Ozlandia

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Sunday-

• Japanese woodcut artists such as Hiroshige were almost obsessed with the effect of water and wood, particularly pilings and bridges and boats.  They would no doubt have enjoyed this view from the dock.  In a few weeks, the semi-transparent views between poles will be completely obscured by the vessels tied up there.  Today, however, the still frigid gale seems to be keeping all the summer mariners warm at home.
• One of the reasons I enjoy studying visual art is to gain the ability to compose or view scenes as if I were this artist or that artist.  To see the dashes of color as Monet, to admire the sky as if it were painted by Tiepolo, to find landscapes that Hokusai would have eagerly captured.  That enriches my life considerably, costs nothing at all, and, not least important in this day and age, hardly affects the environment at all. 

Saturday-

• Continuing the tired old theme of the week, someone might say “strange weather we’re having around here lately.”  Not quite snowfall yet, but cold enough to happen.  The heavy coats, hats, and gloves are back on the more observant people, while others just shiver and mutter.  This maple blooms in hope of attracting insects, but most of them are still hibernating.  Everything is one grand glossy panorama, clear and crisp and wonderfully attracting until one steps into the cruel wind.
• Spring is filled with promise and disappointments.  Like so much of our lives, we dream and are frequently let down.  I’ve fortunately learned to temper my dreams, which I suppose is what we old folks like to call wisdom.  I miss the ambition of my youth, once in a while,  then I settle back and contemplate that, after all, what I’ve got is not bad at all.

Friday-

• If dandelions were difficult to grow, they would be the pride of anyone’s garden.  The deeply serrated dark green leaves are interesting, the yellow flower large enough to stand out, even the final global seed puff unique.  They bloom continuously from early spring to late fall.  In a pinch, they are even edible. Plants would be sold at high markups, glossy catalogs would showcase the latest varieties from horticulturalists.  But they are prolific, ubiquitous, hardy, and almost impossible to eliminate, so they remain a kind of scourge.
• I like them as weeds.  Other invasive species that colonize waste patches like ragweed take a bit of contemplation and forced mental adjustment to appreciate.  Dandelions always stand out, adding patches of gold everywhere singly or grand groups.  But the darn things don’t know their place, and head into my lawn, flower beds and patio. They not only take over, but just cannot be destroyed even if I pull out their entire foot-long tuber, and they pop up like magic almost day by day.  There’s some lesson there about the most perfect guest overstaying a welcome, but I’ll let you work that one out.

Thursday-

• Magnolia on the lawn in front of “New Town Hall” which is the “old high school,” opposite the oldest Presbyterian church.   Sign notes the town was founded in 1643, not coincidentally in the middle of the English civil war against Charles I, the same year Louis XIV (a powerless seven-year-old) became king of France and the final year of the Chinese Ming dynasty.  The settlement was nominally part of the Dutch empire, although actually on the disputed frontier between New England and New Amsterdam.  Layers of history can be fun to add to a sedate beflowered landscape.
• Tourists flock to Europe _ the old world _ to gawk at the wonders of the past.  I myself have done so.  We often fail to realize that many of those monuments happened simultaneously with the growth of what became the United States.  Here in the northeast, layers of previous generations lie almost as thickly as those in the narrow streets of Paris, if we just take the time to look them up.  Fortunately, we have an active historical society which can track just about every rock, nook, cranny and wall back almost to the day of founding.  

Wednesday-

• A scene in town, fairly capturing the ambiguity of the season.  Magnolia in full blossom, trees alongside seemingly completely dormant.  Come along the same path tomorrow or in a few days, and the magnolia may be fading rapidly, any one of the companion trees fully leafed.   The rhododendron in the lower right is just waiting for the right trigger.  The sunlight is brilliant and energetic, the temperature well above freezing, but nonetheless this spring has been colder than normal, and everything seems much behind schedule.
• The insistent and ongoing transformation is pure magic.  By that, I mean it happens when I am distracted and looking away.  I stare all day at a tulip in the back yard _ a big unopened green bud on a long stem _ and nothing at all seems to be happening.  I look away for a while, trying to find more pleasant views or accomplish some chore or go to sleep, and when I look again it is a magnificent red.  Poof.  We think of the vegetable world as slow and deliberate, but at this time of year the processes may be zipping along faster than we are.  Especially, I admit, if you are my age.

Tuesday-

• Appropriately for the theme, this week opens with a tremendous rainstorm, including midnight thunder and lightning and downpours seemingly capable of drowning anyone walking through them.  Nature seems all the more amazing for not only coming back from incredibly deep cold and suffocating snow cover, but also for brushing off heavy winds and driving water.  Just part of the normal. 
• Hard to say if this is extreme because of climate change, or really if historically it is extreme at all.  Certainly individual yardsticks have been set recently, I will no longer say “I remember the snows of ‘77” _  Superstorm Sandy, the snows of 2014, and the cold of 2015 are everyone’s reference points.  This day is not nearly on that scale.  Since I am dry and warm and have nowhere in particular to go it is actually quite entertaining, and I have enjoyed watching sheets of rain and wind sweep across the bay.

Monday-

• This week resembles that astounding moment in the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy opens the door and the movie suddenly transmutes from sepia to oversaturated brilliant color.  Now the sky becomes painfully blue, the grass a legendary green, the willow leaves sharply etched.  True, the treeline remains brown and bare, but close examination reveals that each tree will soon burst into full foliage.  Along the ground, various shrubs are preparing for spectacular display.  There are even little munchkins _ in the form of butterflies and bumblebees _ hesitantly venturing out, and just a hint of wicked monkeys _ mosquitoes and ticks_ in the not too distant future.
• We are told about the brains of dolphins and dogs and the consciousnesses of birds and rats.  I have sympathy, for animals are life, and more intelligent animals are close relatives, and we are all united against a cold and uncaring universe of rocky planets and suns and deep space.  But dogs do not make movies nor write books and blogs, dolphins create no extended irrelevant metaphors to amuse themselves, rats are not critics of the literary efforts of their peers.  In addition to feeling oneness with all life, we must also appreciate our own uniqueness and the special gifts that our immense and unlikely knowledge of existence has given us each moment.

Springinging

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Sunday-

• Blur the details a bit and this could model a nice abstract canvas.  Very warm day as various brilliant components of landscape start to detonate like fireworks.  Forsythia and daffodils now, tulips and magnolias starting, azaleas and cherries soon to come.  Each glance around becomes an enchanted gaze.
• I spent the day in the yard, not even drifting the block or so down to the water, catching up on some outside chores and enjoying our own proper flowers and bushes,  each with a story to tell in remembrance of our lives.  Breaking a rigid schedule once in a while for good cause is the right thing to do.  Discovering fiddleheads emerging from leafy detritus in my backyard should be just as worthwhile as seeking something exotic along a more distant shore.   

Saturday-

• April is proverbially filled with showers.  A cloudy misty day has its own loveliness, especially now that the forsythia adds a soft golden glow to the already glistening greens of lawn and young weeds.  People travel far to look for such scenes, Ireland is often mentioned.  For those with eyes and a bit of imagination, local scenes like this have most of the charm of distant places.  Even better, intimate knowledge of them day by day infuses the experience with the depth of linked knowledge.
• Chinese brush painters could have created fine scrolls of this, Japanese wood block artists would have added a figure or two for effect, impressionists would have replicated the glow.  In my own poor way, I once tried to capture the feeling.  But the awesome fact is that art and photography are poor substitutes for standing here, listening to nature all around, feeling the universe flowing everywhere, and realizing that this whole immense landscape is unique to me this moment. It is only there because I take the time to pause and enjoy and remember.

Friday-

• Nothing at all subtle about this patch of celandine covering part of an entire hillside.  An invasive and somewhat aggressive weed with brilliant crisp yellow flowers and shiny emerald leaves is even planted on purpose sometimes.  Like ragweed, it seems quite happy in mostly desolate spots where not much else can make a go of it.
• Microclimates and tiny environmental zones are extremely noticeable this time of year.  A few degrees tilt towards the sun, a bend to shelter from the north wind, a boggy low ground or simply an inland valley with raised temperatures will show entirely different stretches of plants.  Forsythia blooms here but not there, ferns have emerged there but not here.  Even if the difference is only a few days, I can often walk through several such places in an hour, marveling at the variety.

Thursday-

• Discovering hidden tiny surprises is one of the joys of early spring.  Here we have a very small plant which is probably a mint, all with miniscule purple flowers resembling orchids.  To properly appreciate it requires an ant’s-eye view.  A casual glance across the sprouting coarse grass in this weedy patch would have ignored it entirely.  For a week or so, such marvels are ubiquitous.
• In such small details, I find encapsulated the contradictions of the age.  Each small flowering plant (a weed, truly) is a miraculous evolutionary survivor, with a pedigree as long as my own.  Yet it is a footnote to history, environment, climate, and development.  Well, in that, we are even closer kin.  Nobody will fight to save it in its fragile magnificence, nor will it make it into some coffee table book to make wealthy people feel they are paying attention to nature, but its individual struggle is just as awesome as that of any rain forest or tropical reef.  We must save the big things, of course, but we must remember we do so to preserve the small.

Wednesday-

• Like some witch’s cottage tucked almost invisibly amongst a grove of trees, the old spring house at Coindre Hall (traditionally before refrigeration cheese and butter and milk could be kept fresh here with the cold running water in a relatively insulated space) squats gently above bursting clumps of dark green garlic.  Its walls, like all abandoned walls, have not escaped the urge of people to prove they exist by making marks on the universe.  This is a misty, gentle, warm day with birds almost deafening in massive symphony as they rush to finish mating and build nests.
• I felt tired, and achy, and almost didn’t make it over here.  There was so much to do at home.  Some mornings are like that, when I suddenly realize I cannot possibly do all I think I must.  In this case, I figured I should really accomplish the one task I least felt like, and that proved to be the right choice.  One of those strange moments that are far more beautiful in totality than any specific element could ever indicate _ if I went on for pages and pages I could never explain why it felt so perfect.   

Tuesday-

• These pussy willows are already going to seed, almost shocking given the sparseness of other visible activity.  But hidden processes are going on everywhere now _ under the water, through the water becoming murky as algae reactivate, under the ground where ants and termites and microbes and spores and fungi are busily keeping the planet alive, and everywhere above where mosses have started into their fruiting cycle as well.  There are so many humble unseen processes on which the biosphere is dependent, and many are hardly known.
• The damage we have done to the planet in the last few centuries may be reversible, but that is hard to tell since so much of it we are not aware of.  The biosphere is mighty and flexible and resilient, but we have drenched large areas in poisons and contaminated the oceans with toxins, not to mention whatever effects may come from the gasses and industrial chemicals we have spewed into the atmosphere.  Our influence may be overstated _ I hope it is _ but the plain fact is that _ like underground insects, moss spores, and harbor algae _ we are all ignorant of what once was and what should be.  At least we should try to be conscious of what there is now.

Monday-

• With highs near sixty and lows near forty each day for a week, a grand transformation is underway.  Definitively now the browns are giving way to blushes and shouts of color, spots and patches to begin with, cascading until becoming the dominant features of the landscape.  Miraculous rebirth so astounding that its novelty catches attention, even the most unobservant get caught up in the general excitement.   
• Diligently seeking subtle signs of any growth for weeks now, I suddenly find myself overwhelmed by choice.  Life is once again everywhere,  charging forth with new banners almost each hour, regardless of outside conditions.  Almost by definition, any picture I take now has elements of convention.  I promise not to complain.

Fresh Scenes

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Sunday-

• April often looks gorgeous, but retains bite in frequent breezes.  Unwary folks take the day at face value and dress as if it were nearly summer, walk a while soaking up welcome sunbeams, then miserably fight their way back upwind, chilled to the bone.  Improbable pockets of warmth or pleasant cool embedded in a basically cold situation add to the difficulties.  Meanwhile, vegetation ignores everything except the expanded light and as long as temperatures remain above freezing vigorously continues its rampant path.  Animals have their own protections, even those birds now migrating through from warmer places.
• I’ve learned, gradually, to overdress.  It’s hard not to be seduced by sunshine, dragged onward by clear air and sparking waves, feeling an inner spring in my step as I am also energized by the season.  But, at my age, prudence wins and this day I wear a heavy jacket and light gloves.  Looking like the ancient peasant I have become, I trundle along the road and greet joggers, pedestrians, and those walking their dogs in various states of what I consider undress.  Ah, the follies of the younger generation!

Saturday-

• Almost desperate hope that chilled morning fog represents not only a transition from standing cold front to incoming warm one, but also that it signifies the final departure of a winter that has long overstayed its welcome.  Somewhere else, green leaves are glistening in dew and cherry blossoms gently waft on the breeze.  Somewhere else lovers stroll beneath bright warm skies gazing at profusions of flowers bursting from the ground.  Except for constant birdsong, here only the grass seems to have any notion of ongoing spring.
• Even my philosophy of accepting each day as it comes sometimes is tested.  Sure, the fog is lovely in its own way, the chilled morning has its own charm, there is something wonderful about this mysterious world.  But enough is enough.  I am so easily thrown into confusion by such minor things, how will I deal with the greater tragedies of life inevitably to arrive?  Probably as I often have, by ignoring them until the last minute.  Then, somehow, just get through and try to remember pleasantly even the cold mists I have experienced.

Friday-

• Wintry stasis this week, as the temperature has never left the thirties while precipitation has been constant, the north wind has blown unrelentingly, and the sun never broke through a heavy overcast.  Vegetation kept slowly emerging, birds kept appearing more frequently and noisily.  This Andromeda bush in front of the living room finally bloomed.
• Sometimes it may seem I am partial to “native” species and “original” landscapes.  But I am not nearly so naïve as not to accept the beauty of imports like azaleas and tulips as well.  I try to enjoy what actually exists, however created, no matter what it replaced.  Life is constant change, our aesthetics must recognize that reality.  By the same token, weather like this is not cause for grand discontent, whatever we may expect, whatever paper claims is “normal.”  Reality is each moment, however much we may wish it differently, and our spiritual test is to appreciate that we are living through it.

Thursday-

• Still photographs may give the impression that this harbor is a quiet refuge from the bustle of civilization, but it is as noisy as anywhere else.  Cars, hammers, construction, leaf blowers, sirens all pierce the air.  Here the town dock is being rebuilt, pile drivers jamming in bulkheads.  Huntington was founded in 1653, only twenty-odd years after the Pilgrims, and has always been a busy place.  Halesite has always been the town port, where the deep water ended and marsh began.  Periodically, everywhere along a tidal waterfront must be renewed or it falls into permanent unusable decay.
• One of the glories of our culture is that we can realistically appreciate our past.  Ignorant folk may glorify or denigrate what went before _ aborigines, colonists, farmers, suburban developers _ but all of them were people like us, happiness, pain, loss, and gain.  We are fortunate to have records here _ massive original town documents carefully preserved, eventually including photographs almost from the time photography first became available.  I love being able to look at a site like this and see not only the pilings and rocks but the layers of shellfish-based native settlements, lumber and local pottery and fish being shipped out by sailing vessels, clams and recreational use now, Nathan Hale, tidal mills, old trolley line, “town gas” production, and even, in my own residence, an odd succession of mostly terrible bars and restaurants.

Wednesday-

• Just over a week or so ago, this hillside contained a marvelous tracery of white lines sparkling in sunlight, the result of a late snowfall.  At the time there was no hint of green.  Now the brambles are filling with color, and a close inspection will show buds beginning to burst out of each thorn-studded vine.   A week further on, the full transition will be underway as this patch of earth becomes impenetrable except to birds and small animals.  Soon the only brown to be seen will be tree trunks standing and fallen.
• Not a nicely composed picture, I know.  Just a wall of stuff.  Really, isn’t this how we see most of the world, most of the time?  A jumbled painted canvas, often in our way, something we just have to chart our way through to get where we are going?  When I walk, I have time to regard it otherwise, but otherwise I am no different.  The frozen nature of a photograph or painting, its usual attempt to focus attention where we often do not, is one of the main attractions of the medium.

Tuesday-

• If there is not, there should be a paint hue named “April Green.”  New growth has a peculiar brilliant color that strikes through the existing soft patinas of old sienna and umber.   A complementary shade would be “April Red” for the strong dark blush of new buds and vines beginning rejuvenation.  Whole hillsides are now subtly becoming cast in those two filters, a transformation easy to miss until it is suddenly overwhelming.
• Noticing such things has always been a primary value of sketching or painting as a hobby.  Nowadays, the more impatient culture uses cameras, of course, and I also find that a useful reason to look more closely at what I otherwise fail to see.  What is often missed is that photography, like most arts, is a meditative tool for the user.  That aspect ought not be lost in our mad dash to share everything in lottery hopes of becoming rich and famous.

Monday-

• Like life itself, language contains beautiful ambiguities.  A word is defined by context much as behavior is modified by habitat.  Fresh can mean cold, pure, presumptuous, unsalted, new, clean.  April is all those things, and as the poem says, contains more than a tinge of cruelty.  Momentous transitions are occurring, the world is constantly renewed and for all the hope of lying on the grass and watching clouds roll by, the air is often bitterly chill and the wind strips off body heat.
• Those of us living in such climates claim to enjoy the challenge and opportunities.  We like being invigorated, we say, unlike those who live in places warm and green all year round.  We find  lessons and interest in the thousand little changes each day _ I often find I can hardly keep up with so many so often _ then greening of the briars, the constant bulb blooms, the swelling and uncurling buds, the parade of waterfowl, the mating antics of creatures great and small, not to mention the first hints of insects.  The sky here is pure blue, awaiting the certain rains which may fall for the next few days, more of what our fresh spring will inevitably deliver.

Emergence

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Sunday-

• Showdrops in leftover leaves, a couple selected from large clumps growing on the bluffs on the east shore.  Beyond the bare vine network brilliant blue sky promises a lovely day.  But this morning, the sun and wind are involved in a classic struggle recalling the old fable.  Where the sun shines and the wind is blocked, hats and gloves come off, where the wind howls and the sun is shaded, covering head and hands is hardly enough.  Looks beautiful, no matter what.
• I am easily pleased for a little while, then hope for better.  Twenty degrees warmer than a week ago is wonderful, ten degrees more would be far more delightful.  A snowdrop is fine, but where are the daffodils?  And when all that happens, in due course, my insatiable desires will continue to elevate unabated.  Kind of a curse, but one that forces me to always appreciate the infinite varieties of our world.

Saturday-

• Sap rising, leaves unfurling on honeysuckle on the fence overlooking the inlet.  Most of the tangle remains blasted and brown, but underneath the basic patterns and essentials remain, the spark survives, and miracles of near-resurrection occur once again.  Every bit of new growth after such a long dormancy is a wonder and cause for rejoicing.
• All of this affects my spirit tremendously.  Some philosophies claim we should remain detached, take all as it is, be unaffected by the ebb and flow of event and circumstances.  Once in a while I try such an approach, and then reject it.  It doesn't fit my own tides and emotions.  I love spring, exalt in summer , savor autumn and endure winter.  Being willing to let my spirit flow with sun and rain, cold and heat, calm and storm, bloom and blast _ ah, that is a joy of being conscious.

Friday-

• At Hecksher park, turtles climb out of the pond to sun themselves on the banks of a few islands or swim slowly about, heads in the air.  This one seems to be resting in a small stream, but as it never moved it’s hard to tell if it is really resting or dead.  Seems a tragedy to make it through such a difficult winter, only to miss the spring, even for a turtle.  Otherwise, except for the happy screams of herds of young children at the playground, only the warmer temperature gives strong hints that the season is finally progressing.
• There are not many animals in my photos.  I don’t pretend to be a photographer, and purposely use lower grade equipment, slow shutter speed, low resolution shots.  That’s unfashionable _ I’ve read reviews of new cell phone cameras where a young woman describes capabilities with all the tenderness, excitement, anticipation, and sheer lust more appropriate to a lover.  Some even here have telescopic lenses the length of rifles.  For me, another minor tool, a sketch rather than a finished artwork, and usually incapable of capturing wildlife.  Able to snap shots of turtles, however, especially if they are not alive.

Thursday-

• In a forlorn marsh formed by a tiny brook that is more of a drainage ditch, in a forgotten back woodlot at Mill Dam Park, this reliable grouping of skunk cabbage is always fully in bloom by now.  Being endothermic (generating its own heat) its flowers are only slightly affected by yearly variations in snow and cold.  At least enough early insects are around to have guaranteed its survival _ and it is almost everywhere,  particularly in places where people do not even want to walk.  An overlooked native wildflower holding out against human encroachment on own terms.
• I hope that such survival means other species will also make it through this epoch.  We pave our cities and fill suburbs with strange exotica and carry invasive disruptions floral and animal throughout the world.  Farmlands have become vast barren chemical monocultures.  Wildlands and parks set aside are isolated and often on land that nobody wants for anything else, lacking the niches necessary to support any variety.  Yet skunk cabbage is still doing well, a harbinger of spring, and a few other plants and animals seem to be creeping back into our worlds.  I don’t give this hope much percentage of success, mind you, but it is at least possible.

Wednesday-

• April arrives looking pretty much as March did.  The evergreens are bright and cheerful, but the only other real sight of green is this verdant scum on the pond at Coindre Hall.  Most years it hasn’t shown up until much later, perhaps the underground water supply is warmer than usual.  It does provide an interesting aesthetic harmony with the browns of the reeds and weeds.  Nature always surprising and always correct in its artistic judgement.
• Scum is life as much as we are.  An awful lot of our genes are shared, and we require almost exactly the same environmental conditions.  Most of us have grown taught that we must be all that we can be, do all that we can do, that only being excellent counts.  I wonder, sometimes, if being scum doesn’t count too.  Not that I want to be scum, nor encourage you to strive for it, but I believe a human life without fantastic recognized achievements is just as meaningful in experience and being as that of any of those exalted by historians and publicists.  We are each one of nature’s masterpieces.

Tuesday-

• As the snow melts away, revealing sprouting weeds and greening shoots with a flower here or there, other objects emerge.  Some trash was here before the winter snows, but a lot of it gets layered on between snowfalls, and remains hidden for months.  Some artists might find in all this some kind of aesthetic vision.
• Not me, however.  Garbage is garbage.  I admit that I have been pleasantly surprised this year that the actual amount is a lot less than I expected.  I suppose the deep cold and constant precipitation made everyone keep their car windows shut tightly, so less opportunity to litter.  Probably less pedestrians as well, certainly nobody on bicycles.  All will now revert to form, and it will be a race between new growth and new human detritus.

Monday-

• First flowers, first honors.  This clump by the harbor always seems to manage to push up yellow buds before other crocuses in more favored locations.  Old leaves and remnants of last year’s flowers lie all around, soon to be cleaned up by the caretaker in a fit of spring fever.  Certainly a cheery sight, on a cold day with overnight snow yet again.
• Crocuses are imported, but pretty well adapted and naturalized.  Since studying evolution, I never saw nature again as I did when I was a young child.  Even opening early is a ploy in survival and competition, gentle though it may seem.  Survival is not all red tooth and claw, sometimes it is being first, or even waiting until last, or a faint color difference, or basic luck in where you happen to be.  Not unlike our lives.