soliloquies in the outdoors
Meadows for the most part are a release, either from the claustrophobia of canopies, or the tiring, involuntary ballets of moraines and glaciers… colourful tapestries that seem as close to utopia as one can get, expanses and imaginations unbridled, hope taking wings to the horizon… ‘tis where the waters frolic, exulting over their escape from …
Most nocturnal birds are reticent during the day, winding themselves like a clock to unleash quiet furies once dusk settles in… pretty obvious in a way, for everyone needs to rest, be it in cocooned in the dark or shrouded in bright light… but there is a silent undertone to their existence, these hunters of …
Meditating over mountains is an exercise in peeling off multitudes… meandering around their geometries, mulling over whether to engage with the elements or take shelter from them, you look for those deep life lessons recorded over many a tome of the yore and now chopped up into bite sized, social media portions, but in vain… …
‘Twas perchance that I stumbled into Coptic Cairo, after a dusty morning gazing at the pyramids and the early noon spent at the Egyptian museum, we’d planned to visit some market after lunch but the restaurant was close to towering church spires that spurred a change of plan and spooled us into their fold… Somehow, …
Twilight is by all means a magical time of the day… crepuscular congregations in full swing as the skies grapple with those sudden transient spurts of colour fading into the dusk or the day as soon as they appeared… twilight is when the sun really gives a few glimpses of it’s true artistic potential, for …
Plumbeous redstarts endear one with their restiveness, nudging and ingesting hapless insects trying to fathom fast flowing waters… a songbird punctuating rivers and streams, it darts around from boulder to boulder tracing parabolas in the air, adding to the din of the river with short, shrill calls and animating the surroundings with a flurry of …
The dipper tends to send a few shudders down the onlooker’s well-cloaked disposition before one begins to marvel at its foraging, combing the surface of frigid waters emboldened by gravity before diving into their shallow depths for a morsel… seemingly foolhardy but in reality, one of those evolutionary ingenuities… I knew that the brown dipper …
The treecreeper is a rather comforting bird to look at… ensconced in its arboreal domain, enquiring for food among nooks and crannies, subsisting industriously… twixt humility and hubris, it prefers the former, choosing a benign camouflage over loud contrast… skittering up trees with hastiness akin to a rodent, leading some hapless insects to the end …
Elephants are such content beings, relishing every morsel, making a difference to every inch of the jungle they trudge through… flummox the blind they might, get agitated by the unceasing fragmentation of their wide expanses they do, but for a creature sharing human lifespan, the tolerance and wisdom in their sombre gait goes way beyond… …
Pyramids – they’re full of stone, geometry, and crowds… entrenched in the memory since childhood, as one crammed up the seven wonders of the world, they fade into, as much as they stand out in the desert… architecture at a scale that the modern world keeps trying to fathom, excavating for remnants and clues that …