one thing i really appreciate about living in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere is the seasons. every season has its thing, even the wretchedly cold winters…

lately, it feels like spring here, and the days are getting longer. and there is nothing quite like having the warmth of the sun on your face on an otherwise cool day, or the prancing shadows that follow you like a transient friend.

while i yearn for warmer days, i find solace in the transient shadows… particularly today, when a family bids a formal farewell to an aunt.

Of Shade And Shadow

The present age has declared war on shadow — with noise, reason, acid rain.

The impulse that began with the clearing of the forest continues in the demand that nothing be withheld, no opinion or confidence, no joy or wound.

Reticence is a kind of shade, the foliage around a sacred grove.

Anything continually on show, anything which does not periodically conceal itself, begins to lose definition, to fade into its surroundings, like old paintwork on a shop front.

If measurement, logic and purpose take their bearings from light, wildness, tenderness, profusion, are some of the gifts of shade.

There is a time to go out, to be dispersed in light, and a time to return again, faculty by faculty, to rest in one’s own weight.

We should cherish all forms of delay, of arrestment or digression, any interruption on our incessant light.

As there is a theology of light, so there is a practice of shadows, a poverty of intention, a duplicating and neutralising of forms, a waiting that renounces every path.

The trembling of shadows is contagious.

Once there were civilisations, great articulations of light and shadow, which are now only broken columns in the grass.

Reserve swells towards a ripeness of speech, a fruit which is proffered without reservation.

In every assumption we make, in any energetic movement of thought, we should remember shade, the obscured connections, the mitigating circumstance, the shelter one thing lends to another.

Often where a shadow has parted from the branch, a small scar is left behind.

One thinks of the patience of shadows, but there is also their tension, their immediacy of response.

The longest shadows reach back into childhood.

There are spring days, before the first leaves have appeared, when the light in the beech wood is so strong that sunbeams and shadows appear substantial as beech trunks.

When the sun shines behind the alders, it throws small ovals of light onto the shaded path.

The simplification of form, the inhibition of colour which a subject observes in its own shadow may precipitate the moment when even the shadow will be discarded.

A shadow can be one fact among others or a gap, a tear, a fissure in the continuity of things.

On those days when I find myself in possession of a shadow, I often have the urge to watch it dance.

As a fly in a room can intensify the stillness, shadows draped in a corner will blunt the limits to imaginative space.

In the mode of attention we call sympathy, one shadow is answered with another.

As a snake moves between sunlight and shade to control the temperature of its blood, there are whose whose equilibrium depends on the skill with which they manipulate a crude dialectic.

When the forest returns, all the banished words, kindness, gentleness, innocence, shade, will again be spoken.

A shadow is company, sitting by the fire.

From a slight distribution of shadows on a face, we infer the arrival of humour, anger, astonishment, pain.

That there are no autonomous facts or events should be an article of faith.

With mosses, lichens, webs and shadows, it is easy to forget, to fall into that receptivity upon which memory must cast its image, but a more difficult state to maintain is the forgetfulness on which no image is thrown.

There is no shadow with enough density to impede a song, no song with enough weight to bend a willow branch.

In secret places, under alders, by slow-moving streams, the torn fabric of quiet is quietly repaired.

To avoid the scrutiny of light, forms in shade are constantly changing — mist into smoke, fox into scent, girl into laurel.

The fluidity of flute notes, where they weave among the beech trees trunks, is impeded by a melancholy, the initiative each note savours before lending itself to the melody.

Accepting an invitation, or ignoring a warning, we step into the shadows.

The coolness which the shadow spreads at the foot of the tree is a detachment not to be confused with indifference.

That which is most intimate to us comes and goes like a shadow and is the gift of light which is continually arriving from great distance.

I can remember as a child, crossing a field in Ireland, wondering if my shadow would ever be as big as the shadow of my grandfather.

I can remember, on a straight road in Italy, after several days of walking in the mountains, the contrast between the clarity of my mind and the ragged outline of my shadow.

Shadow falls on shadow, sorrow on sorrow.

In the heat of noon we may come to a place where someone planted long ago an avenue of chestnut trees.

— Thomas A. Clark —
taken from Distance and Proximity

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