nature – follow your nose

The Resilience of Swans

January 19, 2025January 27, 2025 Katharine Asals4 Comments

We’ve had some cold snaps here, creating a bit of ice on the lake, but today the temperature truly drops with the arrival of the much hyped polar vortex.

I keep thinking about the swans – this winter is the first time I’ve seen swans here in our harbour.

While kayaking in the summer, I’d noticed a little island full of them over by The Spit – not quite in the harbour but adjacent, over in the wildland park area.

It looks lovely in their spot over there – sandy and green and very few signs of humans, so I’m not sure why this one pair has come to take up residence in the noise and grit of the harbour proper – it doesn’t look very hospitable.

When I first learned or noticed that swans stick around all winter, was back in the days when I was going up to Georgian Bay on the regular, getting out of the city and into nature, and getting to know my first digital camera.

Up there I saw that even as the temperatures plummeted and the water became filled with huge chunks of ice, the swans endured, floating quietly through the cold winter months. What impenetrable layers they must have, I thought, thinking of the thick layers of fat on a duck and imagining something like that underneath all the pretty white feathers.

The sense of this kind of obdurate toughness has been coming up repeatedly in the ongoing saga of my dad’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year.

Over the holidays his partner of the last twenty-five years died. It had been coming for a long time and yet in the end happened very quickly, I think catching my dad off guard as he himself has had such a rough year health-wise and is the elder of the two.

Sad times.

Since my dad has been living for some months in a retirement home, we have begun the process of packing up the condo where they lived, and are in and out with boxes and bags, figuring out how to deal with all the stuff of a life.

The other day my brother and I got deep into it with the doorman of their condo building, discussing their dealings with the ongoing issues with the plumbing and renovations, and he said to us, “If I had to go to war, I would want those two with me – they were so stubborn…”. And there was something about the way he said it and what he didn’t quite say that implied a kind of “Okay, sure they’re gay, but… those two homosexuals are some tough motherf***ers.”

Underneath all the pretty white feathers…

Lens Artists Challenge – Resilience

Nothing gold can stay

May 31, 2024 Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

~ Robert Frost

My dad spoke this entire poem aloud as we sat at the exit of the rehab hospital, looking out the window at the emergence of spring, waiting for the ride to get him home.

When I made a crack about “nothing gold can stay” being perhaps not the most uplifting of lines, he came back with “assumptions about Frost being a sunny, feel-good poet” being off base and the like – the sharp engagement with language and writing and expression was clearly intact. So good to know after some 6 weeks of hospital turmoil.

The rehab hospital offered some particularly fine moments – taking dad out for walks through the verdant Willowdale grounds as spring sprung. I downloaded an app of bird song, just to know who exactly was singing so brightly as we wandered from one corner of the gardens to another. There were robins of course, the occasional jay, a waxwing, and several variations on sparrows – the prettiest being the Song Sparrow as opposed to the House Sparrow or the Common Sparrow. But one day there was a fleeting moment of Goldfinch… oh, what a magical name. Must be the gold reference.

In the mornings before heading up to the hospital, I started a practice of sitting on the benches facing the lake and doing 10 minutes or so of meditation.

I have an app for that too, don’t ya know. So I sit there with my headphones on and do my best to clear the mind.

The guided meditations in my app do your basic bringing attention to the breath, but they have a few other tricks to help with the incessant Thinking Thinking Thinking of the brain. My favourite so far is to “become aware of the sounds” that are all around you. Recognize that you cannot stop the hearing of the sounds, that there is a part of you hearing the sounds – your consciousness – and your consciousness is hearing sounds whether you will it to or not. And then be in touch with that part of yourself that is simply hearing sounds and simply carries on breathing all day long. Something that is always there no matter what thought is going on in your mind.

For some reason I see this “consciousness” thing, this place that is somewhere behind and beyond the Thinking Mind, as a kind of vagus nerve shape…

…something that includes and yet is deeper and more extensive than the brain.

I dunno – maybe this image will change over time as I do more meditation, we’ll see.

But there is something about the realizing that sound is happening all around all the time whether or not you are paying attention to it, and using that as a way past the thinking that works better for me than trying a similar thing with the visual world. I guess I’m so visually oriented that analysis jumps in very quickly. As soon as I open my eyes my mind starts in with the ideas: “Would this scene before me make a compelling image?” ” “Is this interesting to look at or not so much?”

Anyways, dad went home that day from the rehab hospital and was home for a few weeks before he ended up in yet another emergency department, and was then admitted to hospital again, and is now in “transitional care”. A bit of a holding zone while he builds his strength again and we work on a more sustainable plan.

Meanwhile, on a weekend getaway to a friend’s cottage, I pulled out the birdsong app, and was brought back into the joy of birds… Hello!!!

So many different birds outside of the city!!!

Yes, plenty of robins and jays, but then there was an Eastern Phoebe! A Northern Flicker! And when I thought I was hearing the Northern Flicker again, no, no, turns out that was a Yellow-Bottomed Warbler!!! Such a world of variety.

And so many elaborate swirling marks when their calls are expressed as waveforms –

Well, I soon realized that the birdsong app, as fun and charming as it is, is also a way of being in that very analytical part of the brain, of not relaxing back into a more experiential way of being in the moment.

And I have to say, I do find water – and the glittering play of light on water – a kind of short cut to clearing the mind and simply being. Being in the present moment.

Nothing gold can stay.

Water drops – on imitating

May 28, 2013 Katharine Asals8 Comments

Over the weekend I was messing around with the camera out in the country, experimenting and trying different things.
As I was framing and snapping and adjusting, I realized I was imitating Karen – realized there were photos of hers I had seen and been intrigued by, and as I looked through the viewfinder, I was semi-consciously trying to figure out how she did that…
And while failing utterly to get the same results, still I found I was teaching myself something via this imitation of a master.
Other moments it occurred to me I was trying to create an image like Sandra Bartocha’s images…
And again, failing completely. Yet in the process, little things were learned out about the angle, the blur, the light, the settings on the camera.

It has been almost 1 year now I’ve had this camera, my first digital camera. We are still getting to know each other.

Mucking around like this in the rain, trying to capture something of the water and reflections and the glistening of water drops, working from an impulse of exploratory curiosity, fun as it was, I found the pictures I was taking bored me in and of themselves…
But the process of passing through these mediocre efforts was part of pushing towards something that might still be fresh and different and unique, that might interest me at least, even if no one else.

So then, back home, staring at the endlessly fascinating fish pond, I tried something a bit different –

Training the hose onto the surface of the water, a process began of exploring the bursts of action and colour, of water as it met water…
And wondering about the possible extremes of abstraction, I became curious and interested again…