Raccoon tracks.

Raccoon scat?

It's been -40ºF/C in Novosibirsk for the past few days. I can't believe it's December right now, and that it will never get that cold here in Virginia. It's a whole other world.

This was a cool spot, but I tried developing this roll myself and screwed up.

Archaeology building down the street (with the mammoth skeletons) in Akadem.

Finding the Scarf

by Wyatt Townley

 

The woods are the book

we read over and over as children.

Now trees lie at angles, felled

by lightning, torn by tornados,

silvered trunks turning back

to earth. Late November light

slants through the oaks

as our small parade, father, mother, child,

shushes along, the wind searching treetops

for the last leaf. Childhood lies

on the forest floor, not evergreen

but oaken, its branches latched

to a graying sky. Here is the scarf

we left years ago like a bookmark,

meaning to return the next day,

having just turned our heads

toward a noise in the bushes,

toward the dinnerbell in the distance,

toward what we knew and did not know

we knew, in the spreading twilight

that returns changed to a changed place.

Out at the cove.

By Reed Creek.

Cabin Creek Trail.

Trail Boss Trail.

Dad picking blackberries at Strawberry Ridge.

Missing Akadem.

View of a Christmas tree farm from Listening Rock.

We miss him.

Cabin Creek Trail at Grayson Highlands.

Ron Jude's book Lick Creek Line.

There are a lot of other great photo books on that channel, too!

“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the heavens, and they will tell you; 
or the bushes of the earth, and they will teach you; 
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every living thing
and the breath of all mankind."

Job 12:7-10

Spore prints!

Along Lavrentyev Street on my way to work, spring 2011. I should get up at sunrise more often.

I think this was a little locust tree up on Big Walker Mountain. Secondary succession?

Dad mowing last summer. Sent some more film to be developed yesterday! It's like Christmas every time.

From Eva-Fiore Kovacovsky's artist book 339 Gräser. Cool!

"Every July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event.

"It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840's. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our country. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked."

From Prairie Birthday, page 44-45 of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. I love this book.

The dusty road to Oksana's dacha, this July.

Living in the States now! There are over a hundred rolls of film in the fridge, which I'll be slowly developing. One day I'll make something out of this.

Dad's picture of our yard back home.

Woods II 8, Terri Wiefenbach

From Woods.

They did a show inspired by Brooks Hall! the site of my first art class at UVa and other adventures. Anyway I love everything about this.

Brooks Hall sometime between 1877 and 1940

Ruffin Hall sometime between February 24 and March 30

"Seeking a focus that combined diverse artistic styles, Burckhardt was inspired by U.Va.’s former natural history museum, which occupied the gallery of Brooks Hall from 1877 to 1940. The result is an installation called 'The Brooks Natural History Museum, c 1900: A Creative Interpretation.' The main attraction of the original Brooks Hall museum was a plaster model of a woolly mammoth, constructed by the naturalist Henry Ward. This artifact is the inspiration for the exhibit’s centerpiece, 'Wilma,' a full-size replica who gently shelters a bust of Ward between her cardboard tusks."

Olllld. Spring is here and I'm out of film, how could I be so stupid?

instead of a picture

Today is Palm Sunday by the Orthodox calendar, except here it's called Pussy Willow Sunday because we don't have palm trees. People buy newly budded pussy willow branches and have them blessed by their priests and put them in their homes. I think it's so neat how the tradition of greeting Jesus with palm fronds gets translated into familiar plants so that we can feel that story on our skin. I went to the wooden chapel down the street this morning, and it was crammed full of people. I mean, I couldn't move at all, not even to cross myself, but somehow more and more people kept squeezing in. The woman next to me had on a soft, fuzzy hat which kept brushing against my face. People passed candles to the front to be lit. Once, the crowd parted to let out a lady who felt faint. I could barely hear what the priest was saying, and it reminded me of when the crowds came to hear Jesus, and he had to teach them from a boat while they stood on the shore because there were so many that they would have crushed him. I wonder if it was hard to hear his voice over the sound of the waves, and whether anyone got their feet wet because of people in the back pushing forward to hear. I wish I could have taken a photo of everyone's backs this morning, the pussy willow branches they held sticking out everywhere, red or brown or green bark with their furry silver buds, casting soft shadows on each other's coats.

When the Ob River was dammed up in the 1950s to build the Berdsk Reservoir, much of the old city of Berdsk was submerged, and some villages, too. I've been working in Berdsk this year! Here are some maps. I found the first one here.

I like Kevin Anchukaitis's posts on the NYTimes Scientist at Work blog about studying Guatemala's climate history through tree rings! Here's the first one.

"Andrew E. Douglass, the astronomer who founded dendrochronology, wrote, 'Through long ages past and with unbroken regularity, trees have jotted down a record at the close of each fading year — a memorandum as to how they passed the time.'"

Happy vernal equinox!

John James Audubon, Great-footed Hawk

John James Audubon, Wild Turkey

John James Audubon, Spotted Grous

From The Birds of America, 1827-1838. Lots more here.

Ernst Haeckel, Actiniae

 

Ernst Haeckel, Basimycetes

More here.

"Man is best defined not as a 'logical' but as a 'eucharistic' animal. He does not merely live in the world, think about it and use it, but he is capable of seeing the world as God's gift, as a sacrament of God's presence and a means of communion with him. So he is able to offer the world back to God in thanksgiving. 'Thine own from thine own we offer to thee, in all and for all' (The Liturgy of St John Chrysostom).

"Secondly, besides blessing and praising God for the world, man is also able to reshape and alter the world, and so to endue it with fresh meaning. In the worlds of Fr Dumitru Staniloae, 'Man puts the seal of his understanding and of his intelligent work onto creation...The world is not only a gift, but a task for man.' It is our calling to co-operate with God; we are, in St Paul's phrase, 'fellow-workers with God' (1 Cor. 3:9). Man is not just a logical and eucharistic animal, but he is also a creative animal: the fact that man is in God's image means that man is a creator after the image of God the Creator. This creative role he fulfills, not by brute force, but through the clarity of his spiritual vision; his vocation is not to dominate and exploit nature, but to transfigure and hallow it.

"In a variety of ways–through the cultivation of the earth, through craftsmanship, through the writing of books and the painting of ikons–man gives material things a voice and renders the creation articulate in praise of God. It is significant that the first task of the newly-created Adam was to give names to the animals (Gen. 2:19-20). The giving of names is in itself a creative act: until we have find a name for some object or experience, an 'inevitable word' to indicate its true character, we cannot begin to understand it and to make use of it. It is likewise significant that, when at the Eucharist we offer back to God the firstfruits of the earth, we offer them not in their original form but reshaped by the hand of man: we bring to the altar not sheaves of wheat but loaves of bread, not grapes but wine."

The Orthodox Way by Bishop Kallistos Ware (pages 53-54)

Little update! A picture from back home.