Fairy forest

I've made two recent trips to Kairos - the one with Dave, when he took photos, and another when I had a little chat.

This wonderful fungal photo was taken using a canny little gizmo you can put on a lens that lets you go really close to the subject. Cool, eh?

I used it for this one as well.

This next is my normal lens, but I like this as the grass on the left looks like rays of light, which seem to extend the rays of the cut trunk (rays go from centre to outer, cutting through the rings).

And here is a fungal love heart!

And an artfully positioned oak apple.

As for this one, I was stading holding it up saying I was the Statue of Liberty, then Dave took it and ran in slow motion humming the theme tune for Chariots of Fire! I love playing around like that!

Maybe a little less fun on my own - and it was cold! I was listening to Hospicing Modernity and she said something interesting: that modernity seeks for the meaningful, and overlooks the sense-ful. Something struck me powerfully in this. What was it?

That constant search for meaning... the search for something, conceptual, idea-like, that supercedes and transcends the actual! But actually, what is most meaningful to me is not the... story about the thing or the relevance of the thing to some grand narrative, but the thing itself! The colours and the sounds and the cool breeze on my face and the soft ground and the leaves blown like waves across the ground, except for one catches an updraft and rises, unexpectedly, flittering through the branches until a twig catches it.

It's like, there's a pot of gold defended by a dragon, says modernity. Get the pot of gold. The sense-ful instead says, WOW! A DRAGON!!!!!

I was thinking about this as I sat with Kairos. And that was it really. I was sitting with Kairos and it was cool and there was a breeze and birds and squirrels.

Hospicing Modernity is kind of like the antidote to Paul Kingsnorth... OK, look, I know, I liked the Kingsnorth book, because I thought that what he categorised as the Machine was impostant. But that's all there in this book, and this book is deeply ethical, a book that asks you to be in relationship with it.