Term's End

A glimpse of someone's study spot: a reminder of what I do (the challenge of learning with guidance from a demanding teacher) and don't (exams -- taking them, writing them, giving them, grading them) miss.

A Day of Discovery

A friend sent me a review of Patrick Barkham's Coastlines: The Story of Our Shore. The reviewer wrote, "Bleak and windswept, the place [Scolt Head Island] was no idyll, and after an episode in which Barkham's father spotted two men stealing rare eggs but failed to persuade the island warden to confront them, the family stopped going there. Revisiting it 35 years on, Barkham surmounts the discomfort he felts as a child to achieve a dreamlike peace or hypnagogia -- no easy matter when you're swimming in the North Sea."

I am not British, nor have I a shore. I don't remember a non-idyllic place which my family visited, nor have I swum in the North Sea.

But I know hypnagogia.

I experience it every time I take pictures outside or in, when I see something beautiful and want to experience it both outside the frame and in it. At those moments, I suspend thinking and simply look and do.

Today, though, I paused long enough for the wind to die and realized that even when I take lots of not-so-great photos, I could keep doing it and keep failing all day. Happily.

Fortunately, after struggling to photograph a Shooting Star, I found something that doesn't move.

Something to Read

James Rebanks' memoir The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches From an Ancient Landscape. Why? Because I know two younger women who have farmed/ranched sheep, the writing shows he graduated from Oxford, the land and what people do with it move me, and . . . because this

and many more beautiful videos.

Full Circle

I
Down, in the book, I read this: 

"I was intrigued to learn of a novel Swedish solution to human burial. In a country where cemetery space is at such a premium that older bodies are dug up and reburied more deeply so that second- and third-story tenants can be installed in the same plot, the practical Swedes have now developed a system for composting human remains.

"They start by freezing the corpse in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Once solid, it is easily shattered into tiny frozen pieces, nugget-sized, by ultra-sound waves or, somewhat less palatably, a hammer mill, a process likened by one proponent to that of making chipped beef. The nuggets are then freeze-dried and placed, with a starter of bacteria, in a biodegradable box to be buried as fertilizer for whatever plant you place above your still-serviceable 'loved one.' In my view, this is as about as close as we're ever going to get to reincarnation: our very atoms coursing through the venous leaves of, for example, a long-lived oak." -- Hold Still by Sally Mann, page 419

II
Then up, I saw this.

Stuff and Nonsense

Stuff and nonsense: that's what these are. But they're my stuff and nonsense, and I am thrilled.

My friend Arlyn showed me a book she and her husband made online, showcasing their art. She said, "You get two for the price of one!" She said, "Why don't you make one?"

So I did,

and the books arrived today.

They make my photographs look great.

They make me smile!