Where ravens fly
The raven masters the most spectacular voices. Once we sat on a mountain in Sweden.
We thought we were in hidden camera because of an unusual sound slamming around between the mountain walls. Boing! Boing! Boing !!
We went home without finding the team behind the film, or being offered a dinner as compensation for the teasing.
Now we know it was the raven, with its unusual calling.
The Fairies
I believe in everything until it’s disproved.
So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons.
It all exists, even if it’s in your mind.
Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?
John Lennon
Do Ducks Smile?
People were queuing in parks, woods, everywhere.
All the houses stood back empty.
The sun was shining, and the air was warm.
The buzzards circled high above. Children flew kites on the meadow, and the skylark flew singing over my head for the first time this year.
Some girls directed their horses through the shallow water into the lake but one of the riders came too far out.
The horse sank in, and so did the rider. The horse was gasping for air and the girls squealed.
First in fright and later in laughter, as everything went well.
And then I ask you again: Do ducks smile?
After the fight
“There’s been a fight going on!”
My first thought was that some people couldn’t agree on the bill at the little restaurant by the pond. But it turned out much more poetic.
The Cob had successfully defended his pen against another cob.
When I arrived to the pond, he was brushing the feathers as if it was a glorious knight armour and he certainly was impressive.
Dust of Snow
The sun shines from a sparkling blue sky and I feel an urge to see the thick patches of snow spread over my nearest landscape of wilderness.
The snow has already started to melt when I walk into the forest and I hear an unfamiliar sound among the trees.
That is snow, that reluctantly let go of the branches and falls to the ground. Not heavy as for snow which been around for weeks.
No, it’s the dust of snow that falls as in the poem by Robert Frost.
Go to the winter woods …
Winter came down to our home one night
Quietly pirouetting in on silvery-toed slippers of snow,
And we, we were children once again.
Bill Morgan, Jr.
The cold was our pride, the snow was our beauty. It fell and fell, lacing day and night together in a milky haze, making everything quieter as it fell, so that winter seemed to partake of religion in a way no other season did, hushed, solemn.
Patricia Hampl
Go to the winter woods: listen there, look, watch, and “the dead months” will give you a subtler secret than any you have yet found in the forest.
Fiona Macleod, Where the Forest Murmurs
