spring – Don't hold your breath

Deep waters

Kirchlengern is a small town in eastern Westphalia. We spent a weekend in the countryside near it with friends. It was a perfect spring weekend, cool and sunny, with puffy clouds. Now and then they would gather in promise of rain, but then would scatter again to let us see the blue sky. “It’s perfect for a walk,” The Family said late in the afternoon, and everyone agreed. So we walked past the last houses, and past meadows full of buttercups and late daisies to the stream nearby. It’s called Ostbach, and it drains into the Else, which joins the Werre, which falls into the Weser, which flows into the North Sea.

We crossed a bridge over it. The river is shallow under it, strewn with rocks. Looking at the quick flowing water, I guessed that it would be deeper and broader upstream. That was the way we walked. The river floods now and then, so houses are built further away, leaving a lot of moist land to turn into meadows. The result is beautiful. I took a few photos: I’d not seen a spring day like this for a long time. I took my phone out of my pocket to take a few shots. In places like this, you don’t even have to think about structuring your photos. Depth arises naturally from perspective and scale. You can keep your mind on the beautiful present.

Sure enough, as we walked along the water turned placid and deep. This was the home of coots and geese. The banks were overgrown with wildflowers. I recognize very few of these flowers of north Europe, so I just admire them in passing. The path faded into squelchy mud in about a kilometer,. A little before that a fallen trunk was covered with mold and moss, with a scramble cleared over it by previous walkers.

On the way back I noticed places where there were path down to the water, and benches at the edges. You could come here with a book and a bag full of berries. Or you could spend a few hours fishing. Or, like us you could just meet with friends and walk past the benches. Anything at all is pleasant on a mellow spring day like this.

May in Germany

Under the lime tree
On the heather,
Where we had shared a place of rest,
Still you may find there,
Lovely together,
Flowers crushed and grass down-pressed.
Beside the forest in the vale,
Tandaradei,
Sweetly sang the nightingale.
Walther from the Vogelweide (Under den Linden)

The buds burst forth
From each green frond!
A thousand bushes
Resound with song!
And joy and wonder
Streams from each breast.
Oh Earth! Oh Sun!
Oh joy without rest!
Johann Wolfgang from Goethe (Mailied)

Spread once more your arch
Over me, You green canopy! …
Soon will I leave thee,
A stranger be in foreign lands,
On divers busy roads
See life as on a stage;
But in the midst of life
Thy earnest words’ force
Will buoy me up, the solitary, and
So will my heart ne’er age.
Joseph from Eicendorff (Abschied)

Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something-you don’t know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood

you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour

will grant.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Vor dem Sommerregen)

Mellow nights after hot days

Days have been intensely hot. By the time I get back from the gym the temperatures are in the high 30s. We’ve been trying to beat the heat in various ways. For a while I tried to ignore the heat and just go out for a coffee after a shower, do some chores, or meet friends for lunch. You can do it, but by four in the afternoon you begin to flag. Much better then to stay in, have your meetings, get your reading and writing done, and then meet friends for dinner.

We are so far inland that it turns out there’s a big swing between day and night temperatures. It took me some time to adjust to it. But now I’m beginning to see that’s how the city works. Get some things done in the morning, have a siesta if you want, or at least stay indoors in the afternoon, and have a long evening. We found ice cream selling like, umm hot cakes? No, that doesn’t sound quite right, but I guess you know what I mean. As you can see, every other person in these two photos seems to have a waffle cone in hand. Or you can sit in a nice little pub and have your IPA as you watch the IPL.

Was it for this?

Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighs
Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
Where no seed stirs,
The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
Bright as a fig;
Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
Slides like a sea;
Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
Spout to the rod
Divining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,
Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
Day lights the bone;
Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
The winter’s robes;
The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,
On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
When logics dies,
The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
And blood jumps in the sun;
Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Light? What is gentle and beautiful about light? Light is a harsh thing, the kind of thing that sent Dylan Thomas off on long rants. When you have to deal with harsh tropical light all the time, you envy photographers in parts of the world where the sun slants down and filters through a thick layer of air to drip its soft light on things. They can keep their fatuous sunbeams. We know what sunlight is: a killer.

Midwinter’s light in Thailand (the featured photo) is so harsh that it has to be filtered through leaves to yield a photo with shadows. Compare that to the similar photo from the Camargue in the south of France. The contrast is less harsh as you go away from the equator. The mangoes and jasmine buds photographed yesterday in my balcony have to compensate for harsher light than the gentle summer light of Europe.

The six seasons: 1

Living my days out in an air conditioned office in Mumbai, I’d concluded that Mumbai has only two seasons: uncomfortable and wet. Now that I’m forced to live at home, and I spend more time in the balcony, and open up the living room to the outside, I realize that was wrong. Even in this coastal city, there are seasons, although strongly moderated by the warm tropical sea. The many different Indian calendars roughly agree about the seasons. So across the northern end of the peninsula, closer to the mountains, and away from the sea, there is are climatic changes which can be recognized from east to west. It is different along the coast, of course, and down in the southern part of the peninsula there are very different climates and seasons. Mumbai lies roughly in between, so one can feel most of these variations if one is sensitive to it.

Looking out of the window, listening to the birds, I saw signs of vasant slowly passing. The bees which hummed between trees and bushes, are slowly less visible now that spring has passed. The last flowers of the season can still be seen (the featured photo). The sky was as mild as the morning’s cool breeze. The beautiful light blue, which I used to paint as a child, flecked with fluffy clouds are typical of this season which just passed.

Just another Sunset

Locked down at home, there is time to look out at the world around me, even with the (literally) hundreds of emails that I need to assign to the “read” folder every day. That’s what life must have been like to the new humans of a million years ago: hunt all day and sit and look around you the rest of the time; no rushing about, so no need to constantly look at watches. The result is that I re-discovered ancient means of time-keeping. There is the quick passing of the day, the sunrise which now wakes me up, the change in the quality of light through the day, and the sunset, full of alarmed birds calling loudly.

But there is a longer passing of time, which I’d not paid much attention to earlier. It is still early in spring time, and I can see the earth slowly wobble in its daily rotation. As a result, the sunset is still moving northwards. I live in a city, so the horizon is interrupted by tall buildings. I’ve been noticing how the sunset was first blocked by one building, before I had a clear view, and now another building is slowly coming in the way. Lucky me. If I didn’t have these buildings I might have had to start hauling large blocks of stones around to build my own calendar.

Spring in the air

I woke this morning to the definite feeling that spring was here in full bloom. My nose was blocked, my eyes were watering. Hay fever, means pollen, means flowers. This is definitely not the virus, but my own body reacting to spring. It’ll have passed by mid morning. In my balcony the jasmine plant had begun to flower, the little white vincas are in bloom. In a little patch of ground below the flat I can smell the parijat, the night flowering jasmine. Looking out over the garden in front of us, the banyan tree is full of fruit, the mango tree is bursting into bloom, there are red coral flowers on top of a sea of green. In the mountains the musk rose, the peony, daffodils, must be in bloom. I stood on our balcony and stared at the deep blue sky flecked with clouds. I’ve never seen Mumbai look so beautiful. Today is a bad day, I can’t keep my mind from thinking of traveling up to the mountains, walking in the open.