There is no ice and fire here this New Year's Eve,
. 
only things sponged down to a pallour and greyness, like disappointment,
drained, thawed into deliquescence.
There seems no beauty to be made here at this time, and I won't cheat, pretend, enhance, delete, crop out the ugliness, decide 'I'm Feeling Lucky' to brighten things up. (Though I am).
All is beset, complicated, compromised by feed, need, and greed, by squalor and cruelty and by kindness and talk, by muster and requirement,
the messy, unenraptured threads and loops of custom and connection.
Me, no, I'm not complaining. But I am wanting:
the hills beyond, the crystallizing clarity, burned in by freezing time. It is chill and fog and drab outside, and I am missing light and vision.
I search for embers, a fleck, a glow here or there, of gold, yellow, ochre,
or smouldering orange, in the smeared, wet-ash world.
It's more than I've a right to wish for, and I wish it for you too. Happy New Year.
28 comments:
I don't know what it says about me that I find your subdued images beautiful. Perhaps it is because of my mood of the moment, perhaps it is because I am introspective on this last day of 2009...perhaps, just perhaps, it is because the images are in fact beautiful, as are the words that accompany them.
A good post to burn away the old year to make way for the new, sort of like the Cajuns do along the river banks in Louisiana with their pyres they light at midnight, to light the way for the New Year coming. I celebrate your ashen, sodden images, made all the more powerful by the small, but intense, splashes of color you found.
Merci beaucoup, Lucy. And Happy New Year to you, Tom and Molly.
:)
Happy New Year Lucy
As always, Lucy, your way with images and words touch me deeply and I'm grateful for them and you in my world. Wishing you and yours a very Happy New Year with continuing joy, creativity and good health!
Happy new year Lucy! Sometimes beauty is there without we realising it..
Happy new year, Lucy, Tom and Mol.
Beautiful, as always. Happy New Year, Lucy, Tom & Mol!
Grey, ochre and gold seem to go well together.
I can smell the air in your images.
All goood wishes to you and Tom and Moll.
I'll take any weather, grey or bright, snow ice or rain, so long as the air is breathable again.
Deliquescent 2009 ... Thank you, sweet Lucy, for your kind wish. Yes, I believe I see a flicker in the east. 2010 is nearing accompanied by colours warmed by your heartfelt words.
Best wishes: dream deep, dear.
Malgré tout - I wish you and Tom a peaceful and productive 2010. I hope that friendly traffic between our blogs will thrive.
Beautiful photos, lovely colours and moods in them.
Have a very happy new year!
The silo/hopper is ugly but it is the product of human thought, faced with a task, coming up with a solution. Judging by its deliberate assymetry I'm fairly sure it works well. To have decorated its outlines with rococo blandishments - to have decorated it in any way at all - would, to me, have rendered it false. The man (and I have to say it was almost certainly a man) who designed it had only one aim: to provide a reservoir of grain, or whatever, which is readily accessible in controlled amounts. I, who have never made anything in my life, am beholden to people who make things even if they leave ugly tracks behind them. In this case the system is probably saving the backs of rural labourers and that pleases me. I have never favoured manual work for myself or for others. This is not a sermon in a stone but in mild steel and if I climbed that ladder I could see engaging countryside, an incidental the manufacturer never considered and possibly disapproves of. But most of all I attach fecit to what I see as a reminder of the imperfect human race to which I belong. Ah what the heck, as the Americans would say, I'm just blowing smoke.
Happy New Year to you and Tom!
Happy New Year, Lucy, Tom and Molly!!
Wishing you copious sunshine, just enough rain, clouds of beauty above and all around.
Oh Lucy, What an eye you have. The photos are beautiful. Happy New Year to you and yours.
Warmest regards and thanks for the kind wishes.
Every happiness to you.
BIG hug,
Simone.
The orange is a relief.
Best wishes for 2010.
Thanks all, and the very best for 2010.
It has been so drab since the snow melted, it's really been an effort to find any inspiration round about at all. Then I determined I'd photogrpah it anyway, just as it was. The iris pods and their berrries create a rare splash of colour, and a certain amount of gorse is flowering, everything else looks crushed. But now there's a sharp frost and we're worrying about having to travel in it...
I have love-hate feelings about grain silos of all kinds, and farm buildings and apparatus in general, which may be material for another post. This hopper is attached to a particularly depressing set of turkey sheds. The ladder used to be hanging off it which looked rather hazardous to the workers. The intensive rearing sheds require few people to run them, and always seem totally deserted of humankind. We don't eat much turkey but our Christmas one is always free range from somewhere else, though doubtless they are fed from hoppers too, and probably don't exist in any particularly picturesque setting.
I have sometimes pondered doing a kind of anti-rural-idyll post, featuring things like the factory farm sheds, and at one point a dead cow which was left in a field for rather too long hereabouts, but I didn't have the camera with me when I passed it, and anyway my moral courage failed me.
But I do like the words 'mild steel', which have a poetry of their own...
A tiny footnote: I'm in favour of people who make things; I'm far more equivocal towards those who practice torture on animals and who wreck the landscape on the grounds that they're too busy to do anything else.
Every shot a line in a visual poem.
You say much with simple images beautifully chosen.
Something tells me those orange things are poisonous! Pretty things often are.
Have a lovely 2010.
Have a wonderful New Year and keep the photos coming.
A very happy New Year, Lucy! Thank you for many memorable images last year, and I look forward to more of your words and photos.
Dear Lucy,
On December 12th I sat in a church in Manhattan listening to the Tallis Scholars singing early British music, so lovely, and now I see that you too love Thomas Tallis' music. Serendipity.
Goodbye, 2009, and hello, 2010 - happiest of New Year's to you, Lucy. Thank you for your beautiful writing and your beautiful photographs. I'm happy to feel connected to you over the ocean.
Alison
Anti-rural-idyll, indeed. I took my camera on a long walk yesterday . . . but found nothing beautiful to photograph. And yet you've made such a fine post out of grayness, dampness and the workday aspects of the country.
I felt a deep connection with this piece, Lucy. It really expressed what I have so often felt these past few months. Yes, I am fortunate (and know it), BUT!
On the other hand, we have a bright blue sky today . . . and so do you, I hope? Very best wishes for 2010, Lucy. I do look forward to travelling through another year with you.
I notice that the ugly is particular and different from the ugly in my bailiwick. So it's great to see it documented. Welcome, new year.
Thanks again.
BB - nicely put.
Alison- nice to see you, are you McGhee? That's lovely about the Tallis - did you know that was my birthday too?
Bee - yes, wonderfully bright today.
Lucy, yes, it's me, McGhee. I didn't know it was your birthday, but how doubly wonderful.
As a gift to you, here's a new blog that I find so beautiful:
http://yourmanforfuninrapidan.blogspot.com/
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