The earth has its voices and songs. It has its own languages crafted over millennia through slow and patient processes, its dialects peculiar to geological regions or areas of weather, to places of particular precipitation. The earth has its voices and songs just as we have our own, a music born of place, notes threaded together by winds [...]
Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category
Water Music
Posted in Landscape, Nature, Photography, Prespa, tagged environment, ice, music, Nature, photography, Prespa on February 10, 2012 | 28 Comments »
A Winter World
Posted in Nature, Photography, Prespa, tagged climate, environment, Nature, photography, snowflakes, Wilson A. Bentley, winter on January 19, 2012 | 28 Comments »
To one who lives in the snow and watches it day by day, it is a book to be read. The pages turn as the wind blows; the characters shift and the images formed by their combinations change in meaning…It is a shadow language, spoken by things that have gone and will come again. ~ [...]
Glimpsed, In Passing: 2011
Posted in Balkans, Nature, Photography, Travel, tagged 2011, life, Nature, photography, travel on December 28, 2011 | 29 Comments »
You’d be quite right in thinking that this isn’t part two of our journey to Szczecin in Poland. And rather than have you looking for it, or wondering whether I’ve deleted the subtitle of the previous post and therefore the obligation to write a follow-up, I’ll confess to not having written it. Not yet anyways. Much of [...]
Flights of Summer
Posted in Butterflies and Moths, Garden, Nature, Photography, Prespa, tagged butterflies, childhood, clouded apollo, environment, environmental indicators, fritillaries, garden wildlife, marsh fritillary, memory, Miriam Rothschild, Nature, photography, swallowtail on July 14, 2011 | 46 Comments »
Ever since I was a boy summer has seemed synonymous with flight. Whether a figurative lift coinciding with the end of school when my brother and I would take to our bikes or the fields with equal delight and spend endless, consuming hours exploring whatever was there to be discovered, or an actual journey through air, travelling from [...]
The Karst Country
Posted in Balkans, History, Landscape, Photography, Prespa, Writing, tagged birds, deep time, journal, karst, limestone, Nature, photography, Prespa, Terrain.org, wind turbines, writing on March 26, 2011 | 12 Comments »
Some of you reading Notes from Near and Far may remember that Julia and I have been working in the hills high above the Prespa Lakes monitoring birds as part of an environmental assessment for a proposed wind farm. It is there that I had the good fortune to meet Stavros, an Albanian shepherd who plays the flute [...]
In Memoriam: Berlin, part 2
Posted in Architecture, History, Photography, Travel, tagged architecture, Berlin, Berlin Wall, Coventry Cathedral, Cross of Nails, Daniel Libeskind, history, Holocaust Memorial, Jewish Museum Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Mark Rothko, photography, war memorials on February 8, 2011 | 19 Comments »
On the night of November 23rd, 1943 Allied bombers destroyed much of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church at the heart of Charlottenburg, Berlin. Built by the Kaiser at the end of the 1800s in honour of his father, the church lay largely entombed by its own fallen stone. All that remained was a shattered shell and [...]
City of Glass and Other Dreams: Berlin, part 1
Posted in Architecture, History, Photography, Travel, Urban, tagged Berlin, Berlin Wall, Fritz Lang, history, Metropolis, Norman Foster, photography, Reichstag, travel, Weimar Republic, Wim Wenders on January 20, 2011 | 120 Comments »
“Berlin is a city condemned always to become, never to be.” – Karl Scheffler, 1910 Perhaps no other city has taken up as much imaginary space over the last century as Berlin. It is a city forever in flux, not in the gradual, accumulated ways of most urban spaces, but with sudden, violent reinventions. Berlin [...]
Welcome
My essay, Faith in a Forgotten Place, has won the 2011 Terrain.org Nonfiction Award. You can read it here!
Julian Hoffman is a writer living beside the Prespa Lakes in northern Greece. Notes from Near and Far is his blog on the nature of place.
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