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 [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Nature’
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 »
The Light of Birds, Evros Delta
Posted in Balkans, Birds, Landscape, Nature, Travel, Wetlands, tagged birds, environment, Evros Delta, memory, migration, Nature, photography, quality of light, spring migration on May 28, 2011 | 28 Comments »
To listen to an audio version of ‘The Light of Birds’ please click on the play button. They’re returning, wave after wave of them spilling over the delta of the Evros River. The sky is streaked with sharp-winged falcons, with storks whitening the meadows when they descend, with flocks of ibis that close like black umbrellas on [...]
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 [...]
The Way the Light Shifts
Posted in Nature, Prespa, tagged light, Nature, Prespa, spring, storms on April 8, 2011 | 29 Comments »
The way the light shifts is sudden, like wind slamming shut a door. All day clouds have been gathered seamlessly above, immobile and the colour of slate. Unexpectedly they let in the sky. A thin sunbeam parts the dark, then further streaks swell through, throwing coins of light onto the lakes. They float for a moment before sinking into the [...]
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 [...]
A Time of Turning
Posted in Garden, Nature, Prespa, tagged freeze, frost, ice, meltwater, Nature, Prespa, seasons, spring, thaw, winter on March 11, 2011 | 27 Comments »
While the days edge tentatively into new territory, the nights hold fast to winter’s side. The resplendent black sky splashed with stars is clear, and startlingly cold. A seam of smoke from our chimney floats over the dark like a ship at sea. For a week or so I’ve heard the wheel of time shifting forward: ice [...]
Sticks and Stones
Posted in Geology, Nature, Prespa, tagged beech, deep time, fossils, geology, juniper, Nature, oak, petrified wood, Prespa, wood on February 25, 2011 | 26 Comments »
The trajectory of a tree’s life is as unforeseeable as our own, determined as much by circumstance as intention. Like any living organism, it has its phases and difficult ages. It’s subject to environmental shifts and storms, to changing patterns of land use and arbitrary rains. A tree might be shaped by strict winds, the intimate attentions of [...]
Glimpsed, In Passing
Posted in Balkans, Butterflies and Moths, Landscape, Prespa, Wildflowers, tagged Albania, cardinal butterfly, crocus, fire salamander, FYROM, Nature, photography, Prespa, V.S. Pritchett on December 28, 2010 | 18 Comments »
As the year wanes I’d like to mark its end with a few photographs. While place can be dense with the layers of our living, with the accumulated histories of wild creatures, cultures and faiths, the tightly knit webs of ecosystems or urban architecture, sometimes we’re afforded merely a glimpse of it. These images are such glances. Photographs remind me of [...]
Journey to Ithaca
Posted in Landscape, Nature, Prespa, Wetlands, Writing, tagged C.P. Cavafy, Edmund Keeley, Homer, Ithaca, literature, Nature, Odysseus, Phillip Sherrard, poetry, The Odyssey on December 8, 2010 | 17 Comments »
After last week’s deluge the river ran wild with rain. It had transformed overnight from a sinuous set of bends where kingfishers flared like blue flames to a wild and churning tempest. The mud-brown water was washing off the mountains and cascading through steep granite galleries to roil across the plain towards the lake. The thrum and roar were recognisable, storms having altered the shape [...]
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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