a curatorial content blog of modern and contemporary poetry, poetics, photography, philosophy, permaculture, and the arts

art books

on the coffee table…

far below our window

dawn fire

lights the estuary

Paul Beech

Copyright © Paul Beech 2022

Source: Art books (Tanka) | Grandy’s Landing

Copyrights

The featured image is of Friend’s Clump on the Ashdown Forest, from an original oil on canvas by Alison Berry (reproduced with permission). Alison painted it during the Summer a few years ago when she spent many days just painting the Forest.

Here is a link to her Web Site. She paints stunning pictures so do take a look …

Alison Berry

Reading Time: 2 minutes Shades of Green – A Walk in the Woods Let’s go for a walk; a walk around your local wood or park. It’s early morning and there’s only you and maybe one or two dog walkers about. The grass is still wet with dew. You follow a pathway through the bluebells. There’s hardly a sound. […]

Source: Art in Nature • Shades of Green • Walk • Podcast

Tectonic Time by Maria Popova. (Available as a print, benefitting The Nature Conservancy.)

“Place and a mind may interpenetrate till the nature of both is altered.”

*

The clear water was at our knees, then at our thighs. How clear it was only this walking into it could reveal. To look through it was to discover its own properties. What we saw under water had a sharper clarity than what we saw through air. We waded on into the brightness, and the width of the water increased, as it always does when one is on or in it, so that the loch no longer seemed narrow, but the far side was a long way off. Then I looked down; and at my feet there opened a gulf of brightness so profound that the mind stopped. We were standing on the edge of a shelf that ran some yards into the loch before plunging down to the pit that is the true bottom. And through that inordinate clearness we saw to the depth of the pit. So limpid was it that every stone was clear.  

I motioned to my companion, who was a step behind, and she came, and glanced as I had down the submerged precipice. Then we looked into each other’s eyes, and again into the pit. I waded slowly back into shallower water. There was nothing that seemed worth saying. My spirit was as naked as my body. It was one of the most defenceless moments of my life.   – Nan Shepherd

*

Knowing another is endless. And I have discovered that man’s experience of them enlarges rock, flower and bird. The thing to be known grows with the knowing. I believe that I now understand in some small measure why the Buddhist goes on pilgrimage to a mountain. The journey is itself part of the technique by which the god is sought. It is a journey into Being; for as I penetrate more deeply into the mountain’s life, I penetrate also into my own. For an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy, that leap out of the self that makes man like a god. I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. To know Being, this is the final grace accorded from the mountain.   – Nan Shepherd

Source: The Living Mountain: Pioneering Scottish Mountaineer and Poet Nan Shepherd’s Forgotten Masterpiece About Our Relationship with Nature – The Marginalian

“In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. . . .

“Our own senses constrain us, creating a permanent divide between our Umwelt and another animal’s. Technology can help to bridge that chasm, but there will always be a gap. Crossing it requires what the psychologist Alexandra Horowitz calls “an informed imaginative leap.” You cannot be shown what another Umwelt is like; you must work to imagine it.”     – Ed Yong