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 … Continue reading First Things
Category: Prespa
Water Music
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 … Continue reading Water Music
A Winter World
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. ~ … Continue reading A Winter World
Crossing Paths
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 … Continue reading Crossing Paths
Faith in a Forgotten Place
"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 … Continue reading Faith in a Forgotten Place
Julian Hoffman 