between baskets and the wild wood

woven adventure


I love my local art gallery. 
It hosts the world in many forms and never fails to attract spirits of one kind. 
When Klaudie decides to get out, we have guaranteed adventures. This time, we opted for The Bonhoga, exhibition complete with lunch, as we both love art and good food! This month's exhibitor, Lois Walpole, would offer us something different. ...Basketry. My mind was already rowing around the world! Friends already warned me I would enjoy it. 


Well, here is what we found when we pushed the door on the first floor of the restored Weisdale Water Mill...

world-made, man-made fabric, 

tightly woven, 

recycled, 

 so colurful, bright, 

refreshing, 

just like somewhere in the Andes, Nepal or Africa! Humblyband was sitting on my lips thoughout the entire day.

I smiled at the Camembert boxes. Ms Walpole has a great sense of humour :-)

...So many treasures!

Fabulous exhibition if you have not seen it yet... 

So much to marvel in one room, we took our time before heading to the Café downstairs for lunch. Al fresco, it would have to be, so blue outside...

Mackerel Paté with oatcakes for Klaudia, herring in dill and oatcakes for my taste buds. It never fails as a delight!

And then , we headed to the woods... Wood, in Shetland? You may think I am teasing. Well, not exactly wild, but certainly unique in the area! Magic of our natural world, on a carpet of lesser celandine, as expected for the time of season. Next month, blue will override yellow. Meantime, it reflected the magic of the sun that was beaming between branches. 

It certainly felt like spring in such light.

What kind of blue were we after? The viewpoint at Wormadale never fails to deceive either, So spectacular through the fisheye. I love Sundays of this kind! Magic moment filled with a myriad of colours, delights and smiles.

with or without Lady Mist

at one with the world


Have you heard of the arrow of time? It belongs to laws of physics and dictates us a one way ticket in the world. When I reflect on yesterday (the past) I know I cannot find myself sipping that same cup tea on the patio, listening to that beautiful earthsong in some unashamed sun... Divine moment of serenity, as birdsong filled my northern sky: sparrows, starlings, skylarks, meadow pipits... Curlews, oystercatchers (my dear shalders!) ... What else, oh, yes, greylag geese and golden plovers enchanted the afternoon (though breezy) sky, as if inside a gigantic auditorium! Sunsets keep retreating on the clock of time. So we retired to the hearth. But then, as dusk began to glow, a snipe drummed above a nearby field and a hedgehog wandered freely in our garden. First for the season! Happy moment I have to treasure as a memory. This belongs to the arrow of time.


Today, the island feels different.

Eerie, serene though mysterious, as mist clads sea and hills. Birdsong even sound different. It does not fight against the wind, but plays hide and seek with sea fog. If you lived on the edge of Norway, or in Faeroe - come on, let's push it to Iceland - those  sea-, sky- and landscapes will appear familiar to you. But then again, when sea fog strikes on the planet, no matter where  one stands... Along the stretch of the American, African continent, Asia, Antarctica or Australia, ships wrecks are found stranded in sand... rocks or ice. 

There, on my rock, where spring birds return to fare chicks, or rest a bit for further northern realms, I feel the power of seafog, which I once called so affectionately Lady Mist in a poem. 

Everything changes all the time.

We just cannot run away from the arrow of time. 

It flies like water in a stream, as it filters emotions through moments.   What makes it magical is our technical skills to immortalize on silver paper or a chip!  There, the water stops forever on my picture; the light shines at its surface, whatever the colour of my sky as I am typing.  And yet, in our natural world, water still flows, seafog comes and goes as it pleases!  Only our sun can set alight  the petticoat from Lady Mist!

So let me share with you two more images from the island, with or without Lady Mist, as I wandered through the second week of April.

There, at my feet, lesser celandine re-emerges, as delicate as a skylark's song; meadow pipits court and parachute in the sky... The air is crisp, as the wind gusts across the land.

As we progress through the season,  the island intensifies in colours, and soon this painter's palette will shine and dazzle both locals and visitors' eyes and hearts!

For I never take for granted why I live and breathe on this island, whatever colour of the sky and the ocean. My joy to share it with the rest of the world remains intact in the face of the arrow of time. 

early spring wanderings

through the mind of the motionless traveler


I love limpets. There, clinging to boulders at low tide, they embody the very spirit of dreamers. Immobile, intriguing, eyeless under their carapace of nacre, and yet, so sensitive to the motion around them... Our world may spin, they have to wait for the next tide. In the meantime, they owe survival to one muscle against rock, and salt water under their hat.

Their destiny on one island. 

The light was soft earlier this week.

Water in the bay  tainted jade in the shallows,  I let my spirit watch the world in its vastness for the first time since the few days that followed the Vernal Equinox. I was tempted to step barefooted inside sand, although I knew this would worsen the very cold I had nurtured for a fortnight. So I abandoned the idea and hopped in between rocks to catch a glance of the dragon and the turtle through the fisheye.  

And I listened to the shoormal, gentleness of rollers, like a rengaine.

At the very edge of the sand, oystercatchers gathered and conversed in their traditional tongue, oblivious to my armoured friends clutching at rocks. They know they'll have to forage inside the softness of wet sand to hope for lunch. 

A rude redshank slashed their rowdy conversation.

   

But limpets have a secret life. As soon as the water returns, they unglue themselves from their rock and wander free below the surf in search of food and adventure! A bit like us, when we unleash our deeper self and dare to leap off the bubble of the artificial world. It takes courage to dare and glide without fretting from others' thoughts. Poets do this across their verse; artists, on paper or canvas... Musicians score theirs with a quill or keyboard of a computer. Writers heave worlds inside pages... The reader turns a traveler. 

As a regular on this sand, I record treasures on a chip. 

My deepening into the majesty of the real world, regulated by irrefutable laws of physics, allows my spirit to attain a greater sense of belonging and reach out  to plenitude.

Our world is generous enough to offer us the gift of life, a sense of place and generates so many dreams, as we tune in.  Now, we glide like kites in the wind, or limpets inside surf.

We attain stillness in our hearts.

Spring tides, equinox, the great pulls towards light, solstice. Some called it great cosmic clockwork time keeps unfolding in circles (or ellipsis). I ate my sandwich at the beach and wandered off to other parts of the island. As I went south, I watched the magic of late March: common seals gathering on deserted white sand, two Red-Throated divers (looms) courting in emerald waters, common eiders congregating (males in full regalia), and wren song erupting in darkening Atlantic sky.  Moments of joy deep in my heart.

Light games

I love the island at springtime. As I type, gardens drink light rain. Our every tree, bush and shrub reveal their colours. Flower before leaf is a game that need water to burst and shine. What a contrast with last weekend, as we bathed in unashamed blue! 

Festival from our star inside our very own patch of life! Its great energy, so precious, has delivered us from winter. There is a local word for spring, Voar. In the mind of one great motionless traveler, Jean Giono, I re-explored his Provençal world, Regain. Jean Giono Regain, spring, voar... Renaissance, rebirth.  I first discovered the Manosque-born writer as a pupil back in my lycée years in Aix-en-Provence (France). Giono celebrates the earth, la terre, with a lower case "e" as well as man's place through two parts, winter and spring. I love the way he speaks of the elements, and the wind in particular. Giono paints a very sensual world that speaks so loud to the poet and day-dreamer that I am! Monsieur Giono remains one of my main influences without a doubt. Re-opening Regain at the beginning of spring remains a source of sheer self-indulgence.

Geopoetics in motion

And whilst I deserted the monitor of my computer to enjoy the bounty from our sun, like-minded friends congregated in Cumbria (northern England) to celebrate the poetics of the real world. The former home of John Ruskin harboured a weekend of magic. Please click on the link to find out more geopoetics . Three fascinating videos to let you arouse your senses as well as different insights inside of the world(s) of respective creative hearts. If man remains an amazing machine made of stardust, his sense of celebrating the world shines through geopoetics, the making (or re-making) of the real world. Geopoetics and John Ruskin: a conversation

Spring has arrived on the island. The land is warming to longer days, game of light, mist and life. And as night shrinks, this boreal latitude begins to glitter in colours.

cosmic rite of passage

clockwork world


Our universe in perpetual motion, as we, in our turn, are rotating through this precious Vernal Equinox. 

On the last day of winter, in our boreal world, we enjoyed 12 hours and 2 min of precious light. The Island bathed in winter tones on its last day... So I went off and wandered, as freely as the wind.
And I admired the vastness of our ocean, sky and imagined the other stars that need to wait for dusk and night to shine, reflect light from our sun.
Under my feet, the ground was still waterclogged with those recent days of rain. Moss traps our precious liquid so exquisitely.


And then came night, mother of transition.

That supermoon, our Full Worm Moon, rose at around 1830 [GMT] and shone through thick layers of clouds... Luna's power felt so immense, I watched those clouds traveling at moonlight speed and remembered how gravity, this universal force that binds us all together, keeps us in one place whilst our planet waltzes around our star at something like 6,000 mph. That put my heart back in perspective! As night progressed, our atmosphere turned a pea soup, so I abandoned my moon watch and yield to the call of Dreamtime... 

Spring Day on the 60th Parallel

Today, Sunday, Spring Day, began with light and hissing wind. Spring Day, Spring clean, as the wind sweeps the final remnants of darkness... At last, we glide though Equinox! The wind feels cold and gusts like mad, but it stays dry and I don't mind! So I knotted my prayer flags to my washing line and communed with the world this way.

 For all the peoples, who face the harm from the artificial world, and those who face adversity in the light of natural disasters, those prayer flags float in the wind for you.

Too often our ruling classes want us to forget that we live in an amazing world that is living as we are. 

haiku de transition 

Winter's last day -

skylarks still wait in starting blocks,

as winds still skelp ocean & land.

#geopoetics

Door on the world -

listen to the wind through the wood,

winter has come off its hinges.

#geopoetics

in the name of our world

blue & white denomination


Winter far from over...

There, a few images from a wander around the southern edge of the island. So animistic in my heart. 

From my northern Atlantic edge... 

To fellow Pacific dwellers, I feel for you.

And light candles.

Namaste from 60N.

Rendez-Vous with Fire

luminous
All day I looked at blue through a myriad of windows...
All day blueness hanging around shore & school gates.
All day I walked to this moment.

simple pleasures

summed up inside simple triptych , palette of our shore

a bit of honey glazing sand,

like copper-plated horizon ...

Weaver of dream  or just treasure.

Today I know my heart's at home.

And talking of cartographers...

Nordic world scatterlings


I still have very much in mind that famous song from South African artist, Johnny Clegg,  and its first line from the chorus, "We are the scatterlings of Africa..." , as I keep staring at any world map. To my nomadic  heart, it resonates as an anthem. 
Animals of all kinds migrate... They go where food and water are.   
And when I look again at this Nordic map, it illustrates the very nature of mankind: movement.  Nationalism has gradually overriden nomadism with geopolitical  boundaries, with the exception of a few pockets on the planet. Our world is more or less partitioned by imaginary lines on paper... The most frightening ones notably scarred Africa, the luminous continent, and (North) America.  Massive squares, rectangles criss-cross both continents, as old empires collided over fates of other cultures they once thought irrelevant (or out of place).... In the name of prestige, national expansion and notion of property, (a notion unknown to entire aboriginal societies), subsequent world powers have re-mapped the planet, or invent inexistent countries - Somaliland remains an example.


However, movement - or man's migration - has many facets and, since there is no yin without yang, it contributes to the very essence of our species. One could argue that when it (movement) does not annihilate, it adds to another culture. Multi-linguistic (cultural) societies can live in such ways, as long as they can reach and preserve a consensus. Living in harmony with the world can be attained in absence of war. I recently read in an article that Costa Rica had renounced to its army and favoured national investment in her people through, notably, education. How courageous is that? 


Closer to my world, I have learnt to appreciate the "positive" legacies from "past conquerors", such as the Romans and the Vikings... Their respective cultural heritage contributed to some forms of progress, which cannot be neglected. Roman, Viking architecture, farming, language, literature, Arts, technology - their respective geopoetics, savoir-faire and expertise in many fields are notable examples still visible today. 

Funny how traveling men persist through time. A recent visit to the Gadderie at the Shetland Museum & Archives in Lerwick during the weekend notably prompted a fascinating tête-à-tête and window onto another world. Needless to remind anyone that Vikings were renowned seafarers and that their culture reached from over the North Atlantic (a thousand years before Colombus) to the WNW to Constantinople (today Istanbul) in the SE. 
Those little guys, carved in whale bone, were dated back to the 12th century. They originated from Trondheim (Norway) and they were found on the island of Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides, in the 17th or 18th century... Their very craftsmanship and significance intrigued scholars over quite some time. Research was undergone to, not only crack the mystery about their very existence, but over the history of the game of chess and other board games. They have prompted a lot of curiosity wherever they have traveled around Scotland since they have been on the road. They are a delight to see as artifact, or human signature from another time. Their symbolism as game pieces never ceases to amaze.


Fascinating allegory, chess, as men could be seen battling for power over a checkered board, that symbolic, miniature battlefield! Food for thought, as if conquering ground was perceived as a game, or sport... So human.


In any case, the Lewis Chessmen, as they are known, inspired my heart for a haiku.

Lewis Chessmen -

king, horse, bishop carved in whale bone,

wandering, on traveling show.

Haiku fae 60N