Late summer technicolor

Volunteering. Shoveling gravel onto a trailer and into ruts on the track. A regular summer pursuit, as cutting is reserved for September to February when the birds will not be nesting. Though no one told the pigeon in my garden that. Mind you, she might be off the nest by the end of the month.

It's hard work. There were only three of us - as Mischa was having fun clearing drainage ditches in a hired digger. Still, we managed four trailer-loads of gravel and filled in twenty metres or so of ruts. There's about 12 miles of track on the reserve and possibly two miles in total get badly rutted. It's a big job.

Anyway, I had taken these pictures the day before and Erin was stunned by the colours... then we realised we were surrounded by fallen sycamore leaves and needed only to look at the ground rather than my iPhone.

This one has galls, probably caused by mites. They look like rubies scattered on gilt and vert velvet.

Yes, indeed, these are caused by mites.

Erin showed me a photo she had taken of galls on an oak leaf. They looked like spaghetti hoops. I hadn't seen them before, but when I walked around the corner and looked at a fallen oak branch I saw the same galls on the leaves. And here they are - spangle galls, created by a tiny wasp.

This is all wonderful. And on wonder, Iain McGilchrist writes - and this is from The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, not the other book:

It cannot be willed, though it might be much desired; it requires an (apparently passive) patient openness to whatever is, which allows us to see it as if for the very first time, and leads to what Heidegger called radical ‘astonishment’ before the world. That concept is also related to Jan Patocka's shakenness: a sort of elemental driving out of the complacency of our customary modes of seeing the world.163 It is what Wordsworth in particular strove to achieve: in Coleridge's words, to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.164 It involves reconnection with the world which familiarity had veiled. It is at the furthest remove from the need to shock: it requires looking more carefully at what seems only too familiar, and seeing it perhaps for the very first time.