To listen to an audio version of 'Embers' please press the play button They appear out of the silence and snow without sound, without any sign of foretelling that I can decipher. Arriving as if by magic, they flare from reefs of pale and brittle reeds like they’d been pulled from a hat, or lance … Continue reading Embers
Tag: Prespa
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
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
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 