online: 5 june 2011 modified: 4 june 2011 4 june 2011 finality and freshness
pond 1 on Hampstead Heath
...cool east wind after hot sunny day of clear sky with a few blue-grey and pink clouds... feeling as calm within as is the sky... after days of adapting to the changing prospect... of life on earth and in the universe...
...the water surface shimmers in the breeze as it reflects the pale blue sky as if it were white... and a low-flying jumbo jet climbs and turns northwards over the heath... a solitary bird (surely a heron) stands on the bird raft as it gazes into the water...
...this spot (the scene of many of these notes) is as familiar to me as is any other place... on the heath or elsewhere... and i like it more and more... as perhaps do others... one's liking for particular places is i think a vital aspect of one's life...
...which reminds me of Traeth Maelgwyn*... the tidal beach or flatland amongst the sand dunes at Ynyslas in Wales... a place i've often thought of as my favourite spot in the world... not so much for the sands as for the whole estuary... and the surrounding hills... and its history...
...however the pupose of these notes is not to revive memories but to share otherwise unnoticed aspects of the present... in and around a city forest... as typical conjunctions of industrial nature...
...when i came to sit here in the breeze i was alone... but now there is a picnic of about 10 men and women (on rugs and table cloths) nearby... despite the wind and approaching darkness... as we all, yes all, move in our separate ways towards whatever life emerges from our jointly disjointed culture... and from the whole that no one can completely predict or comprehend...
...dark shadows now on pond and under trees as coots and humans make sounds in throats and beaks and mouths... the voices of the world that unite or separate the perhaps too many of us...
....darkness approaches...
...returning now on a brand-new train... with modernised stations on newly-laid track and signals and overhead power cables... i enjoy this sense of newness... and careful redesigning... enjoying the finality and freshness of things well done (both railway and the photographs below)!
*Traeth Maelgwyn... neutral ground on which Prince Maelgwyn ap Rhys (1170 to 1231 A.D.) is said to have met other princes to negotiate peace between North and South Wales... photographs by Nigel Brown for Geograph (an archive of photographs of every map square in Britain and Ireland... his photographs and the whole collection are to me entrancing... a joy of the internet and of digital photography... for details of copyright and Creative Commons please click within the Geograph website)
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