Ingela Bohm's Blog, page 39

A young rowan

It’s not a lens flare. It’s a tiny spirit, charged with guarding this particular rowan.[image error]

Blueberry bush

Blueberry embryos blushing in the afternoon sun.

Ice age landscape

Some six thousand years ago, the ice sheet withdrew towards the horizon, where you can see one of the oldest mountain ranges in the world.

 

A belle behind bars

The arctic starflower, also known as chickweed wintergreen. A small and unassuming flower that’s nevertheless the belle of the murky northern forest.

Evening lake

Marsh marigold

I just love that name – marsh marigold. I looked it up a minute ago, because I haven’t had reason to talk about them before. They’re one of the few flowers that bloom before Midsummer, and so it’ll figure prominently in my WIP, The Seventh Flower. This was one of two specimens along the whole shoreline, too, and I had to crawl in the, well, marsh to snap this pic. Oh well, now I’m home and dry.

Effort, reward… and the aftermath.

It may be a bit of a moralistic stance, but I do actually enjoy a view more if I had to work for it. Perhaps it stems from a childhood spent scaling the Black Mountains in Wales. Perhaps that conditioned me to love what I fought for more than what came easily.

Or maybe it’s just the contrast: the sweat and the strain of walking uphill, and then the cool calm of sitting down and enjoying the fruits of your labour.

Me with a dead tree sticking out of my chest (AKA composition is tricky).

But after that? The trek doesn’t end on the hilltop. As climbers of Mount Everest will tell you, the return to base camp is at least as dangerous and strenuous as the uphill climb. You have to save some energy for the aftermath, the summing up, the winding down.

The going home.

What doesn’t kill you

This is not a “normal” tree branch. If indeed there is such a thing as normal – but as humans, we do thrive on categorization, so let’s assume normality is a thing. Or at least prototypicality. There are prototypical specimens of things – a chair is a prototypical piece of furniture, a divan less so; a hammer is a prototypical tool, whereas a jointer plane may not be found in the average household.

And the above branch is not a prototypical pine tree branch.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. (See exhibit A…) It also doesn’t mean this kind of snaky, unusual branch is BAD. It doesn’t mean it should be sawed off, or that the whole tree should be felled to rid the woods of its excentricity.

It just is. It grew in one direction, and when that didn’t work out, it changed into another. Was it the wind that made it grow so strangely? Was it something else? Does it matter?

Well, alright, it sort of does matter to me because I want to know how things work, but I wouldn’t cut the tree down if the branch wasn’t formed by the wind. I wouldn’t say, “The tree chose to grow like that, so it had it coming.”

Yes, there is the so called normal. Yes, there are prototypical specimens of things. But there are also grey areas and pangolins and vagueness, and that’s totally fine. Research by Mary Douglas once showed that cultures where anomalies were revered as divine were more peaceful than others.

I have no trouble believing that.

Look at that branch. It’s charming. So just let the strange ones be.

A Return of the King moment

I had such a cinematic moment yesterday evening. I was out photographing in the woods, but I’d given up on account of the cloudy sky, so I was packing my camera into my bag. Then suddenly, the sun came out for thirty seconds and set the hillside completely ablaze! It was like that moment in the ROTK movie where Frodo and Sam see the head of a statue with a crown of white flowers.

Of course I didn’t have the time to photograph it properly. I just whipped out my camera again – and my umbrella, because it started raining at the same time – and snapped a few pictures, just hoping for the best. The ground was almost yellow, and the trees cast such black shadows…

Yeah, I know. You can’t see how spectacular it was. But at least I have the memory. And even if it does irk me that I didn’t capture it on camera, I know I wouldn’t even have been in that part of the forest if not for my photo quest, and then I wouldn’t have seen it. So sometimes, even if you don’t have a perfect product to show for your efforts, the experience was still worth it.

Typing typing typing DEATH