And you know it’s time to go Through the sleet and driving snow Across the fields of mourning Lights in the distance And you hunger for the time Time to heal, desire time – U2, ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ Whenever I monitor birds on the lower hills I pass what is left of the village. I stay [...]
Posts Tagged ‘photography’
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 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 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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
Selected Writing
-
-
Recent Posts
Archives
Categories
- Architecture (4)
- Balkans (8)
- Birds (9)
- Butterflies and Moths (6)
- Conservation (4)
- Garden (6)
- Geology (2)
- Habitat (7)
- History (10)
- Insects (3)
- Landscape (21)
- Mammals (2)
- Nature (25)
- Photography (8)
- Prespa (26)
- Travel (8)
- Uncategorized (1)
- Urban (3)
- Wetlands (9)
- Wildflowers (4)
- Writing (7)
-
Recent Comments
-
