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Ficus benghalensis
Why is the Indian fig tree with its characteristic hanging aerial roots called banyan? That’s an interesting story, which has nothing to do with its sacredness about which I contemplated in last week’s post. Banya seems to be the Gujarati word for merchant. Via the Portuguese and later the English in India the word banyan…
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Sacredness
Banyan trees are often considered sacred. I think this is because they are really awe-inspiring, like the gods themselves. Standing face to face with an extraordinary tree, a towering Sequoia, a corpulent Baobab, a wrinkled olive tree, a ramified Banyan, we easily fall silent. These are creatures that are somehow beyond our comprehension. Maybe that’s…
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Blowholes in pancake rocks
The breakers dash against the rocky coast. The water breaks into a natural cave, forces its way into a narrowing tunnel, then finds, under enormous pressure, a way out to the surface through a vertical blowhole … That the sudden blasts of water up in the air appear amidst a landscape of eroded pancake rocks…
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Glacial milk
It can be white, but also grey or turquoise, depending on the mineral composition of the rock that is ground by the glacier on its slow way down. The rock flour collected in the melt water of the glacier is so fine that it remains suspended, giving the water its cloudy (milky) look. Here in…
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Coincidence
Two swimmers in Wellington Harbour. One in the water, the other on the wall of a gallery at the harbour front. One doing breaststroke, the other backstroke. Both rather clumsily. I remember when seeing the second swimmer I thought of the first whose picture I just had taken outside. It made me decide to photograph…
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Rolled, rubbed and rounded
The rock and the stones, they look of the same soft make-up, only differing in colour. What a nice and quiet ensemble they make in the blazing sun. Till the tide comes in and the waves wash over them. Then the stones roll up and down in splashing water, rubbing against each other over the…
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A streak of yellow
All I can say about this terrace is that I sat down there once with Theodora for a good meal, sea food of course. After a week of intensive work we thought we deserved it.* And why this photo? Right, because of the pleasant surprise of this bright streak of yellow against the dark and…
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Equine reveries
This little member of the horse family seems overwhelmed by the abundance of nature around her. I like to think it’s a she although the photo does not permit us to see and know. Standing stock-still, does she think she’s dreaming or is she closing her eyes behind the curtain of her dark manes, afraid…
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Dissected and compounded
A breast, a breast with arm, a head, a neck, black hairdo … the figure of a woman put together of its constituent parts. The artist has done a decent job, at least for the portion we see in the picture, which was the part of the sculpture most to my liking when I saw it at the…
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Dryads
Are they wounded, these stately wood nymphs with their heavy breasts? The red-lined cuts over the full length of their bodies lead one to suspect this is the case. Maybe the god of thunder and lightning has violated them and left his marks. Many years ago, during a walk on the island of Corsica, I…
καιρός remembered
… the right moment, position chosen, shoot …
καιρός remembered 