something else. To say that clouds are ephemeral is simply a temporally broader observation.

If the whole idea of classifying transient bodies seems nearly pointless to you, you're not the first to think so. The sorites paradox sums it up nicely. Darwin recognized this problem with species concepts, of which there are now at least a couple dozen floating around. Systematics is simply a recognition that there is some salient cluster of characteristics that allows us to make a little more sense of what we see, from clouds to barnacles.

"I look at the term species", Darwin wrote, "as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other." Which is just about all we can agree upon. But at least we agree on that.

Fuite de sens

2009-07-10T15:28:00.012-04:00

I took this string of photos atop a fire tower in Tennessee as the sun was setting. The clouds seemed to be directionless, some retreating to the west, while others fled eastwards above them.

My thoughts from the evening went something like this:

My legs dangle freely a half-story beneath my camera clicking away at 5 second intervals and catching un « dageurréotype » du coucher du soleil, ou plutôt la lumière qui se déplace devant le coucher du soleil.

La nuit approche. La lune est pleine. Demain, mon deuxième vol de nuit vers un aéroport contrôlé. Je sais. Et je ne sais rien. Les bottes de mon ami faire un craquement à chaque fois qu'il se déplace sur l'ancien escalier de chêne juste à côté de mon oreille.

La nuit descend rapidement et, peu à peu les grillons me calmer vers pensées de mes étés d'enfance sur un île-barrière, comme les rêves étoilés de Saint-Exupéry qui fut transformé dans le désert et a accouché du petit prince. J'écris.

Il y a quelque chose de sérénité dans le changement lent de lumière. Il est peut-être la raison que je me languis des hauts latitudes où la lumière reste suspendue pendant des jours du crépuscule et chaque saison a sa propre gamme de couleurs délicates.

Mon ami monte, et moi, je reste assise sur l'escalier tandis que les grillons et les grenouilles chantent pour le changement de la lumière. La nuit approche.

swallows

2009-07-01T07:36:00.010-04:00

I just received a Canon G10 to help me document my Watson year. Minutes after I got it, I saw some incredible cloudscapes at Lake Cheston. The barn swallows are nesting at the old dairy.

summer

2009-06-26T12:10:00.003-04:00

dried oak leaves lie caught in a piece of door screen curled away from the frame. tiny nails stick out. it stays open for days.

the porch has so many different textures of wood that shadows from the maple growing beside it become muddled when they fall there. it has sloped for ages.

at eight o'clock the light catches the bench in the front yard. by nine, it's warm and too hot to sit down upon.
I don't know how long it has stood there. the grass beneath it is long.

in the Lowlands

2009-05-28T19:17:00.005-04:00

Sometimes words fail.

For me, that time is encountered more often than not. I've always found writing to be easier than speaking, and music easier than writing. Recently, it has been a song by the pianist George Winston entitled "Billy in the Lowlands," that reaches a part of me that my mouth or pen cannot. Whatever it is that impels me to pour myself into this song every day, I cannot explain.

This week is a strange one. A dear friend is leaving. Another is arriving. A lot of things that want to be said cannot be, simply for lack of words. Yet somewhere in the music we make, what wants to be said becomes evident.

I've had this image on my mind for a while. A sunset on Cumberland Island, which more closely resembles a sunrise. The clouds fetch twice the glory in the plate glass water of Christmas Creek. There's something about clouds, too that is difficult for me to explain. Why, for example, the frayed lattice of an altocumulus heap can put me at peace. This year I hope to delve into that question and hopefully, after a year, be able to express some sort of answer, whatever the medium.

sunrising 101

2009-05-23T09:26:00.004-04:00

step 1. get up.
step 2. no really, get up.
step 3. be quiet.
step 4. marvel.

Little Cranberry Island, Maine, 4:50 a.m.

5:38 a.m.

2009-05-16T09:18:00.009-04:00

Summers in Tennessee beg an early rising. Long days and short nights pare sleeping hours to but a couple hardy breaths, and the bulge that bursts through the plateau hat each morning does so with a reassuring fortitude. Daylight spreads, fog melts to sky. This story is one of my favorites. I took this photo from atop a nearby fire tower.

hacienda la pacifica

2009-05-08T11:58:00.002-04:00

thinking of far-off places...

Nymphalid surprise

2009-04-23T17:33:00.009-04:00

paused at a stop sign on my bike, I noticed a lenticular cloud in the distance. when I tried to take a photo, this Monarch flitted across the frame.

abysses

2009-04-14T10:00:00.005-04:00

about this time last year, I was in Paris on my way back from this exhibit at the Galerie de Minéralogie et de Géologie of the Muséum nationale d'Histoire naturelle, when I spotted this scene in a puddle on rue Linné.

an open sky

2009-03-31T00:00:00.003-04:00

taken last week, en haut, from my favorite firetower.
courtesy of B. L. Padgett.

aqueous

2009-03-24T10:17:00.003-04:00

Spring thus far has perforated and bent light in some astounding ways. Here's one I noticed at my desk this morning.

crepuscular calling

2009-03-19T20:22:00.008-04:00

My favorite place to watch the sun disappear is from a hilltop in Sharpsburg, Georgia. Since my family moved there when I was ten, that hill has been an emblem of many things. In high school, our cross-country team sprinted repeats up its side, aptly dubbing it "the Matterhorn." As the name implies, it's tall, and an open field on its western edge invites ample view of the day's final lapse of light.

This evening, I set out for the summit. Watery hues of a late winter sky guided me through the woods, over a rickety wooden bridge crossing Shoal Creek. The night was cool and quiet, almost windless. When I reached the top, I rested in the grass, in tune to an array of sylphid sensations--the subtle patter of insect feet across my legs, the prickly grass beneath me, the subdued hum of airplanes.

I spent a great deal of my childhood in and around these woods. They are as familiar to me as my own hands. Yet tonight, in the calmness of the day's end, with the knowledge that all of this will soon be very far away, I watched the sun set again from an old hill and felt something new. For me, the beauty of the experience lies in the ability to experience it a million different ways, even from the same spot. I will spend a great deal of time in the next year searching for thoughts in the sky, trying to get ever closer to the life I see there, and exploring why it holds any at all. A nebulous pursuit? Certainly. It's the nature of the sky. The wonder that I assign to this experience is something shared by other cloud enthusiasts in different places that I hope to explore.

When I reached the bottom of the hill, I turned to look at a little tree that stands apart from the forest on the summit and noticed this tiny cloud creeping into view. Part of the wonder, I think, originates in having new eyes, in seeing an old place with new a perspective.

beyond all that

2009-02-24T03:00:00.003-05:00

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase "each other" doesn't make any sense.

(mevlana jelaluddin rumi)
13th century

Cill-easpuig-Broin

2009-02-15T21:40:00.004-05:00

(spot the airplane)

open

2009-02-15T21:37:00.004-05:00