The skies have been blue over Tillypronie, and a pale frost hard on the ground. Today there is the lightest dusting of snow, like icing sugar, but the dark earth is still visible below. Yesterday I walked down to the river, which runs deep and swift, filled with last week's torrents of rain; and then to the frozen loch, where last summer's lilies lie beneath the ice, their leaves motionless, as if held in time like Sleeping Beauty in a glass casket; and in the garden the berries are bright as a fairy tale...
Up here in the hills, it is good to feel one's small place in a vast landscape; to feel a true sense of perspective, where mountains are so much greater than ourselves.
9 comments:
"to feel a true sense of perspective, where mountains are so much greater than ourselves." What a superb thought- just by looking at those wonderful photos I know what you mean. Here the sun strikes down on us the sea is blue and the ocean is vast. We spent Xmas day on the beach and I too felt like a tiny speck in the universe. May 2013 be a year of wondrous things.
looks pure bliss -
Merry Christmas Justine. Thank you for your poetic words and imagery. It is wonderful to experience the 12 holy nights of Christmas through nature. Observations of the natural world always lead to deep inner experience and reconnection to a greater whole.
Happy Christmas to all on this site. Did we all get books for Christmas and were they what we wanted? I did - eight volumes sitting enticingly on the coffee table. Currently reading "Wedlock" - the story of Georgian Britain's worst husband! (of the Countess of Strathmore) and some serendipity with your Scottish connections, Justine, as they were the Bowes-Lyons of Glamis.
I will be reading Sally Vickers new novel next - The Cleaner of Chartres.
that's what I need........ a little perspective!!
Thank you for the lovely words and pictures. Happy new year Everyone.
Happy new year, belatedly, to everyone, and thank you, as always, for your lovely comments. Like Jaywalker, I am looking forward to Sally Vickers' new novel... and intrigued by the sound of Wedlock.
Thank goodness, I've actually had time to catch up on some reading over the Christmas holidays -- including Maggie O'Farrell's new novel (out next month), which is BRILLIANT. And then an old novel, which I've been meaning to read for ages: Sarah Waters' 'Affinity', which is also tremendously compelling. Both very different, even though each writer is sometimes tagged with labels like 'domestic gothic'... Maggie's book is set in 1976, during the long heatwave of that summer, and I do recommend it to everyone. I'm sure many of you will have already read 'Affinity', but if not, it's a darker tale, spun in the appalling landscape of a Victorian prison, with a spiritualist confined within its dark walls...
I've finished Wedlock and was flabbergasted by it. If it were ever made into a film, which it probably should be, people would barely believe it was fact. I also learnt a lot about Georgian domestic life, including constant childbearing. Mary Eleanor Lyons had a significant effect on Georgian notions of divorce and marital cruelty which tends to have been forgotten.
I am half way through The Cleaner of Chartres (Sally Vickers) and thoroughly enjoying it. I read Affinity last year and was both intrigued and horrified.
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