For an audio version of ‘The Sum of Quiet Abundance’ click the play button. Insects are contagious, both in their profusion and appeal. In the cool hours of early spring they are few and far between, like solitary wanderers striking out across a desert. A roving ground beetle might rise into view, clambering with slow [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Nature’
The Sum of Quiet Abundance
Posted in Nature, Insects, Butterflies and Moths, Garden, tagged Nature, photography, environment, butterflies, insects on May 29, 2012 | 2 Comments »
An Uncertain Country
Posted in Birds, Habitat, History, Landscape, Wetlands, tagged environment, history, migration, Nature, photography, wetlands on May 5, 2012 | 19 Comments »
To listen to an audio version of ‘An Uncertain Country’ click the play button To near the coast in April is to stray into uncertain country. At times a hot sun bathes the orange groves until they glow. Then the lashing rains return, hurled by the wind across the hills like ragged grey sheets. Mist [...]
First Things
Posted in Butterflies and Moths, Garden, Nature, Prespa, Wildflowers, tagged environment, Nature, photography, Prespa, spring, wildflowers on March 19, 2012 | 39 Comments »
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 [...]
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. ~ [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Gathering In
Posted in Garden, Nature, tagged autumn, changing leaves, fall colours, Nature, photography, seasons on October 18, 2011 | 35 Comments »
The sun passes lower in the sky, bringing the quickening rush that starts the long winter months. Tresses of drying peppers spread like flames across sheds, turning the stone walls into scenes of tropical design. The elegant stems of onions that have spoked all summer above the swelling bulbs are plaited, woven together like hands in a dance, and hung out of the way of snow. [...]
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 [...]
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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