To listen to an audio version of ‘First Things’ click the play button You hear the long, quavering call of a blackbird and open the window, stiff after the swelling snow. The song slips inside, spins and swirls for a few moments, and then steals you from the room. Standing outside, warmth lilts about your fingers [...]
Archive for the ‘Prespa’ Category
First Things
Posted in Butterflies and Moths, Garden, Nature, Prespa, Wildflowers, tagged environment, Nature, photography, Prespa, spring, wildflowers on March 19, 2012 | 39 Comments »
Water Music
Posted in Landscape, Nature, Photography, Prespa, tagged environment, ice, music, Nature, photography, Prespa on February 10, 2012 | 28 Comments »
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 [...]
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. ~ [...]
Crossing Paths
Posted in Birds, Nature, Prespa, tagged birds, life, Nature, photography, red-footed falcons on November 4, 2011 | 33 Comments »
Certain exquisite experiences in the natural world arise because of the precise alignment of unpredictable paths. We can never know exactly where and when they’ll occur, if at all, and that, perhaps, is the very essence of their charm. Other than being out on the land as often as possible, I know of no way to [...]
Faith in a Forgotten Place
Posted in Conservation, Nature, Prespa, Wetlands, Writing, tagged eco-tourism, environment, Landscape, Nature, photography, Prespa, Terrain.org, travel, Zagradec on October 4, 2011 | 22 Comments »
“Where there are borders, there are bridges.” I’d been researching a cross-border eco-tourism project on the Albanian side of the lake when Myrsini Malakou, director of the Society for the Protection of Prespa, suddenly said this during an interview. Her words crystalized for me a vague idea that I’d been carrying around throughout the time I’d spent in [...]
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 Circumference of a Second
Posted in Balkans, Birds, Geology, Insects, Landscape, Nature, Prespa, Wildflowers, Writing, tagged bagworm moth, environment, eternity, Henry Vaughan, Landscape, Nature, nightjar, perception, photography, poetry, Prespa, Wild Apples, wild flowers, writing on June 24, 2011 | 24 Comments »
To listen to an audio version of ‘The Circumference of a Second’ please press the play button. for Dimitris Noulis Sometimes just a few words can transport us. A friend had emailed me the first line of a 17th century poem by Henry Vaughan, and I found myself reading it over and over: I saw [...]
The Fragile Forest
Posted in Conservation, Landscape, Nature, Prespa, tagged arson, conservation, environment, fire, forest fires, Nature, Prespa, Rick Bass, silver birch, Society for the Protection of Prespa on April 29, 2011 | 45 Comments »
The silence is unprecedented for spring, a time of bird song and insect hymns. It’s a silence I’ve never known in this forest in fact, this wild tangle of silver birch and willow, alders, shrubs and reeds. Even in deepest winter the place resounds with a living quiet, a mute but sensed presence. Instead there is the hollow echo of absence. I have been [...]
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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