First Things

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

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

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