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: Interlaken
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.
Spring Sun Glory
Filled my lungs again and again until I became inside out dizzy with its sweetness…then I made a mistake.
I read a newspaper. In the article, I was warned that too many cow farts would doom life as I was enjoying it. Naw…ain’t gonna believe that am I? Spring is here. I’m going out for a walk before I miss it!
Snort…what?
The temperature lowered, the clouds lowered, the precipitation began…then the gray. Lower and lower came that crazy gray infinite, reducing my vision…that enveloping grayness, proving how limited is our human sense of sight. Grayed out–sense of sight, sense of balance, even sense of gravity…dissolving…bit by bit…
…then the snow. I have carried a dream, maybe just a memory for decades, more than fifty years–strangely vivid–I was told to count backwards from 10 and inhale slowly and deeply–it was a black mask over my nose and mouth and it was ether that I inhaled–I saw the gray background turn darker to almost black and gradually it became filled with white dots–soft white dots–like snowflakes not quite in focus–that is the dream and each time it returns, it has a comforting subtitle–this is how death will come, quietly like a snowfall beginning.
Oh, but this is just a late spring snowfall–it’s not death–it’s not the return of winter…but, oh, for the briefest of moments, it was strangely exciting to feel, but inevitably, not sustainable.
…too busy…I almost missed Spring…11…next…last
Plentiful Water
…and then the big time flowers begin their parade…
…voluptuous tease…since the new year, Viburnum bodnantense, despite its naked stems, had teased me with its winter flowers and their fragrance. Then finally with the correct combination of warmth and sun, its leaves began to show…and the closer I looked, the more the foliage detail entranced me…voluptuous?
What is the energy flowing through its leaf veins…oh, we have names for it…we call it blood in humans…we call it xylem and phloem in plants…but what is it really?
Spring: yes, it’s here now…
Then fruit–off the tree, taken by stealth, enjoyed to the fullest–oh those joys of youth…of anytime. And Johnny Appleseed–share the fruit, share the beauty, share the health. Look at that tree–walk over to it…
Mountain water–glacial rivers, snow melt–collects in the lowlands…bathes the farm lands, the feet of the plants. Look at the rich mixed forests. And look, if you will, at the gap between the two mountains in the background–it is the portal through which has emerged and withdrawn many times the Lower Grindelwald Glacier–massive ice flow–paintings by Caspar Wolf, 1735-1783.