“We were deeply engaged in this improbable geology.” - Patrick Leigh Fermor, Roumeli I woke early to beat some of the fevered heat of the plains, the kind of humid blaze that leaves you soaked to the skin by mid-morning. The silhouettes of the Meteora were etched faintly against the night sky when a startling … Continue reading Meteora: Stones of the Sky
The sky is a harbour all of a sudden. Wherever I look there are wings leaving a wake in the air. Having sailed northwards to reach here, swifts, swallows and housemartins dive through the teeming insect feast laid on for their arrival, swirling through pools of clouded blue. Golden orioles flare from the lakeside willows, brief … Continue reading What the Light Knows
It reached me as an afterglow. We were walking on a cliff-edge path when a faint light glimmered at the corner of my eye. I stopped and looked down on the sea for a while, reluctantly accepting that it must have been the sparkling roll of a wave that I’d seen, a crest of bright … Continue reading Gathered Light
The lone and level sands stretch far away. - Percy Bysshe Shelley, from ‘Ozymandias’ Only the evening before, a friend had warned me about the shifting sands of the estuary should I try to get close to the stone, confessing her own driven desire to seek out the totems and talismans of the landscape as … Continue reading Where the River Meets the Sea
In the pale light of a February morning, a meteor flared unforeseen across the Russian sky. The fireball burned through the cloudless blue, weeping a contrail of smoke in its wake, before eventually crashing into the Ural Mountains and leaving hundreds of people injured by shattered glass from its shockwave. Recorded on myriad photographs and … Continue reading Across the Sky
Julian Hoffman 