“I like to look on plants as sentient beings, which live and enjoy their lives — which beautify the earth during life, and after death may adorn my herbarium… It is true that the Hepaticae have hardly as yet yielded any substance to man capable of stupefying him, or of forcing his stomach to empty its contents, nor are they good for food; but if man cannot torture them to his uses or abuse, they are infinitely useful where God has placed them, as I hope to live to show; and they are, at the least, useful to, and beautiful in, themselves — surely the primary motive for every individual existence." 

Richard Spruce, who loved the lowly liverwort in the 1800s. From here.

In 1990, Gabriel García Márquez interviewed Akira Kurosawa. Here's a little bit.

García Márquez: Can you remember any image from real life that you consider impossible to express on film?

Kurosawa: Yes. That of a mining town named Ilidachi, where I worked as an assistant director when I was very young. The director had declared at first glance that the atmosphere was magnificent and strange, and that’s the reason we filmed it. But the images showed only a run-of-the-mill town, for they were missing something that was known to us: that the working conditions in (the town) are very dangerous, and that the women and children of the miners live in eternal fear for their safety. When one looks at the village one confuses the landscape with that feeling, and one perceives it as stranger than it actually is. But the camera does not see it with the same eyes.

Thierry Girard, Accrochage, 1944. This picture and this picture:

Robert Adams, from The New West: Along the Colorado Front Range, 1974.

And that quote versus this one about Girard:

"He photographed the landscape as it stands, as we do in living there, unvarnished, without picturesque conventions. And paradoxically, thanks to his magical talent, France is such that we love the most. We have in our memories, our very unconscious, associated with these pictures, feelings of happiness. These cold images become very emotional and a real beauty appears."

Thierry Girard's Maquis, 15 novembre 1942 from Paysages Insoumis, 2007,

Point de vue 12, 1997. From his blog.

Facebook alerted me to the work of Thierry Girard, whose work is up at New Cabell Hall back at UVa. Thank you to Google translate for the quote below.

"...whenever possible, I try to take into account the thickness of the landscape, and consider it as a kind of palimpsest, the landscape is actually the result of successive writings and intertwined in history natural and human."

"...To be just, however, it is necessary to remember that there has been another tendency: the tendency to stay put, to say, 'No farther. This is the place.' So far, this has been the weaker tendency, less glamorous, certainly less successful. It is also the older of these tendencies, having been the dominant one among the Indians.

"The Indians did, of course, experience movements of population, but in general their relation to place was based upon old usage and association, upon inherited memory, tradition, veneration. The land was their homeland. The first and greatest American revolution, which has never been superseded, was the coming of people who did not look upon the land as a homeland. But there were always those among the newcomers who saw that they had come to a good place and who saw its domestic possibilities. Very early, for instance, there were men who wished to establish agricultural settlements rather than quest for gold or exploit the Indian trade. Later, we know that every advance of the frontier left behind families and communities who intended to remain and prosper where they were."

From The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry (page 4).

This blog has been on hiatus for school, but that's probably okay because there are about three people in the world who look at it. (Hi!) Maybe I can read a real book and take some pictures over break.

Ha! Still learning how not to quit at step 4, or step 2.

I guess I need a flare hood... but I liked this anyway.

Sometimes I question my life because of a comic book. These pages are from Daisuke Igarashi's Little Forest. (Read from right to left.)

My great-grandmother and namesake Julia Morehead - painter, frame maker, tree saver, early adopter of pants, and wearer of one earring. Sometimes you hope genes win out :-)

And another Oksana.

Here's Oksana!

Oksana sent evidence that my little tree has survived two Siberian winters!

At the Channels, which feels like a holy place to me.

I wrote a little article about Sullivan Swamp (and how you can see it) for work.

Some more of the beach.

Found a ton of old photos that I was too lazy to put on here.

"Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries."

Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac.

"In traditional indigenous communities, learning takes a form very different from that in the American public education system. Children learn by watching, by listening, and by experience. They are expected to learn from all members of the community, human and non. To ask a direct question is often considered rude. Knowledge cannot be taken; it must instead be given. Knowledge is bestowed by a teacher only when the student is ready to receive it. Much learning takes place by patient observation, discerning pattern and its meaning by experience. It is understood that there are many versions of truth, and that each reality may be true for each teller. It's important to understand the perspective of each source of knowledge. The scientific method I was taught in school is like asking a direct question, disrespectfully demanding knowledge rather than waiting for it to be revealed. From Tetraphis, I began to understand how to learn differently, to let the mosses tell their story, rather than wring it from them."

"Mosses don't speak our language, they don't experience the world the way we do. So in order to learn from them I chose to adopt a different pace, an experiment that would take years, not months. To me, a good experiment is like a good conversation. Each listening creates an opening for the other's story to be told."

Pages 76-77

"In traditional ways of knowing, one way of learning a plant's particular gift is to be sensitive to its comings and goings. Consistent with the indigenous worldview that recognizes each plant as a being with its own will, it is understood that plants come when and where they are needed. They find their way to the place where they can fulfill their roles. One spring Jeannie told me about a new plant that had appeared along the old stone wall in her hedgerow. Among the buttercups and mallows was a big clump of blue vervain. She'd never seen it there before. I offered up some explanation about how the wet spring had changed the soil conditions and made way for it. I remember how she raised a skeptical eyebrow, but respectfully did not correct me. That summer, her daughter-in-law was diagnosed with liver disease. She came to Jeannie for help. Vervain is an excellent tonic for the liver and it was waiting in the hedgerow. Over and over again, plants come when they are needed."

Page 103

From Gathering Moss; A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses by Robin Wall Kimmerer, which has a lot more scientific method than I just made it sound.

What is UP with this BOOK. It's perfect.

And this artist?? Can I just start over and be Jochen Lempert?

My camera recently started leaving a dark stripe or two along the edge of most of my photos. (I did a lazy fix of the top photo in Photoshop.) The shutter must be catching for some reason. I also got my printer set up, but there is one print head that is stubbornly clogged even after several rounds of cleaning solution. Struggling with equipment is my least favorite part of photography!