Microcosmic

I used to love running. I *really* loved running. Before illness limited what I could do physically, I ran every day and competed in road and fell races. One of the best feelings I’ve ever had in life is the feeling of ‘flow’ while running. When it was going really well, and I was very fit, I’d be running at a good pace for long periods of time, but with an ecstatic feeling of effortlessness, of harmoniousness. I miss that feeling. And when I think back to a ‘perfect moment’ that moment was while running. What happened was seemingly inconsequential and trivial – but I was totally 'in the zone'. I was living in Portugal and out running. I ran towards a football pitch with a game in progress and a very high fence to stop balls going onto the road. I was running well and ‘flowing’ already. Someone kicked a ball up high and it was clearly going to go over the fence. I could see from some way off that my direction of travel and the bottom of the ball’s trajectory woul

a tree wrote the book of shadows, other trees read it; people couldn't

A Patch Portrait Collage of patch Wildlife with the perimeter and contour lines picked out with the names of patch species. In some cases, especially the very large ones, these numbers are in the realm of 'guestimate' and indeed speculation This a lot of life - where did it come from? Life, the universe and everything I sometimes find it instructive to look at an area and think what it would like without the living things. In short it would look similar to the dead, rocky surface of the moon. Life has bestowed upon this, would be, barren surface a green cloak of living organisms. The breathing, growing, reproducing, eating, feeding, singing, scurrying, flying, flowering, beautiful exuberance – that is nature... …and it all originates in space. Green plants trap the sun’s energy by photosynthesis allowing living things to rearrange atoms on the earth into living structures. These atoms ultimately originated in “The Belly of a Star” - almost every elemen