{Standing beneath the row of peppercorns, the view before me is splendid.}
As Louise now wends her way home from a trip to her family’s rural property across the border in New South Wales, I am thinking of home and all it means. The pets in her absence have largely refused to eat and have retreated into some sort of half-awake slumber. They are waiting for her to return. They are in limbo. And they are proof to me that home is where the heart is. Thank heavens it was only a fleeting trip away with her parents as the pets are languishing and we are all of us weary from sleeping with one eye open. Terrific creatures of habit, it seems. And big scaredy-cats. (La fifa fa novanta (1948))
This is a little of what Louise has seen these days of late, shared on instagram. Escaping the habits of the mind, and revealing in space, all that space. These iPhone snatches remind me of Ruskin bottling the sky in his studies of Cloud Beauty (1857).
November 1st: A vermilion morning, all waves of soft scarlet, sharp at the edge, and graduated to purple. Grey scud moving slowly beneath it from the south-west, heaps of grey cumuli — between the scud and cirrus — at horizon. It issued in an exquisite day ... All purple and blue in distance, and misty sunshine near on the trees, and green fields. Very green they are — the fields, that is; and the trees hardly yet touched on the Norwood western hillside with autumn colour. Note the exquisite effect of the golden leaves scattered on the blue sky, and the horse-chestnut, thin and small, dark against them in stars.
November 3rd: Dawn purple, flushed, delicate. bank of grey cloud, heavy at six. Then the lighted purple cloud showing through it, open sky of dull yellow above — all grey, and darker scud going across it obliquely, from the south-west — moving fast, yet never stirring from its place, at last melting away. it expands into a sky of brassy flaked light on grey — passes away into grey morning.
(Edward Tyas Cook, The Life of John Ruskin: Volume 1; Volumes 1819-1860)
{Late morning's view.}
{A trip of goats renders the scene complete.}
{Nearby, a Willie Wagtail serenades his reflection in a puddle.}
{Field notes gathered in sketchbook 7am: Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Long-billed Corella, Yellow-tailed Black-cockatoo, Kookaburra, Galah, Willie Wagtail, Magpie}
{Perfecting the art of the toolshed fossick.}
{Have wheels, will travel. At terrific speed.}
{Squint and you can see goats in the distance.}
{All this I will miss.}
{"When I consider ... the small space I occupy." Pascal}
{Homeward!}
Meanwhile...
+ The Pointe Shoe Makers of Hackney, Spitalfields Life
+ Omar's featherd dreams
+ A pair of Red-rumped Parrots
+ An exciting new project in the wings, le projet d'amour
