soliloquies in the outdoors
Mountains make their own weather… they also, perhaps less acknowledged, make their own time… where durations are defined by degrees of experience rather than dances of gravity… there, more often than not, time is intensity, be it physical or sensory… mountains make their own time, I’m pretty sure, whether plodding through fresh snows or getting …
Graves are as much annals of natural history as that of civilization, one muses, looking at lichens creeping over the tombstones… myriad shades of green go exploring the cracks and crevices to burst forth and fulfill their seemingly imperialistic ambitions through spores or isidia… from the vestiges of those deceased, life emanates as an intriguing …
Woodpeckers underline the echoes of winter… their tap-taps breaking the silence of the otherwise brooding woods… as the chirps of other avifauna punctuate their own little surrounds, woodpeckers fill the whole forest with their drumming… rhythm and bass section, one muses, watching these birds bristling about the oaks and pines in a no-nonsense manner… for …
Crickets and their brethren are basslines of the songs that abound the outdoors, vocalizing canopies or anything damp with their chirps and twirps… while the birds bebop from one branch to another, they skittle around with the same restiveness, punctuated with those quantum leaps every now and then… The chirps of crickets and cicadas have …
Grasshoppers are intriguing, from living catapults that pleasantly pique a child’s curiosity to swarms of locusts that lay waste to agriculture, one of the pillars of human evolution, survivors par excellence that predate dinosaurs… there was this pumpkin vine at home this time around that had grew remarkably well, partly through the monsoons, and partly …
Musings on views of Trishul peak from Ranikhet
Musings on Scaly thrush (Zoothera dauma), a secretive ground foraging bird common in the Himalayan region
Musings on an old Parsi cemetery, Ranikhet, Uttarakhand
Birds are one in the faunal realm that share the joie de vivre of running, meandering (out of breath) just for the sake of it (and some foraging, maybe), a seeming purposelessness that is whimsical and resolute at the same time… while other animals chase you, or recede into the thicket at the sound of …
It might be a coincidence — though one gets a rather assertive feeling in the gut that ‘tis not — that the less we splash about in the rain, the more we swoon over petrichor in the annals of internet… Google Ngram Viewer testifies to the fact, with the usage of the word spiking around …