Brush Strokes & Shutter-Clicks

Adventures of a creative empath - nature, ocean, poetry

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I noticed this evening the Sun setting further south once more. Just a week or so and I'll not be able to see it setting from the lock here again until next May. The wheel of the year is surely turning. All the different green hues of Spring are merging into the same tone and the birds are quieter. This is my opposite to Imbolc on February the 1st, the "quickening" of the year, and I can say for definite that living somewhere where I can fix some sort of horizon from the house to track the Sun's movement has made these times more immediately noticeable to me. It's not really til Lammas / Lughnasadh on August 1st that the slowness of Summer ends but I can feel it; I felt it this evening

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Golden times at Crinan Harbour at the end of June.

[julesofnature]

I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.

Richard Nelson (via julesofnature)

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May flowers

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Shore Cottage at Crinan Harbour. May 2020

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Crepuscular rays at Crinan - May 2020

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Bannatyne Cottage over the canal with a very strange sky at the end of the day. 

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May 2020

So lucky to have this walk from the front door.

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Two photos taken (top - Crinan Ferry start of June / bottom - Crinan Harbour end of May) when folk began venturing out in small groups, or gathering with social distancing. Like taking the first tentative steps back out into the world. 

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We look back, I think, towards times when we were not looking back. We are nostalgic for the absence of nostalgia. We long for those moments when we were not longing for what we could not have. We are restless to find rest. At home, beneath skies that I have known for most of my life, I still think of other places where I have lived ... and I feel an aching, unquenchable homesickness. I think of all that cannot be brought back - a storm of pleasures, gone - and I curse my memories, just as I curse the lack of them.

Malachy Tallack, on nostalgia, from his book 60°N

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8th July and a repeat of the walk to the sea along the canal, but this time with clouds, and what clouds they were. The oblique rays of the sun cast a gilt-edged light onto the lumps and bumps of the coast around Crinan Ferry, and on beautiful Eilean Glas. 

I didn’t have company this time apart from Hector, who doesn’t really enjoy just stopping and staring at things, so I watched as long as he would allow me to, and the sky put on its dramatic show. Sometimes I feel life could be further improved if dogs appreciated aesthetics beyond their noses!

There is an unfortunate epilogue to this entry. The day after these pictures were taken (yesterday), I got flustered after a walk through very tall bracken, in exactly the sort of place where ticks like to linger, waiting for passers by, be they four or two-legged, to latch onto and bite, and in all likelihood infect with the horrible Lyme Disease. In short, I wanted to frisk both myself and Hector as well as I could before we started back in the car, so I popped my phone on the car roof. And forgot about it. And drove off. Once I’d realised it wasn’t in my possession, around half an hour had passed. It wasn’t in the car park, so I back tracked on foot for over half a mile, scanning the undergrowth and the road. I came across a series of clues: an unused book of stamps, some ferry tickets, business cards .... my bank card (relief) ... and then my terribly squished and undeniably dead phone. :-( 

So, I feel my poor phone went out in a blaze of glory. It served me very well over the past two years, and I’m just so sorry I didn’t look after it better. 

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7th July and not a cloud in the sky. I’d had a really crummy day and not felt myself at all despite making time to read a book and meet someone new on my dog walk. So when my friend Ali messaged me to give me two options for the evening a) a programme on BBC ALBA about Tiree b) a walk to watch the sun set, I chose the latter. 

It was a bit midgey, but not so bad once we got to the sea, just in time to see the Sun itself, before, in the blink of an eye, it disappeared behind the island of Scarba. So there we sat, with Hector, talking nonsense and just looking at how beautiful it all is, and reflecting on how it constantly changes. We sat until past 11pm, and the sky was still orange and blue well past midnight. 

I texted my friend later that night to thank her for turning my day around. Friends can be so good at that!

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This was an unexpected sunset at nearby Crinan Ferry. It had been raining all day long, and Hector was not impressed, so when it stopped, even though it was pretty late, we took the 5 minute journey over to the other side of Loch Crinan. It was cool, breezy, and there were no midges, and as the sun set to the West, the Full Moon rose in the Easterly sky. Curlews called and Oystercatchers had a sing before settling down to roost. Hector also had a near-midnight paddle. It was all the more magical for its being so unexpected. 

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More from the sea lock at the end of the canal. 

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The huge majority of my lockdown walks from the house have naturally been along the canal, but really, there is so much sea and sky that it is never the same experience twice, for which I am very grateful. 

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Process of a watercolour and inktense-blocks illustration I made this afternoon. Hector loves peering into the water at the seaweed from this little stone jetty at Crinan. This is the very end of the canal I live by, where there is a sea-lock into the Sound of Jura. 

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Another piece of art I made last week. There are swallows nesting in the roof of Bannatyne Cottage across the canal, and because it’s West Coast Scotland and is SO midgey, the swallows and housemartins wheel around the lock and do aerial handbrake turns!