adrift
Reinebringen, Moskenesøya, Lofoten, Norway
15th June 2017
Category: water
bouquet
Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales
30th January 2017
suspension
Port Bannatyne marina, Isle of Bute, Scotland
18th December 2016
spherical
Cwm Garw, Glamorgan, South Wales
19th June 2016
window
After nights and days of rain the room is silent when we wake, but we open the curtains to a dense white mist. It presses in against the long window panes, cocooning us in a wet softness. The houses across the street are dimly apparent but the rooftops and hillsides beyond have vanished. There’s just what’s immediately here.
It reminds me of certain winter mornings in Montreal when I would wake to find my old un-double-glazed windows covered in a layer of frost. The frost was thick enough to be opaque, screening out the view of the apartment block opposite and giving me a rare sensation of privacy. And as the sun rose above the apartments, my frosted panes would become suffused with a gentle light, and the room would suddenly seem holy, like a small chapel glowing within patterned glass windows – because, when you looked closely, you saw the frost was a latticework, incredibly intricate, of intertwining fern-like fronds.
Our mist windows are uniform in comparison, and dull rather than illuminate, a damp blank haze. Yet still we have the temporary intimacy of insulation from the world, that depthless proximity which allows us to notice what we usually overlook, to feel what we usually forget to: quiet hovering glances, the warm breath of each of us, near.
Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
11th November 2015
cupped
Chives, Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
13th June 2015
late afternoon rainbow
light
arching
through a tenderness of rain
Cwm Garw, South Wales
30th January 2015
River Inver
The whitest water I’ve ever seen was at a “minor waterfall” near Mount Fuji in Japan. It wasn’t just the whitest water, it was the whitest whiteness I’ve ever seen, wild and tumbling in a rapid thrash of motion, shattering like diamonds as it smashed round the rocks, poured over, frothed down.
The River Inver is brown in its depths, its spuming foam yellowish as it roars on. But still – the illuminate flashes, the diamond fragments scattering –
River Inver, Assynt, Scotland
28th October 2024
Shiraito no Taki
A turquoise-pooled paradise
in a bowl, a basin
hung with white strings
Shiraito no Taki (‘waterfall of white threads’), Fujinomiya, Shizuoka, Japan
14th October 2014 (photograph by Uemura Katsuhiro)
Easdale
We sailed not far from Easdale last summer. We were going to sail right in and anchor by the island but, as we drew out from Colonsay and glided along its east coast, clouds began to gather in the distance ahead and, by the time we reached Colonsay’s northern tip, the Firth of Lorn looked dark and ominous. The wind had moved round too and was bearing down upon us and the sun was shining in the west, so we changed course and sailed into the sunset instead.
This year we were again going to sail there but our boat was in the north and the winds were from the south, so instead I took a collection of cars, buses and ferries to arrive, crossing the final short stretch of sea in cold windy rain.
I came to visit friends and took shelter in their cosy cottage with a cup of tea until the rain eased off and we set off round the island with wellies and children, sliding over the slate-heaped beaches and exhilarating in the wild washing of the waves over the sharp serrated lines of rock.
A big mist was still hanging around the coast but bits of brightness were starting to seep through and, as the others trailed slowly round the path, I quickly climbed the lumpy slice of hill. The island from up here looked astonishing, a strange gouged-out darkness with whiteness and lights crashing all along its shattered shores. As the air gradually cleared, the whole cauldron of island-ringed water beyond stretched itself out – to Seil, Luing, Scarba, Jura, Islay, the Garvellachs, Colonsay, Mull. I let myself drift out to meet them, following their rising rims, slowly navigating them in my imagination and last summer’s memory.
I was in a gentle dream; but as I picked my way back down the hill and ran the thin path round the north of the island to catch up with the others, I was caught by the quarry pools. They were so deep, so still, so blue, they seemed to gather into them all the wide distance of the waters outside, and to concentrate all their colour. I stopped at one, then another, then another – the deepest blue of all. A fine drizzle soaked into my skin as I stood gazing down and in.
Eventually I pulled myself away and now I stand in a glowing pink evening at the back shore staring out over that island-rimmed horizon. The wind comes across the waters, breaking them in white froth on the dark slate at my feet, but still my eyes are in the deep blue quarry pool on the other side of the island where all the wet world is, secretly, hidden and held.
Easdale, Argyll, Scotland
7th July 2014