It’s that time of year for snow–mid-November, northern hemisphere, in highlands ski country, though the weather is not quite ready to play.
…but we can fix that…fire up the snow machines!
First Snow–not quite
Tag Archives: Berner Oberland
Autumn Mysteries Revealed…
…in the mountains…in one hour.
Autumn leaves are like forty years of a happy marriage.
The future is always unseen, uncertain, filled with anxiety.
Died and gone to heaven–all is clear.
These images revealed themselves over 15 minutes during an 800 meter climb on a cogwheel train in the Bernese Oberland Swiss Alps.
Mountains, civilized? Ha!
Mountains, civilized? Ha!
Not these behemoths!
Since written history and before, the Bernese Oberlands have frightened and inspired humans, including Goethe, Byron, Hesse, Mann, Strauss, Schiller, Mendelssohn, Doyle, Haller, Hodler, Savrasov, Koenig, Bierstadt, Wolf, Fearnley…the list goes on and on…and thousands of others who have followed their footsteps.
It is that human consensus which has inspired local people, evolving from agricultural dependency into the modern world, to build technically complex, electrically powered, narrow gauge cogwheel trains up the Bernese Oberlands mountain slopes to what is known today in the Swiss Alps as the Top of Europe.
So, now, humans climb these incredibly steep slopes, sitting on padded seats, with central heating, enjoying visual delights through floor to ceiling polarized glass windows–civilized access to the not nearly civilized mountains.
Access–maybe just a tiny bit civilized.
Pop-Up City Centers
…Pop-Up City Center…
I slept well. I dreamt deep.
When I opened my eyes…it was hard to focus…near and far…both fuzzy. Then the foreground cleared and I could see in the distance…across the broad green pastures…I saw the city center.
It had developed over time, drawing resources and energy from the sun, the earth and water–all the while transforming those flows into new forms, new shelters.
The shelters were populated by all diversities of living entities with energy flows, day after day, night after night, until…until…like a Roman settlement in North Africa, they just no longer could sustain neither the energy flows, nor the diversities of living entities.
And the next day, the sun rose; and I was home before the sun set.
Irish Roots
…Irish roots work magic in the forest…
I walked through the forest. Neither the date, nor the day mattered. It was in the north. It was in the mountains. Spruce forest. Densely packed, tall trees, more than 100 feet each.
I walked a ridge in that forest. The canopy sheltered. I wasn’t cold. Somewhere, way up there, was sun. Thin, narrow, fractured beams twinkled and sparkled near my feet.
Delicate cloud edges whisped. They came close…on the edges of forming or dissipating or both…here and there…from time to time.
I was tired from walking and climbing. I looked for a place to sit. My Irish roots have always worked magic for me in forests. So it was today when I was invited to sit down and take the shelter of a mushroom.
The ground was soft and the mushroom stem gently molded itself to my spine and rib cage. I was comfortable. My breathing became easy. It slowed. The rhythm eased my eyelids shut.
Can’t find my way home
The various clouds appear, disappear, move and change at many different speeds simultaneously–and today they hid the giants of Jungfrau, Monch and Eiger–normally visible in this frame.
I am working on a story, The Orient Express, whose beginning and dénouement occur in the mountains surrounding Mürren in Switzerland.
This landscape inspires me because its very presence is mysterious–a consuming presence that forces me to interact with an elusive and overwhelming mystery…without beginning, without end…
Landscapes such as this are beyond my words.
…wish you were here…
Trance–not music…or musical ride into trance?
The yodeling exuded the essence of all music…humans, without words, communicating from, and to, some magical landscape node. The yodeling had freedom, it had discipline, it had beauty and it conveyed, at the same time, a pleasant, almost jolly reverence, and an aura of relaxation.
Listening to music is a linear experience, just like walking though a garden, a landscape. Music and beauty. Gardens and beauty. Portals to transcendence. There has to be a linkage. Timeless experiences. Trance? Yodeler trance?
He stood up, stretched, decided to take a walk outside back down toward the center of town. The evening air was sharp and cool. It was quiet, Wednesday near 9PM, really quiet. Grindelwald was at the top end of the valley. No through automobile traffic. He paused, listened…maybe he could hear the Lutschine River, about two hundred or so meters down hill, in the valley bottom. When he started walking again, all he could hear were his own footsteps.
Then somewhere up ahead, he heard what he instinctively knew had to be yodeling. Softly at first, then it filled his ears. It was like barbershop, a cappella, unaccompanied singing, a group. His ears carried him. His ears, transforming like a delicate cocoon…and the music wrapped him. He was inside the music…inside the music…suffused by an intense hypnotic, timeless, yet strangely joyful experience.
In no more than a hundred meters, and in the dark, the yodeling had led him just off the main street. On his left, behind a large tree, he saw a shop or something, tucked behind a hillside. The yodeling was coming from that direction. On a weakly lighted, simple sign attached to the side of a smallish free standing building, he saw the name…Blumisalp Stubbe
The Stubbe had an outdoor terrace, facing the mountains, facing the Unterergletscher, and that was where he found the yodelers, about a dozen, maybe a dozen and a half of them. Everybody he knew always chuckled when yodeling was mentioned, something Americans had once seen back in the 1950s or early 1960s on the Ed Sullivan or the Lawrence Welk television variety shows.
But, in the still of these extraordinary evening mountains, in the quiet of the night, when the mountains were the foreground, middle ground and background all at once, that yodeling had a strong resonance that seemed appropriate to the scale of this place and respectful to its character.
He thought, I don’t know anything about this, so, who am I to judge…but…it does have a very nice feel, a certain sweetness, that’s for sure. He stood and listened. For a moment, he couldn’t put words to it, but for the briefest moment, he thought he almost felt the very beginning of that same warm feeling that had overwhelmed him yesterday afternoon, the first time the mountains possessed him. Then, as soon as the thought formed…the feeling was gone…the intimation disappeared…instantaneously absent. It was, nevertheless, in its brevity, enjoyable.
The yodelers were on the terrace of the Stubbe. All the Stubbe terrace doors were open. The yodelers stood in two lines, at the side of the terrace, singing to the mountains and the Stubbe guests simultaneously.
The yodelers were organized by height, shorter in front, taller behind. They yodeled two more songs that seemed to have verses and choruses…always a cappella…the singers were men and women, a combination of young and old, all in native clothes, native costumes, somewhat Amish-like…very clean costumes, dominated by black and white, well pressed, black trousers, white shirts and black vests with black lapels and black collars, tastefully accented with smallish embroidered wild flowers–gentian blues–edelweiss silver greens.
The men stood rather casually with their hands in their pockets, but there was definitely a grouped organization. And the ladies, well, they, too, looked like Amish people…simultaneously proud and humble…lots of white lace over black cloth…very discreet, no asset display…and their decorations, too–mountain wild flowers.
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Jodlergruppe Edelwyss-Starnen, from Grindelwald, singing Mys Alpli, one alp is a field, a pasture, a productive piece of mountain land where farm animals graze. Thus in the background of this you can hear the bells of the sheep, goats and cows. The full version can be found at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/jodelgruppe-edelwyss-starnen/id329166348
Not Music
This is not music…but they are a part in….
This is music…and it is definitely a part in….
And this is what passes between humans and the landscape when all the communication barriers are open.
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Jodlergruppe Edelwyss-Starnen singing Mys Alpli, one alp is a field, a pasture, a productive piece of mountain land where farm animals graze. Thus in the background of this you can hear the bells of the sheep, goats and cows. The full version can be found at: https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/jodelgruppe-edelwyss-starnen/id329166348
It is what music might be–if you are receiving. Listen to it and look at the above images.
The minute I write, or you think, ‘yodel’, the magic is gone.
It is about ‘being’, like all great music, you become captured and captivated at the same time.
It is a right brain, left brain thing. Above is my weak attempt at right brain.
And this is for your left brain:
1.Where? High in the Swiss Alps, Berner Oberland, above 1,000 meters, where it is just you, the yodelers and the mountains.
2.Who? Yodelers are the people, generations deep living in that landscape.
3.The timing should be when your heart and ears are both wide open to spectra only available where you find yourself in that Berner Oberland landscape.
When you ride that music, the experience is not music.
Words don’t work. This is not music. This is beyond love, beyond service, beyond respect. Language fails–being with the landscape. Humans and landscape…it is deep.
It is what music might be.
Landscape Mysteries: Algernon Blackwood
These posts will be made as part of a Blog Hop as can be seen and visited through the links at the bottom of each post.
Today is 16July2015.
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Landscape Mysteries: Algernon Blackwood
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1869-1951, Algernon Blackwood’s work can be found at Gutenberg.
W. Graham Robertson illustrates the forest landscape in Algernon Blackwood’s, The Man whom the Trees Loved. (courtesy of callumjames blogspot)
Algernon Blackwood is an author who continues to inspire my senses when I take a walk in the garden, a walk in the landscape. Some have called him a cross between an outdoorsman and a mystic.
In his stories, the reader encounters a mystery–and that is where the story begins. Blackwood, at the point at which a character begins to uncover an internal mystery, takes the reader across a threshold–very carefully, step by step, revealing the experience.
Mysteries in the landscape only remain so if a person does not carefully question their reveal. Algernon Blackwood carefully questions their reveal in fine stories such as, The Initiation, The Man Whom the Trees Loved, Descent into Egypt, The Willows and many others.
Blackwood was a prolific writer; but my preferences are the stories where he carefully takes his reader on a journey into the reveal of mysteries found in the forest, in the landscape. He brings the reader to greater appreciation of those experiences that seem, how can I say…too normal? Or too unusual? Or too troublesome.
But we all have experienced them.
In the following two minute sound clip, on the Sussex weald, Algernon Blackwood’s character was helpless in the landscape, under the power of something quite ancient…
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Algernon Blackwood was taken by the landscape of the upper coniferous forests in the Swiss Alps–you can almost feel it in the following three minute sound clip:
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Upper Alpine coniferous forests breathe an air that humans find exhilarating…beyond words. What is it about those trees and the understory they protect and nourish?
Plants: how do they inspire you?
Please answer that question because on the last day of this International Authors’ Day Blog Hop, I will randomly select a winner to receive The 23 Club, Beta 6, a free giveaway for your reading enjoyment.
Landscape Story–what is it?
These posts will be made as part of a Blog Hop as can be seen and visited through the links at the bottom of each post.
Today is 14July2015.
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Landscape Story–what is it?
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These landscape stories are classic quests–journeys. Maybe a landscape story should start with some context, some definition.
On the earth, humans see the surface and what they see is landscape. The difference between landscape and garden is that a garden is cultivated by humans, is protected by humans and is relatively safe from threats of death to humans. Whereas in the larger landscape, the threat of death, by other life forms including humans, known or unknown, may be just ‘around the corner’, or even ‘in your face’.
Myself, I always have looked at it like this from a larger historical perspective: in the beginning humans moved in the landscape–hunting and gathering, I think is the currently popular way to describe their activities. When humans found the dangers in the landscape, when they found the threat of death in the landscape too great, they built shelters–the realm of architects today, shelters.
Then humans put fences around their shelters, cultivated plants and called those outdoor areas, gardens. Gardens are places dominated by plants, places where humans offer some personal service to plants. Gardens are places relatively safe from the danger of death. In the garden, there is protection. In the garden, the intense human energy for self defense can be suspended, enabling finer instincts of humans to be accessed.
Gardens and landscapes both are essentially the environment of plants. And plants are the domain where the most dynamic interactions remain to be discovered by humans. Landscape stories explore dynamic interactions between humans and plants in gardens and landscapes.
A landscape story moves beyond furniture and setting. The plants, gardens and landscapes begin to have lives of their own…kind of like real life…and beyond. In the works of literature, arts and music, plants, gardens and landscapes have forever been the source of seemingly unlimited human inspirations. Of particularly rich inspirations for me have been works by Kenneth Grahame, by Algernon Blackwood, by J.L. Borges. Inspirations of sensual thresholds, of emotion, of intellect, of design, of beauty, of spirit, of existential uncertainty, of connecting essence, of source, of…
In The 23 Club, Erik Chalmers, a landscape architect, follows his obsession to build beautiful and captivating gardens in strange places…this time to the Empty Quarter in the Arabian Peninsula. On his way, he stops over in Bahrain and, in a kismet moment, bumps into an old friend, Jean-Claude Thibaut.
Jean-Claude Thibaut, an ethnobotanist, was born in the Belgian Congo and had built his career around exploring ‘borderline’ human cultures, Bedu, Gypsies, Berbers and their interactions with plants and landscapes. Erik finds out that Jean-Claude had recently been to the Empty Quarter to advise an Emirati on his masters thesis–a study of how people from the Liwa Oasis traditionally used plants in their extremely arid sand desert environment.
In the following 4 minute sound clip, Jean-Claude explains some of the unmappable experiences he had during his nine months driving everyday from Abu Dhabi to the Liwa Oasis, in the heart of the Empty Quarter–the very location of Erik’s new Liwa Qsar project, a five star resort destination series of courtyard gardens.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/214477123″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”100″ iframe=”true” /]
Then there is another facet to these landscape stories. They are fiction, but they use geography, history and botany to give the stories some ‘real life’ anchors, as in the following three minute clip where Erik Chalmers and Jean-Claude discuss the Spice Route over a plate of biryani at a truck stop in the middle of the ‘almost’ Empty Quarter.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/214535236″ params=”auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&visual=true” width=”100%” height=”100″ iframe=”true” /]
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…where is it…
Plants: how do they inspire you?
Please answer that question because on the last day of this International Authors’ Day Blog Hop, I will randomly select a winner to receive The 23 Club, Beta 6, a free giveaway for your reading enjoyment.