soliloquies in the outdoors…
The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …
The treecreeper is a rather comforting bird to look at… ensconced in its arboreal domain, enquiring for food among nooks and crannies, subsisting industriously… twixt humility and hubris, it prefers the former, choosing a benign camouflage over loud contrast… skittering up trees with hastiness akin to a rodent, leading some hapless insects to the end …
Elephants are such content beings, relishing every morsel, making a difference to every inch of the jungle they trudge through… flummox the blind they might, get agitated by the unceasing fragmentation of their wide expanses they do, but for a creature sharing human lifespan, the tolerance and wisdom in their sombre gait goes way beyond… …
Larks have had a distinct section in the canvas of my thoughts in recent times, mostly stuck on to the sub-conscious tapestry since I see a couple of species a lot while running and the Josh Ritter song, so Paul Simon-esque, starts playing in the head almost immediately… they’re part grumpy and part pensive, these …
Mountains make their own weather… they also, perhaps less acknowledged, make their own time… where durations are defined by degrees of experience rather than dances of gravity… there, more often than not, time is intensity, be it physical or sensory… mountains make their own time, I’m pretty sure, whether plodding through fresh snows or getting …
In a sense, mountains are essentially ruins… tectonic crash and bangs that leave undulations big and small in their wake… lofty spires, breathing ice and snow… rock and water locked in a tussle, one trying to remain in stasis, the other insistent on making everything flow… tucked in between these geological forces are millennia… of …
…When it rains, it pours… …Raindrops keep falling on my head… …Rain on your parade… …Why does it always rain on me… There we were, all primed up for Panpatia Col in the third week of September, supposedly having given the monsoons a wide berth… but then came a spell of rain that battered most …
September – a time of astronomical transitions and a last chance to take a long sojourn in the high mountains… for winters, save some initial sighs on never ending carpets of snow, make up for rather dull trudges… with the monsoons retreating – albeit with lesser and lesser predictability in the Anthropocene – one can …
Waterfalls are a contrast, in terms of motion… while the rest of the inanimate prefer to either remain in stasis or relent to move with extreme reluctance, waterfalls are in a screaming rush, as if the oceans would dry out if not for their contribution… gravity and geology… water wanting to become fire… rocks weathering …
Lark – a bit smug, this one, the Ashy-crowned sparrow lark, especially the male, the missus still (relatively) demure and consenting… flitting around open fields looking for grains or reaping the rich entomological harvest of the monsoons… quintessentially restive, forever grouchy… happy as a lark? na… not this one for sure… For Shakespeare and Chaucer, …