Posts by ChrisW
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Lilith __,
a bit of driftwood
Crikey!Nah, that's not a bit of driftwood.
(A response I rejected as too crass - until yours Lilith, in such appropriate dialect, made it irresistible :-)
- Te Oneroa/Midway Beach, Gisborne, October 2010) -
Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
That bee would be she,
Not busy as should be?Summer red hot pokers foregrounding the daily soap opera of the birds on my riverbank willow log, while a silvereye (of indeterminate sex) busily peers up the frilly skirts of the next red hot poker, with intent.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Summer is.....
Colonial brown walnut cake in the afternoon shade ...
Under the walnut tree, on the fourth day in a row with the temperature in that lovely shade over 30 degrees, very pleasant in a breeze coming down the river. -
Capture: BOTY Potty., in reply to David Hood,
definitive native Robin shot
Indeed - you can read the settings on her lens, looking straight back into yours!
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to Nora Leggs,
Your dahlightful flames must be producing all that coloured smoke!
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Back on the level. High tide, and I have the ducks well trained.
First burst of the sun, 2 mins later.
No complaints about the smoke.
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Bit of a smoky haze on my side of the motu too - just pre-sunrise this morning from the log-seat at the foot of my garden. Rather cock-eyed first up for one reason or another.
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Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to BenWilson,
Very Waiheke! (in every respect alas.)
Your big files allowed a closer look at the pink rock pool - and should share it back, so here it is for contemplative interest and pleasure. -
Capture: Someone, Somewhere, In Summertime, in reply to JacksonP,
And time for a chapter break - good to see some others! So for something different from me - this is not a crime scene, but still the aftermath of violence, recorded late this afternoon.
It was pretty warm in Gisborne today, light winds and 33+degs in good shade at my place, no doubt markedly hotter in direct sun on the concrete path by the plum tree. Said tree produces beautiful big dark juicy tasty plums, and has excelled itself this year - much direct eating, supplying 5 neighbours etc with bagfuls, numerous bottles stewed and stashed, the birds getting their share and still the plums fall in excess of consumption. This one rolled out from the shade of the tree onto concrete, whose edging shows my lack of application to the suburban lawnmaster's creed. No bird had pecked its skin. So as it stewed whole in the sun the pressure built up until - well there is the evidence of a violent explosion, guts propelled afar, the skin collapsed back on itself.
Did it make a sound? I'm disappointed I wasn't there to hear it blow.
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Thank-you all - shall I continue with my New Year's morn then?
Late morning, all packed up and ready to leave for the trackless bush behind me - a farewell photo of Waikareiti. If you can see an emphasis that here the bush, the lake, the sky, the beach sand, the hills, the islands - all these elements and every pair of them are unusually close in an integrated whole - then that's exactly what I was thinking.
I'm glad the cooking fire appeals to the senses. I was reluctant to walk on the beach at first, to leave my footprints, then settled on a fire there as leaving a more quickly passing impact, and a single line to the water's edge for ... water. And in the morning I carefully walked on one end of the little beach to access and enjoy the bush edge details, but still with a not-quite-guilty sense of awareness I was changing the place. Then looking at one of my great boot-prints on the sand, I saw on its edge this lovely arrangement of beech leaves, that I had unwittingly almost destroyed - a fresh new red beech leaf and an old silver beech leaf as if artfully placed on an old red beech leaf. So I photographed them and their near-miss in their context of other debris from the bush overhead fallen onto the sand in the last rain and wind.
Then in the photo detail enlarged, I saw a beautifully round grain of sand artfully placed on the leaf too. It's unlike all the other grains of pumice. I'm a geologist - they are from big eruptions of Taupo 1800 and 3500 years ago, washed out of the soils of the bush slopes adjoining, whereas that smaller pearly white round grain is of quartz, washed off the surface of a sandstone boulder exposed on the lakeshore, a boulder that is part of the hummocky debris of an enormous landslide from 18,000 years ago, where the original sandstone itself was around 10 million years old, but this grain of sand within it was far older, having been through several earlier geological cycles to round it so well. How did it land on those delicate leaves? I rather think it had just sprung a few millimetres from the sand disturbed by the edge of my boot. So any trace of not-quite-guilt was gone - I have seen a world in a grain of sand, and enhanced my understanding of what happens when a leaf falls in a forest with and without someone around to hear it.
