Microcosmic

"The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper." The word ‘magic’ can mean several things. A common way in which it’s used is to express the idea of conjuring - pulling the proverbial rabbit out of a hat. Bringing something into existence that didn’t exist before. There’ll be a range of beliefs about this. From it being merely sleight of hand, done for entertainment purposes, to it being a literal act of creation with the use of special powers. In whichever way it's thought of, ‘magic’ usually conveys ideas of mystery and wonder. What is art? If you write a poem, paint a picture, compose a song, you are literally bringing something into the world that wasn’t there before. What’s more this creation may well have ‘special powers’. The ability to strongly affect people, to move them - even change their lives. You are performing a kind of magic...

Dandlion seedhead and sparkler seeds radiating from the center - sparks radiating from the center While attempting to organise my unwieldy, burgeoning collection of photographs from the patch I kept noticing something. My brain was continually making connections – "that lichen looks like cracked mud, that flock of birds resembles smoke, there's a face on that tree". Why do things in nature often look like other, completely unrelated, things in nature? The answer to this points to a regularity, order and unity in nature...and to patterns. Grain of an Oak tree and my thumb print Patterns in nature are visible regularities of form - similar patterns appear again and again in  different contexts - in both living and non living things. Why is this? I think there are three overlapping kinds of explanation. 1) Laws of nature - nature has no choice – it has to obey the physical laws of the universe. So a bubble is the shape it is because surface tension pul...

A barn owl mist. I gave the view out of the window one last look before drawing the curtains on the day. Then.... I'd seen plenty of mist but never like this. A pearly shawl draped over atmosphere. It was as if all the particles in all the gaps  had been painted white. A dream of mist.  Thick enough to hide secrets. To lose memories in. Maybe it had vented up from an underworld of snow's afterlife. It looked barely real -  dry ice pumped onto a stage. but as a herald for what.... Then I saw it. A crack must have opened to let the barn owl in  white side up ghost side down mothborne from another world An owl's vapour Slipped into it, tilted out of it. Became it. An owl made from it.. Fog matadored bird, that created then dissolved back into murk. A dance of back and forth. Just as the owl was a mist owl so the mist was a barn owl mist.   As if there were a cloud - essence of  barn owl swirling over the ground.  So concentrated at its core that it m...

The path Walking along the canal towpath. Like a huge rockfall it falls away - the past shears off. Nothing ever happened. Nothing. And on the other side another landslip. The future. Nothing will happen. Nothing ever could. I suddenly arrive. I arrive here where I am. I'm a spacewalking astronaut, lifeline cut, no umbilical cord to before or after, floating in a starless, timeless void. I don't have any history, no name, I haven't done anything. Walking,, eating, drinking thinking, dreaming, sleeping - none of that. I drag no leaden ball of the past, no slights, hurts, heartbreaks. The slate wiped clean of wrongdoings, boasts, deceits, ill-thought-out misdeeds. That time, first day at secondary school when I wrote 'John Smith' on my exercise book, when all I had to do was write my name, and all the other boys laughed me back into a curled up fetus. Nope, never happened. But neither did those, smiles, laughs, kisses, loves, imagined culinary triumphs, successfully ...

The amazing sight of 100+ Goldfinches, just outside the window This is something I wrote on my first 'blog' Birds in a Cheshire Garden. Though back then - twenty years ago - blogs were still a twinkle in the internet's eye. I spent ten chairbound years looking out of a window onto a garden and a its birds. I was seldom down or bored - because of the birds. They kept me going. Finch Charming I can still remember the first Goldfinch I ever saw . A roadside of thistles glimpsed from the car held two excitingly unfamiliar birds. The sparks of colour brought a touch of the exotic to that urban scene. I knew I'd seen something like it in my Observers Book of Birds. Then came a flash of recognition as I mentally matched the painting of a Goldfinch with the finch-of-paradise I'd just seen It's funny how birds seemed more brightly coloured when I was a boy. Even so, many Goldfinches later, I still get a frisson of pleasure every time I see that combination of red, bla...

I’ve walked on the small corner of our planet – the one I call ‘my patch’ – maybe a thousand times. I’ve crossed this unexceptional parcel, when health allows, many times over the last few years. The same path from the cemetery on to the old abandoned golfcourse - nothing to see here. The track that becomes muddy after rain and seems want to stay muddy long after dryness has come back into fashion. But hang on... It’s never been muddy *quite* like this. I’ve had to skirt round it clinging to dry parts – but never *quite* in this way. And look at those thistles, that arrangement of flowers crossed with medieval weapons, one in front, two behind. And the way they seem to slide past the willows at the back, as I walk by – I’ve never, ever seen that – it's a totally new thing. What about that beech tree trunk with its network of byways made of darker bark as it dries out after rain. They'll soon go and only I will ever see these, and only now will I see them just like this....

This Skylark will change your life - no really! On my patch walk, I saw a skylark perched on a wall. I stopped to watch it for a while and took a photograph. It occurred to me that this bird has changed my life. All the subsequent moments after seeing the lark would have been slightly different had it not been there. And all those lark-rearranged causes and conditions will continue to cascade into the future. But what about the Skylark. It was only there, at that place and that time, because of a host of factors. That insect, would have influenced it – the one that laid its eggs, hatching into lark food….and that insect foodplant… And so it goes on. A ‘world wide web’ – an infinity of interconnections. Ripples on ripples. A friend on Facebook kindly posted a link to an article he thought would interest me. This reminded me of a documentary I’d seen before, which I then re-watched. My life will never be quite the same simply because of the handful of keystrokes and cli...

I stood beneath the Scots Pine, as if bathing in beams of solar flare, each shot through with swirling mist. One step to the left and it changed completely, another step forward gave me a whole new masterpiece. But not quite the same as a conventional masterpiece, say the Mona Lisa. At anyone time tens of people will be looking at it with you. And tomorrow many more. It's true each person will have a unique response. But they are apprehending, more or less, the same unchanging object before them. On the other hand I was literally the only person in the world seeing this lightshow. I was the only person who will ever see it and I will never see it again. My mood had been quite low before the shivelight extravaganza. I've seldom known such as a sudden uplift in wellbeing - a very dramatic example of 'nature cure'. In my eagerness to revel in the morning I walked further than I would have normally. I overdid it so today I'm rather our of action. But can I have compara...

A music that couldn’t be played. There was a music that couldn’t be played. It was overflowing with beauty, life and colour. But there was nothing to play it. It pervaded every corner of the universe. But it couldn’t be played. So it remained a potential – the possibility of music. And the universe stayed quiet, not a note of it sounded through the cold, silent aeons. Until the Earth. Like an orchestra at the beginning of a piece it started quietly, tuning up for a time. Then it played. How it played! It played with symphonies in trees. Loud joyful songs in birds. Insect concertos. Choirs in the oceans. And exultant crescendos where all of nature sounded together. At last the music could be played. The music could play itself – through the Earth and everything living. The Earth had given voice to the music and it rung throughout the universe. The music is playing now. Can you hear it? You are one of the players. Don’t let it stop.

Around the small pond in the muddy field stand eight herons in the form of trees. Three oaks, three alders, a willow and hawthorn. I have found a bounty of thisness. 'Whatness' - the essence of, say dog, that makes a dog a dog. 'Thisness' - the essence of - a particular dog - that makes it unique. Dogs and people have a lot of thisness. Robins, on the other hand don't, they all pretty much follow the same robin blueprint. What else can rival dogs and people in their thisness - well I'd say trees. These trees in particular. Two of them. The first one is a hawthorn. Two forks of tree lightning. Siamese twin trunks - conjoined and symbiotic at the ground, then living their own lives more and more as they ascend. At tree top height each has almost forgotten it ever had a brother. The right hand hemi-trunk has a gnarled, rugged exterior - it is being regulation hawthorn. But, almost straight from a builder's yard, the inside is bare wood. And it is revealing...

  On a couple of days on our recent trip to Shropshire I was unable to do much because of health limitations. This proved to be no hardship. I contented myself by sitting in the garden in front of a small patch of Pearly Everlasting. I could have been watching the comings and goings at an African waterhole! Certainly no wildebeest, crocodiles or elephants, but a similarly diverse and fascinating cast of visitors - just on a much smaller scale. No leopard came by, but instead a hornet. And then an extraordinary insect that looked as if it would be at home in a David Attenborough documentary on somewhere exotic like the Amazonia. A Gasteruption wasp carrying a javelin on its back - an egg laying structure as long as its body (picture 6) No cheetah pursued a gazelle in a twisting and turning chase of life and death. But instead an incredible variety and abundance of small, buzzing, flying things made their appearance on this tiny stage. So if your mobility is limited, or if it's not, ...