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Fragments from Floyd

By Posted on Posted in education, nature 1 Comment

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll post short entries from the observations, images and thoughts that have come from two back-to-back early September visits to a local walking trail called “the Dodd Creek Trail.” In a few weeks, you can walk the trail with me and Jane Cundiff by way of a video narrative, filmed on September 8 by Citizens Coop (thank you Hari and Fox) and to become a small part of SustainFloyd’s 2020 Digital EcoFair in mid-November. The existence of this …

Dodd Creek Trail: Getting There Read more »

By Posted on Posted in Outdoors, PhotoImage 2 Comments

Ah yes. Now I remember. Life in the cloud. It was mysterious and eerie and the relentless fog lent a kind of drama to the aloneness that first year in Floyd County living, just me and the cat, on Walnut Knob, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I especially remember the disembodied language of a flock of Ravens roosting in the invisible trees a few hundred feet into the milky distance. This morning, it is the crows, in the same opaque beyond that ear …

Life in The Cloud Read more »

By Posted on Posted in education, Environment 2 Comments

I have always been fascinated by weather. The atmosphere we experience brings the physics of the cosmos up close and personal and into our daily lives, for good or ill. And climate is just weather writ large, over more geography and across decades and kiloyears. But as humans whose experience of climate spans such an eye-blink tiny window into planetary variability, we tend to lose sight of the wild extremes that fall well out of the bounds of extremes, even in our own age’s …

California: Building an ARK Read more »

By Posted on Posted in nature, PhotoImage 2 Comments

We had 3 widely-spaced friends (read that as you will) over for a porch visit yesterday evening to become reacquainted as the good friends we had been before covid. And what we rediscovered was how interesting ORDINARY used to be, full of simple pleasures. As we sat and chatted, a deer approached within 30 feet of the porch and positioned herself under our one apple tree. She is a regular there. She will be back. So we named her Gala. She’s back this morning, …

Simple Pleasures Read more »

By Posted on Posted in nature, PhotoImage, Reflections No Comments

When is the last time you stretched out on your back under a sky full of clouds? Your mind literally cannot help but make sense of the seemingly random balloonings or smears or pulled threads of clouds. It is what minds do—create order from patterns that our eye and mind can’t help but look for. Seeing shapes in billowing clouds or ceiling tiles was once thought to be a kind of madness. But on looking again at pareidolia, it just may have something to …

On Seeing Things Read more »