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
Category: Travel
Shared in the Sunlight
For Nina, whose mountain spirit inspires. It’s rare that I meet people in the mountains. In all that space it’s not often that our slender human paths cross and twine at the exact same time. Instead there are wheeling raptors to fill the expanse, and ground-nesting birds to either side of me. Ravens darken the … Continue reading Shared in the Sunlight
A Line Unwinding
It is there at the beginning of each day, and again at its end, like a home you’ve always known. It unfurls like a ribbon through mist and glare, rising and falling to the shifting tenure of the weather, a place of processionals sung by skylark and peewit and plover. And when it slips like a knife … Continue reading A Line Unwinding
Glimpsed, In Passing: 2011
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 … Continue reading Glimpsed, In Passing: 2011
A Family Affair: Szczecin, pt.1
To listen to an audio version of 'A Family Affair' click the play button "All origins become mysterious if we search far enough into the past. And almost all peoples, when we look at their earliest origins, turn out to have come from somewhere else." -Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History A fierce north wind … Continue reading A Family Affair: Szczecin, pt.1
Julian Hoffman 