Tag: outdoors

Mountains, Nature

on residues of mountain rains…

Himalayan Coral Berry (Ardisia macrocarpa), Ranikhet, Uttrakhand, India

monsoons bring their own unique romance to the mountains, neither comparable to the pure white vistas of winter nor quite like the salubriousness of spring or autumn… the summers preceding them are not really scorching but still do tend to get on one’s nerves that the rains pacify, beginning with the petrichor and then moving …

Mountains

on long walks in mountains…

walks in Indian Himalaya

there are walks in the mountains while hiking that one underestimates, naïve enough not to pay heed to the illusions of a simple way up wild gorges… the day elongates proportionally with the trail, disaggregated into phases that seem like days unto themselves, each phase anchored to its own particular memory… there’s a brief period …

Nature

Raptors and raptness…

Raptors, despite their preoccupation with death, are seldom disparaged… a captivation since prehistoric times, mutual respect between hunters, in awe of the acrobatics in the air, that lethal stare with a focus and intent beyond human ability… no other avifauna has been able to capture human imagination for so long… entrenched in petroglyphs and adorning …

Art & Culture, Mountains

Chortens and their chores…

Chortens are one of those religious structures that are universally revered, a harbinger of constructive contemplation – one that leads towards inner peace through reminiscent journeys – these trapezoids stacked over one another and topped with a crown are but Buddha posing himself they say… a structural representation of different stages of his mortal journey… …

Nature

a desert drawl…

Desert landscapes of Rajasthan, India

desert … arid, dryness… dehydration, oasis… the sands are, for obvious reasons, representative of desolation, dreariness and despondence… a rite of passage beyond which lie many a virtue – justice, fame, wealth, enlightenment… the ramblings on enjoying the journey rather than the destination doesn’t really ring true in these landscapes though…     in the …

Mountains, Nature

Wistfulness and birds in the mountains…

Wistfulness of birds... Plumbeous water redstart (Phoenicurus fuliginosus), female

Wistfulness is a state of poetic realms, tinges of sweet sorrow sprinkled over the cocoon of contentment… so it feels rather amusing when one manifests it on to animals (in the guise of anthropomorphism) at first, but it makes at sense at times, when formal discourses on solutions to the evolution of evolution and genes …

Mountains, Nature

Butterflies in mountains…

Butterflies of Himalaya

Butterflies go deep, quite deep, maybe simply on the dint of the remarkable transitions they display that for millennia have flummoxed the best of minds… the Greeks and Indians ascribed the transformation akin to the transmigration of the human soul… palingenesis… Zhuang Zhou scratched his head, perplexed with this butterfly dream that seems to snowball …