Morphing ... 7.00 am. Again. This time out on the coast, during that alchemical hour during which moments of morphogenesis occur. The sea, the earth and the sky are all in flux. As though it is as yet undecided which will be solid, which gas, and which liquid. During this hour of metamorphosis it is slowly determined, and the three realms separate.
Seagulls, November, J BowringIt is a place of childhood, of the first 18 years or so. Everywhere this nostalgic placeness ripples through the early morning air. The honeyed fragrance of the flax flowers. And aniseed ... the fennel grows wild all along the coast, invasive, pervasive. Both cut through by the sharp salt air, the sea mist drifts ... onto your lips, eyelashes. Moments of blue open up, and the seagulls reel, squealing. And Charles Brasch's lines come to mind, from The Islands,
Everywhere in light and calm the murmuring
Shadow of departure; distance looks our way;
And none knows where he will lie down at night.
Home, October, J BowringAll astoundingly breathtaking, time to simply Be.
(Last, Loneliest, Most Lovely, with apologies to E H McCormick, who wrote of New Zealand, "Last, Loneliest, Most Loyal"...)
2 comments:
Hi Jacky
The first part of your post made me think of cross country skiing a few days back, in the biggest snow storm this season. A new park
(to me), low visibility, so direction changes on whims and guesses.
And suddenly there was the shore, losing its edge...the lake edge freezing, the ground covered, air dense with snow... all different but the same ... all conflating to soft white undifferentiated cells.
The opposite of morphogenesis?
My eye moved from the snowed-in shore, out over the water, through a erased horizon, to where solid water drifted in water vapour... a vapourous link to other waters; lakes remembered, oceans missed, ocean mists...
cheers, bruno
Hi Bruno - wonderfully evocative adriftness ...dissolution. And other watery bodies: just this morning I began reading a book called Seven-Tenths: The Sea and its Thresholds, and the first page is describing someone floating in the sea, having lost his boat, and swimming down a couple of feet he looks back up at the surface of the water as a 'mirror of air' ..."The swimmer reflects on this mirror, imagining the sky weighing own on the sea and the sea holding up the atmosphere, curious about what exactly can be happening at the interface. If it were possible to magnify the activity, surely a buzzing skin of molecules would be revealed? Water molecules and aire molecules so intermiixed and saturated with atoms in common it would be undecidable which medium they constituted. At what point did these milling particles become waves?"
(James Hamilton-Paterson)
best wishes, jacky
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