soliloquies in the outdoors
Holipura Heritage Village, a small (and save for the glossy paint, largely non-descript) board on the road from Agra to Bah announces a potential excursion to those meandering in the ravines of Chambal… that ‘tis a short detour swings the decision in its favour as one turns the car down a narrow bumpy road for …
the way we mistreat water more or less defines the way we mistreat the gods, cleaving away the elements to deprive divinity of its roots and imprisoning it in a seclusion that can leave even the most devout stymied at times… yet one feels that this thought is more of an urban construct, as a …
mountains make their own weather, goes the old adage… what it forgets to mention is that they keep it too… only letting the last vestiges of moisture tumble downstream… in a fiefdom determined by relief, the environs are pristine and breathtaking… yet they exact a price, these pinnacles, for bestowing one with the true liberation …
the sense of expansiveness brings about a longing… a desire to partake in all but not knowing what in… one yearns for a past built upon the corrected plinths of the present… the mountain becomes more a curtain than a barrier, never refusing a passage but strongly suggestive of moving on… the elements become a …
A feeling of sadness and longing that is not akin to pain, and resembles sorrow only as the mist resembles the rain. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow it starts with a feeling of vacuum, this vicissitude, as the valleys fill up with mist… the vapour dances on the grass and bounces off the rocks as a …
I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, ‘Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again’. -Lewis Carroll the woods of winter are an exercise in a patient build …
A man looking at a hippopotamus may sometimes be tempted to regard a hippopotamus as an enormous mistake; but he is also bound to confess that a fortunate inferiority prevents him personally from making such mistakes. -Gilbert K. Chesterton That what we term beauty is a high relative concept, and even the most unwieldy nuances …
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself. -D. H. Lawrence The avifauna seem to treat the seasons without a shed of diffidence that other animals might care to display… be it the sun or the snow, …
They say an elephant never forgets. What they don’t tell you is, you never forget an elephant. – Bill Murray The pachyderm, as a whole, seem rather content in a general sort of aloofness to mortality… that there are very few predatory threats definitely plays a part… there’s no pricking up of the ears or …
Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen to twenty yards. -David Livingstone …