soliloquies in the outdoors…
There’s a distinctive dynamic to these places, where ice turns to water up in the high mountains… as if the elements take a deep breath and all is still, a burble here and there, an avalanche or a rockfall in the distance… the elements go about their business in an eerie silence, and every small …
Cold, is all that they are, rocks in the high mountains, some basking in stasis, others churning in that slow glacial procession… concoctions of pressure in myriad forms, sharp volcanic outbursts or a gradual buildup of sediment… flaky or smooth, jagged or rounded, monoliths or pebbles, blunt prose or poetic allegories, they’re cold, all cold… …
Lepidoptera, the order of insects comprising butterflies and moths, are a strange lot… not only do their physical forms metamorphose rather unrecognizably from birth to adulthood, interestingly, so does their relationship with us… the adult being an avid pollinator but the caterpillar might be an agricultural pest, although some weave silk too… ‘twas the Chinese …
Fathoming the universe, yet still baffled by dreams, such are the vicissitudes of life… the more we know, more the contradictions… sleeping birds being a case in point… for a species used to crumbling into that suspended space of consciousness for hours, there a tinge of envy as one sees the avifauna managing with just …
Prinia, prancing… that’s my mumble on spotting this busy bee of a bird, flitting impatiently across bushes with the tail moving in a rather autonomous manner, like a music conductor’s baton waving furiously to navigate a busy section of the symphony… well adapted to the chaos that is urbanity, its dismissiveness to the idea of …
Contrasting birds comes rather organically as one scours a landscape for their activity… and so was the case as one mused upon an Imperial eagle and a Grey francolin, diametrically opposite for the most part but then there are some similarities the more one thinks about it… while one bestrides the high skies and canopies, …
The sandpiper, like the rest of its wader brethren, is a busy disposition, tiptoeing pensively along the shore, looking for something beyond food it seems… reading passing scribes on the water or pondering over the lay of the land… there’s a melancholy in its demeanour, maybe those long migrations add up after a few years …
Kingfishers, despite their calculated gaze and stock-still demeanour broken only by flashes of short flights, seem cheerful… maybe ‘tis the kaleidoscopic plumage that bedazzles the eye or the disproportionately large beak, more often than not they tend to enamour the observer… while raptors spend hours riding thermals and weaving circle after circle in the sky …
Woodpeckers underline the echoes of winter… their tap-taps breaking the silence of the otherwise brooding woods… as the chirps of other avifauna punctuate their own little surrounds, woodpeckers fill the whole forest with their drumming… rhythm and bass section, one muses, watching these birds bristling about the oaks and pines in a no-nonsense manner… for …
Spiders, like most insects, are cringey at first but tend to grow upon one’s thoughts… tactical predators, mathematical geniuses, eight-legged freaks, masters of silk, artistic abseilers… spiders weave their own little worlds, an ability once revered by older cultures, from cave paintings to the lore of Brutus… and now inextricably intertwined with the human conscience, …