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Category: landscape

Rice Paddies Gleaming

Rice Paddies Gleaming

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Yesterday was a Monday on steroids. I kept feeing all weekend as if a vacation were beginning … even though I knew one wasn’t. I came to the office and dutifully wrote, edited and interviewed. But I was longing to be away from my desk.

So for today’s post, a mental vacation, a memory. Two years ago, I was preparing for a trip to Bangladesh. It was a daunting assignment. I was interviewing dozens of people, many of them victims of human trafficking. And, to make me even more anxious, I was leading a writing workshop.

It all worked out, led to experiences and friendships I will never forget. So today, I’m thinking of Bangladesh, of the people there who have so little but give so much. Of sodden green pond banks, of rice paddies gleaming and jute drying in the sun.

Tethered

Tethered

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Last night I watched a movie called “Free Solo,” a
documentary that chronicled Alex Honnold’s untethered ascent of El Capitan in
Yosemite.  Using only his hands and feet — and most of
all his brain (which apparently has a less-responsive amygdala than most), Honnold was able to climb up the sheer face of the 3,000-foot cliff.
No ropes, no belts, buckles or belays. Just the man and the mountain.
By contrast, I recently ascended 400 feet in a balloon to see the temples of Angkor Wat. It couldn’t have
been safer. The balloon was tethered to the ground and the passengers were
encased in wire mesh. I was still weak in the knees.

And last night, I was weak-kneed again. It didn’t even help that I knew the guy survived. There’s something primitive about it, something hard-wired in us to recoil when we see another human being clinging precariously to a sheer rock face. 

No doubt about it, the untethered experience makes for great cinema — but when it comes to my own ascents, I’ll take them tethered every time. 

I Walk Therefore I Am

I Walk Therefore I Am

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The best books are not only satisfying in and of themselves but they also lead us to other great reads. Such is the case with The Old Ways, which I finished last night.

Edward Thomas, the British poet and nature writer who died in World War I, and Nan Shepherd, author of The Living Mountain, are two authors now on my must-read list, courtesy of Robert McFarlane.

“A mountain has an inside,” Shepherd wrote, describing the caves and cavities of her native Cairngorms, which she explored throughout her long life. Her prepositions are notable, McFarlane writes. She went not just up but “into the mountains searching not for the great outdoors but instead for profound ‘interiors,’ deep ‘recesses’.”

It’s landscape as self-scape, not in a shallow way but in the most original of human ways, realizing that earth is our home and in nature we discover our best and truest selves.

Here’s McFarlane on Shepherd:

‘On the mountain,’ she remarks in the closing sentences of The Living Mountain, ‘I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy … I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.’ This was her version of Descartes’s cogito: I walk therefore I am. She celebrated the metaphysical rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am,’ the beat of the placed and lifted foot.

January Sky

January Sky

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It’s a good time of year to look up. I snapped this shot just before getting on Metro yesterday. It was later than I would like to have been leaving, but it gave me the chance to see the sky on fire.

It was a quieter sky this morning, one mottled with clouds but striking in its own way.  I took this photograph while walking around the block at the Courthouse Metro Station, which it how I occupy myself when I’ve just missed the bus.

Two mornings, two cloudscapes, both ripe for the picking. All I needed to do was stop, point and shoot. But it can be hard even to take the time to do this.  How many other sky shots have I missed?

We Brake for Trees

We Brake for Trees

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I can’t remember how we discovered Snicker’s Gap, the Christmas tree farm in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. But I do know that Claire (pictured below with her puppy Bella; her beau, Tomas; and their older doggie, Reese) was in middle school. So it’s been a few years.

And in those few years, a few other people have caught on that trekking out to the country and felling your own fragrant Douglas fir provides more seasonal cheer than driving to the shopping center at the corner and choosing a tree from the parking lot. We did that often, too, when the children were younger. But Snicker’s Gap has been the tradition for 15 years now.

What’s become abundantly clear, especially since yesterday, is that many others have made the same calculation. We waited 30 minutes to get into the place. The lesson for next year: Leave earlier, arrive later … or find a nice tree in a lot somewhere.

Moon Walk

Moon Walk

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The story last night was the moon, large and sultry and almost full. I had already walked in the morning, but when I got home last night I had to walk a little bit more, just to keep it company.

I watched it through the trees, waited for it to rise high enough to snap a shot of it free and clear.

But the chili was simmering on the stove back home, darkness was falling, and I realized I was strolling along neighborhood streets (no sidewalks, of course) wearing all black.

It was time to go home. The moon would have to wait. So I snapped a few more photos …

Then called it a night …

The Hills

The Hills

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To live in a city of hills is to know long views and low valleys. It’s to feel that pain in the back of the legs that comes from uphill climbs. It’s to know the slow trudge and the quick downhill.

It’s not always easy, but ease is not always the point.

As I prepare to leave Seattle tomorrow, I will keep many images in my heart, snapshots of a city that Celia has grown to love.

I will remember the city blocks and the flaming maples and Mount Rainier looking down on it all.

It has brought a psalm to mind — timeless, eternal source of strength: “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help.”

Kubota Garden

Kubota Garden

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It’s where Seattle goes on a sunny day … or at least it felt that way last Sunday. There were lovers and families and dog walkers. The elderly in wheel chairs and walkers. Cameras with tripods, their earnest photographers snapping shots of engaged couples and even a bride.

Kubota Gardens is an oasis of green in the midst of the city. Even a city as green as Seattle, one nestled between water and mountains, needs the relaxation potential of an urban park. Kubota satisfies all the senses: the splash of water, the aroma of autumn leaves — and everywhere, flaming foliage, artful arrangements of flower and leaf and grass.

This time of year, Kubota is a riot of reds, oranges and yellows, as the Japanese maple, euonymus and  gingko flare up in their rich tones.

I did a lot of people watching on Sunday, a lot of strolling and stopping, a lot of deep breathing. It was just the respite I needed before a hectic week.

Fading Beauty

Fading Beauty

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The wedding was at 5 p.m., but there was time to meander along a Meadowlark Garden trail toward Lake Gardiner, to see the late-summer salvia and coleus, the asters and ornamental grasses.

It had been cloudy most of the day, but the sun had come out a few hours earlier and warmed the air.

With each turn of the gravel trail the eye took in another artful arrangement of fern and grass and frond.

What a balm for the spirit is a mellow fall afternoon, the air just warm enough, the scent of crisp leaves. After the frenetic growth of summer, the fading is welcome. The beauty seems to come from the fading. And there is comfort in that.

Past is Present

Past is Present

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What would it be like to live where the past is present, where you can visit an Iron Age fort or a beehive hut, drive along ancient routes and savor timeless views?

It would feel like living here, in the west of Ireland.

Take Kilmalkedar, a 12th-century Irish church built with stones that had been around for centuries, some of them with the ancient ogham script. It was built on an important monastic site. After the roof caved in hundreds of years ago, people began burying their dead inside the church, a practice that practically guaranteed one entry into heaven.

Speaking of heaven, what would it be like to love the place you live so much that you give tours of it.  Makes me think about place and some people’s devotion to it, which very much gets me back to why I started this blog.

To walk through the landscape and write about it, and in writing about it to belong to it.

Here, that process is not as labor-intensive.