Paying Ready Attention

A Moon from a different sky “There dragons and beasties out there in the night to snatch you if fall”  (Ian Anderson – No Lullaby) “Uncountable” takes on a whole new depth of meaning when you look at the stars in a truly dark sky.  Numbers fail.  Metaphor becomes needed, but still falls short.  Without the drowning background of streetlights, headlights and unused office lamps the faintest stars come out and the sky fills and fills.  It’s a sight of astounding beauty and wonder.  It brings a feeling of smallness, but not in a way that makes me feel lessened.  It brings a feeling of remarkableness, but not in way that needs explanation in the fanciful.  I stand there in the darkness and look into the near infinity of space and know the importance of the things that I hold close, and the wonderful possibility of the things that are far away.  And out of the darkness a voice says: “Stay close by Jasper * , this is when the animal...

Part 1: The end of the drive. There was, according to the sign, a hazard on the road ahead.  Did this mean there were wild bears in the woods?  Crocodiles?  Raging torrents and steep sided chasms?  Meteor craters?  Thankfully it was just a pothole of modest proportion and there was no dangerous wildlife to be seen.  But the sign and the slightly bumpy road did set the tone rather well; as if we were going further than we really had, or would be more remote than we really were.  At the end of the road, around a slight bend, the house sat with trees pushing in from all sides.  In the darkness of the first winter weekend – one that extended to include Monday as well – the house looked remote and isolated.  This was an illusion, but a nice one.  The key was stiff in the lock, but a fire was set in the grate.  The house was cold, but strangely homely.  We lit the fire to deal with the first and set about expl...

After fours days of desk bound office work, six hours of fresh air had a predictable narcotic effect.  As we drove away from the Spectacles my eyes grew heavy.  In the sugar crash of the late afternoon I started thinking about coffee, and maybe a sly bit of cake.  If it had been offered, I would have eaten the last bit of nut slice that I knew was somewhere in the car. I think Stuart was saving it for himself! Grey clouds and light rain ended a good day.  There is a small café next to my hotel. The coffee tastes good, the cake even better.    Hotel rooms (well at least the ones I pay for) offer a kind of cramped intimacy – nothing is every very far out of reach, and whatever TV the room has looks like a widescreen.  But strangely the electrical sockets are always just out of reach of the power cords for my laptop.  I look through the images for the day, tag a few, and delete more.  A pre-dinner nap beckons....

Prologue: The strangest places in nature exist in the tangled web between our ears. The forests trails, the mossy paths and neural tracks of the mind need to be explored; else we are left wondering what lies over the horizon. In the end these journeys filter, blur and finally focus our understanding of the world around us.  We see what we see because of where we have been. This is a story more of places than people, a story of the way landscapes can come to mean more than just hills and valleys.  So, how did I get to here? I was born in a thick-walled, small-windowed terrace cottage in the spring that followed a long cold winter.  Snow ghosts had hidden in the hedge banks until March.  I would later learn that the populations of herons and wrens had been laid waste that winter, the birds freezing to death in a frozen countryside. As I grew up, they grew back; loud voiced, sharp beaked.  The Cottage had a strange, organic kind of ar...