practicing with the new camera lens, still on a steep learning curve…

Nature in her gaudiest dress made a sudden dramatic though brief appearance on the world’s stage this morning. Hastily snapped between 7:48 and 7:55 a.m. at the front door as I was leaving the house and then standing at the bus stop…

Nor dim nor red, like God’s own head,
The glorious Sun uprist.
– Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Ever since I remember, I’ve been captivated by little burbly creeks, especially when they seem to appear where none were before, by the water dancing over rocks and soil, urgently, ever forward, downwards, forming little waterfalls, emerging out of hidden banks or boulders, then creating rivulets in the sand as it hurries down to the sea.

As I thought of this today, I kept trying to recall a poem I’d known ages ago, perhaps by Tennyson whom I loved in those long ago high school poetry classes. It kept niggling at me all afternoon so when my husband came home from work, I asked if he remembered something like that. Immediately he started to recite the first two lines:

Why hurry, little river,

  Why hurry to the sea?

A little research rewarded us with a poem called The River but surprised us that it’s not by Tennyson, but by a Canadian poet Frederick George Scott (1861-1944). Here is the first stanza:

Why hurry, little river,
  
Why hurry to the sea?

There is nothing there to do

But to sink into the blue
  
And all forgotten be.

There is nothing on that shore

But the tides for evermore,

And the faint and far-off line

Where the winds across the brine

For ever, ever roam

And never find a home.


7:30 a.m. this morning, on the solarium skylights

then later a little playing with photoshop….

compare with frost fractals and first frost