Each morning, usually at around 6:00 am, I sit on a gray chair at our dining room table with a cup of fresh brewed coffee. I am looking eastward. The orange sky and silhouette of dark trees greets me through the four casement windows in our living room; I also see two cars and a van in my neighbors driveway across the street. My favorite coffee mug (a treasured gift finely crafted by my best friend) and my bowl of cereal sit atop our wooden dining room table. Our table was custom built to fit proportionally in our small dinette off the kitchen. I just like this table and appreciate the craftsmanship of those who built it. It’s one of those happy purchases. I now feel settled and go to that place inside myself.
Michael, as one who often struggles to describe beauty in the natural world I love how you paint a beautiful picture from your kitchen table. Well done!
The place I go to is a spit of loose sedimentary rock, pudding-stone, that splits the air and water between two beaches. I scramble down to it from the ragged grass and purple clover of the machair, or at low tide step to it carefully across bladder-wrack and pools with hermit crabs and slow-scrawling winkles. There’s the pipe from the sewage station. At the juncture between its outflow and the free water you can see a tiny fountain bubbling when the tide comes in just so. There’s the fuaran, the iron-tasting algae-crusted bowl of fresh water filtered through the rock, where we used to slurp when we were children. There are the nests of the fulmars. There’s the sulphur stink of rotting seaweed. There’s the cardboard cut-out mountains on the horizon, across the sea, and the herring gulls flying.
I tend to go to the same space in different places. It could be sheltering from the rain under a bridge by a canal in Dublin; or the attic window in a terraced house in Cork city at Christmas; or the gates where Castletown estate and the village of Celbridge, Co. Kildare, touch; or the bridge over the stream as it begins to build momentum to cascade and churn over the rocks on its way to the first glacial lake in Glendalough; or the clearing off the beaten track in any forest, where the trees crowd around, but don’t block the sky above; or the highest point (in very relative terms) in the one of the local parks, where the trees and shrubs have given this latest daring a chance to be; or my bedroom at home where I grew up - today. Thank you. Tomás
Every day that I can, I walk a golf course near my home, before it opens. It’s lovelier than the sidewalks of the neighborhood nearby. The grass is too well-kept, of course, and the sand-craters are so strange. I walk the edges, in and out of wooded areas, past particular cottonwoods and pines I try to listen to. Great horned owls hoot nearly year round just before dawn, but most of the other birdsongs change with the weeks of the seasons. Sometimes I walk by starlight or in moon shadow before the sun is up, the rising morning light gradually illuminating. Near one broken patch of old prairie grasses there’s a smell this time of year that I can’t quite describe - a sort of sweet and cinnamon-sage blend. It moves something in my belly that bubbles its way out as deep joy (and I wonder if this sort-of-craving is what the twinge of an empty uterus might feel like). It’s strange how all these sounds and smells and breezes can transport me. Funny, even when I’m hiking distant shores or mountains, I think about this golf course track and look forward to coming home.
Sean - what a lovely walk! That delicious grass aroma is what I often smell at my sister's large remote summer cottage on Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, Northern Ontario. We call it sweet grass, the Indigenous who live on the Island weave it into beautiful baskets and braids.
I used to live on a golf course and would love the late evening walk among the shadows of a setting sun and remembering the cursing of the plyers in full sun.
I have tried to walk a golf course near my home. But thought oh my does anybody else? So now besides the river and preserves I walk I will do the course. Many golf courses have been turned into nature preserves. I would walk on one in another location I once lived near. I like the concept of the original golf course at St Andrew’s. One did not make it look unreal one played the sport intermixed with the real of nature. Thanks so much for giving me another path to walk.This one more real than artificial.
Thank you for including the commentary of grass too well kept and sand craters so strange amid the beauty of your walk. Also love your appreciation of other walks and the resonation of the golf course as home.
Pat, I have to admit feeling a bit sheepish about loving to walk a golf course. It’s not what I would choose for the land. Yet it helps to preserve habitat for many.
How cool to open your heart to an experience that may seem less than optimal. Walking in a space, most any space -including urban concrete- has meaning and purpose. Sheepish or not, walk where soul calls you to go.
A massive structure of gateways. Of coming home or going there or going home or coming here.
I’m not sure if I’m home or if I’m here or if both can be true.
But I pass through the gateways, screening and checking and scanning and exposing all that’s with me and within me to get on a plane and journey away.
There are no rules. Alcohol at 9am, energy drinks near midnight. Toddlers asleep on the ground, men setting up makeshift offices at the gate before boarding. The worst chain restaurant in the country a few stalls down from the most expensive purses you could by, across from the tacky tourist shop, down the way from the overpriced massage chairs.
Every person coming from somewhere, going somewhere. A stopping place, a gate to another. Not a destination.
The Opposum's Tale has a sign outside its doors when it's open saying, "Probably Jonesborough's Best Pub." It's the only pub in our tiny town, Tennessee's oldest town, which also features the International Storytelling Center (part of the reason for "Tale" in the pub's name). If it's game day, an English Premiere soccer (football) game might be on the TV, some mornings the owners will open early for a women's international match, otherwise the TV is off. The menu boasts limited, but delicious options, including a section for Elenveneses. One of the owners is out front, always in motion, bussing tables, welcoming those who step inside. She can often be seen behind the bar buffing the glasses until they are crystal clear; serious and kind. Her partner is the chef, so in back mostly. When she does make an appearance out front, she beams a broad smile and boasts a hearty laugh. A selection of the pictures on the wall - many of which remind me of my time living in Belfast, like those featured on the walls of the Bot or a small-town watering hole in the country (muted greens and browns; images from another time) - have a pair of googley eyes pasted on them. There are many signs, some waving and obvious, others subtle and interpersonal, that everyone is welcome here.
i go to the edge of lake, but not all the way to the edge. i stop at the mounds of sand from which the grasses rustle and bend in the breeze. i curl small like a hedgehog, or sometimes a quail, and amid the knife-blade grasses, i send up my prayer. the lake is in sight. and in sound. the sky is forever. the cottonwoods quake, their leaves shimmer in the sunlight, a mosaic of diamond glimmer.
The place I go to is up a hill of pine trees and eucalyptus, over narrow, stony, dusty paths. Round the final corner, blue sky above, sun shining almost blindingly so, there is a sudden, surprising view of the vast blue sea. The horizon sometimes blurred with mist. This is the top of the hill. A flat circular area where they have recently built wooden benches to sit on instead of the rough stones next to the old olive tree. There used to be a chameleon resting every day on one of the pine trees. I’ve seen a hoopoe there too. Butterflies abound at times. And one day, I saw three dolphins in the sea.
I go out into my garden where I try to ignore the weeds and enjoy the rabbits whom I otherwise curse for eating my seedlings planted bravely outside the vegetable garden fence. I notice what is blooming and what is still to bloom; what has already bloomed and looks very sad, and my favorites: those who have bloomed but still look good as they set their seeds. Some of those will continue to look good, or at least interesting, throughout the winter — even breathtakingly beautiful as ice covers each ball or spike and glints in the sunlight, or their determined stiff shapes poke darkly out of the snow and cast blue shadows on a cold, sunlit day.
On a podcast yesterday I heard Brian Eno, the musician, say “I am a gardener, not an architect” meaning I plant seeds and let things go their way from there, instead of planning every detail out ahead of time. My garden is mine, and yet not mine; I plant and nurture and mostly do no harm, but the miracles are not mine. And the older I get, the more I enjoy every season, even now, the end of summer, when the first hard frost threatens, and, as Mary Oliver says, everything is doomed.
I kneel in the wet spongy brown-green grass when the first green shoots come up in springtime, and cry. I kiss my flowering dogwood, slender delicate tree under white pines at the back of my property every autumn and whisper “don’t die.” And then we all go into winter, together.
Our garden is on a steep hill. The very top is surrounded by Hawthorn, Hazel, other shrubs and tall trees. Also there are our chickens where every day I sit in an afternoon with them. It's like a sigh from whatever else was filling my day. It's a routine we have to do as part of caring for our birds but one, should we not have them, we would sorely miss.
Sometimes a chicken will sit in my lap while a Dunnock or Robin joins us, oblivious to my presence, to glean leftover seeds.
If we move house I think my question to myself will be how do I recapture this time in this place...or maybe I should ask that question of myself now.
Each morning, usually at around 6:00 am, I sit on a gray chair at our dining room table with a cup of fresh brewed coffee. I am looking eastward. The orange sky and silhouette of dark trees greets me through the four casement windows in our living room; I also see two cars and a van in my neighbors driveway across the street. My favorite coffee mug (a treasured gift finely crafted by my best friend) and my bowl of cereal sit atop our wooden dining room table. Our table was custom built to fit proportionally in our small dinette off the kitchen. I just like this table and appreciate the craftsmanship of those who built it. It’s one of those happy purchases. I now feel settled and go to that place inside myself.
Michael, as one who often struggles to describe beauty in the natural world I love how you paint a beautiful picture from your kitchen table. Well done!
love this. I know that exact same
place and it's a favorite time
of day
The place I go to is a spit of loose sedimentary rock, pudding-stone, that splits the air and water between two beaches. I scramble down to it from the ragged grass and purple clover of the machair, or at low tide step to it carefully across bladder-wrack and pools with hermit crabs and slow-scrawling winkles. There’s the pipe from the sewage station. At the juncture between its outflow and the free water you can see a tiny fountain bubbling when the tide comes in just so. There’s the fuaran, the iron-tasting algae-crusted bowl of fresh water filtered through the rock, where we used to slurp when we were children. There are the nests of the fulmars. There’s the sulphur stink of rotting seaweed. There’s the cardboard cut-out mountains on the horizon, across the sea, and the herring gulls flying.
I tend to go to the same space in different places. It could be sheltering from the rain under a bridge by a canal in Dublin; or the attic window in a terraced house in Cork city at Christmas; or the gates where Castletown estate and the village of Celbridge, Co. Kildare, touch; or the bridge over the stream as it begins to build momentum to cascade and churn over the rocks on its way to the first glacial lake in Glendalough; or the clearing off the beaten track in any forest, where the trees crowd around, but don’t block the sky above; or the highest point (in very relative terms) in the one of the local parks, where the trees and shrubs have given this latest daring a chance to be; or my bedroom at home where I grew up - today. Thank you. Tomás
Every day that I can, I walk a golf course near my home, before it opens. It’s lovelier than the sidewalks of the neighborhood nearby. The grass is too well-kept, of course, and the sand-craters are so strange. I walk the edges, in and out of wooded areas, past particular cottonwoods and pines I try to listen to. Great horned owls hoot nearly year round just before dawn, but most of the other birdsongs change with the weeks of the seasons. Sometimes I walk by starlight or in moon shadow before the sun is up, the rising morning light gradually illuminating. Near one broken patch of old prairie grasses there’s a smell this time of year that I can’t quite describe - a sort of sweet and cinnamon-sage blend. It moves something in my belly that bubbles its way out as deep joy (and I wonder if this sort-of-craving is what the twinge of an empty uterus might feel like). It’s strange how all these sounds and smells and breezes can transport me. Funny, even when I’m hiking distant shores or mountains, I think about this golf course track and look forward to coming home.
Sean - what a lovely walk! That delicious grass aroma is what I often smell at my sister's large remote summer cottage on Manitoulin Island, Lake Huron, Northern Ontario. We call it sweet grass, the Indigenous who live on the Island weave it into beautiful baskets and braids.
I used to live on a golf course and would love the late evening walk among the shadows of a setting sun and remembering the cursing of the plyers in full sun.
I have tried to walk a golf course near my home. But thought oh my does anybody else? So now besides the river and preserves I walk I will do the course. Many golf courses have been turned into nature preserves. I would walk on one in another location I once lived near. I like the concept of the original golf course at St Andrew’s. One did not make it look unreal one played the sport intermixed with the real of nature. Thanks so much for giving me another path to walk.This one more real than artificial.
Thank you for including the commentary of grass too well kept and sand craters so strange amid the beauty of your walk. Also love your appreciation of other walks and the resonation of the golf course as home.
Pat, I have to admit feeling a bit sheepish about loving to walk a golf course. It’s not what I would choose for the land. Yet it helps to preserve habitat for many.
How cool to open your heart to an experience that may seem less than optimal. Walking in a space, most any space -including urban concrete- has meaning and purpose. Sheepish or not, walk where soul calls you to go.
LHR
A massive structure of gateways. Of coming home or going there or going home or coming here.
I’m not sure if I’m home or if I’m here or if both can be true.
But I pass through the gateways, screening and checking and scanning and exposing all that’s with me and within me to get on a plane and journey away.
There are no rules. Alcohol at 9am, energy drinks near midnight. Toddlers asleep on the ground, men setting up makeshift offices at the gate before boarding. The worst chain restaurant in the country a few stalls down from the most expensive purses you could by, across from the tacky tourist shop, down the way from the overpriced massage chairs.
Every person coming from somewhere, going somewhere. A stopping place, a gate to another. Not a destination.
Airports are strange places.
I really get (and like) your airport description. I’m curious. Do you actually like airports?
I’m curious as well😂
It’s complicated and means so many things, especially after a recent international move. So I can’t really say yes or no
I love this description. A bizzare place airports are. Neither here nor there. Just a place in between. With many contradictions.
The Opposum's Tale has a sign outside its doors when it's open saying, "Probably Jonesborough's Best Pub." It's the only pub in our tiny town, Tennessee's oldest town, which also features the International Storytelling Center (part of the reason for "Tale" in the pub's name). If it's game day, an English Premiere soccer (football) game might be on the TV, some mornings the owners will open early for a women's international match, otherwise the TV is off. The menu boasts limited, but delicious options, including a section for Elenveneses. One of the owners is out front, always in motion, bussing tables, welcoming those who step inside. She can often be seen behind the bar buffing the glasses until they are crystal clear; serious and kind. Her partner is the chef, so in back mostly. When she does make an appearance out front, she beams a broad smile and boasts a hearty laugh. A selection of the pictures on the wall - many of which remind me of my time living in Belfast, like those featured on the walls of the Bot or a small-town watering hole in the country (muted greens and browns; images from another time) - have a pair of googley eyes pasted on them. There are many signs, some waving and obvious, others subtle and interpersonal, that everyone is welcome here.
The word "probably" made me smile as did your accompanying description.
Newell's Paddock by Richenda
In the morning chill of Newell’s Paddock,
ducks emerge from tall reeds;
they are small boats bobbing
while swans glide—
the steep arc of their long necks pull metallic fare
from the pond’s blue bowl.
A thousand hues of green breathe softly—
the mesh of them holds back the blare of day
to magpies’ bell.
A path winds through Newell’s Paddock;
it rises and falls gently past eucalypts
shedding bark like a nightdress.
The city is still a spectre and a passing train still empty.
There is nothing left to do but stand on dewy grass
and leave a tattoo of footprints, taking the diamonds with us.
Purple periwinkles
Asters loved by bees.
Stone pillars reaching
Gargoyle grounded.
Old dog meanders winding paths
Stone steps.
Sit under a century tree
Find sanctuary.
Asters loved by bees. - yummy line 😎
Here, the sand sings.
As the water laps the shore, churning sand up from the bottom,
the sand sings.
Every shuffling step, carrying my things to find my perfect spot for the day produces that sound. The sound of the sand.
It sings.
Children run past, throwing chips high in the air for the seagulls, who dip and dive for their treats.
The sand sings.
Arriving to the marina in cars, people board their boats and step onto sturdy decks.
Steering their boats out of the marine into open water, waving at people on the shore.
Do they know?
Do they know the sand sings?
Love singing sand. Never thought of that before. Thank you!
I know this place. I love it too.
Western wind cuts
breathe pulls away
Gravel crunch
Sky opens beyond soft yellow fields
I speak it aloud
Or sing it
To no one
And every one
All at once
i go to the edge of lake, but not all the way to the edge. i stop at the mounds of sand from which the grasses rustle and bend in the breeze. i curl small like a hedgehog, or sometimes a quail, and amid the knife-blade grasses, i send up my prayer. the lake is in sight. and in sound. the sky is forever. the cottonwoods quake, their leaves shimmer in the sunlight, a mosaic of diamond glimmer.
beautiful. I could feel
myself there
The place I go to is up a hill of pine trees and eucalyptus, over narrow, stony, dusty paths. Round the final corner, blue sky above, sun shining almost blindingly so, there is a sudden, surprising view of the vast blue sea. The horizon sometimes blurred with mist. This is the top of the hill. A flat circular area where they have recently built wooden benches to sit on instead of the rough stones next to the old olive tree. There used to be a chameleon resting every day on one of the pine trees. I’ve seen a hoopoe there too. Butterflies abound at times. And one day, I saw three dolphins in the sea.
The water.
The constant humm of the highway.
Passing right by
There is never anyone there. This time of year.
Sometimes a man with dogs brings them to play.
A forgotten tennis ball laps the shore with the flotsam.
The light dances on that water.
And the water is still warm into October.
To slip bare toes the silt.
The peace in my cabin
Is so elegant
So calm
So soothing
It's like an afternoon swim
In deepest waters
A thick, sturdy fin
Propels my body forward
In a smooth glide
Unhinged from ties
To breath or oxygen
Coursing ocean depths
Absent all time
Glints of sunlight
Gently pull my glance
Upward
-Abigail Somma
I go out into my garden where I try to ignore the weeds and enjoy the rabbits whom I otherwise curse for eating my seedlings planted bravely outside the vegetable garden fence. I notice what is blooming and what is still to bloom; what has already bloomed and looks very sad, and my favorites: those who have bloomed but still look good as they set their seeds. Some of those will continue to look good, or at least interesting, throughout the winter — even breathtakingly beautiful as ice covers each ball or spike and glints in the sunlight, or their determined stiff shapes poke darkly out of the snow and cast blue shadows on a cold, sunlit day.
On a podcast yesterday I heard Brian Eno, the musician, say “I am a gardener, not an architect” meaning I plant seeds and let things go their way from there, instead of planning every detail out ahead of time. My garden is mine, and yet not mine; I plant and nurture and mostly do no harm, but the miracles are not mine. And the older I get, the more I enjoy every season, even now, the end of summer, when the first hard frost threatens, and, as Mary Oliver says, everything is doomed.
I kneel in the wet spongy brown-green grass when the first green shoots come up in springtime, and cry. I kiss my flowering dogwood, slender delicate tree under white pines at the back of my property every autumn and whisper “don’t die.” And then we all go into winter, together.
lovely...and I loved that Eno interview, but I was walking while listening, so will need to revisit to catch that great line.
I love your line “my garden is mine, and yet not mine.”
Our garden is on a steep hill. The very top is surrounded by Hawthorn, Hazel, other shrubs and tall trees. Also there are our chickens where every day I sit in an afternoon with them. It's like a sigh from whatever else was filling my day. It's a routine we have to do as part of caring for our birds but one, should we not have them, we would sorely miss.
Sometimes a chicken will sit in my lap while a Dunnock or Robin joins us, oblivious to my presence, to glean leftover seeds.
If we move house I think my question to myself will be how do I recapture this time in this place...or maybe I should ask that question of myself now.
I love dunnocks!