Full Moon Names and Their Meanings and a few Songs!

Full Moon names date back to Native Americans of northern and eastern parts of America.

The tribes kept track of the seasons by giving distinctive names to each recurring full Moon. Their names were applied to the entire month in which occurred. There was some variation in the Moon names, but in general, the same ones were current throughout the Algonquin tribes from New England to Lake Superior. European settlers followed that custom and created some of their own names. Since the lunar month is only 29 days long on the average, the full Moon dates shift from year to year. Here is the Farmers Almanac's list of the full Moon names.

Full Wolf Moon - January Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages.

Full Snow Moon - February Since the heaviest snow usually falls during this month. Also called Hunger Moon, since harsh weather conditions made hunting very difficult.

Full Worm Moon - March As the temperature begins to warm and the ground begins to thaw, earthworm casts appear, heralding the return of the robins.

Full Pink Moon - April This name came from the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring.

Full Flower Moon - May In most areas, flowers are abundant everywhere during this time.

Full Strawberry Moon - June This name was universal to every Algonquin tribe because the relatively short season for harvesting strawberries comes each year during the month of June. Full Buck Moon - July July is normally the month when the new antlers of buck deer push out of their foreheads in coatings of velvety fur.

Full Sturgeon Moon - August The fishing tribes are given credit for the naming of this Moon, since sturgeon, a large fish of the Great Lakes and other major bodies of water, were most readily caught during this month. A few tribes knew it as the Full Red Moon because, as the Moon rises, it appears reddish.

Full Corn Moon - September This name is attributed to Native Americans because it marked when corn was to be harvested. Most often, the September full moon is actually the Harvest Moon.

Full Harvest Moon - October This is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox. In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October. At the peak of harvest, farmers can work late into the night by the light of this Moon.

Usually the full Moon rises an average of 50 minutes later each night, but for the few nights around the Harvest Moon, the Moon seems to rise at nearly the same time each night: just 25 to 30 minutes later across the U.S., and only 10 to 20 minutes later for much of Canada and Europe.

Corn, pumpkins, squash, beans, and wild rice the chief Indian staples are now ready for gathering.

Full Beaver Moon - November This was the time to set beaver traps before the swamps froze, to ensure a supply of warm winter furs. Another interpretation suggests that the name Full Beaver Moon comes from the fact that the beavers are now actively preparing for winter. It is sometimes also referred to as the Frosty Moon.

Full Cold Moon - December During this month the winter cold fastens its grip, and nights are at their longest and darkest.

The midwinter full Moon has a high trajectory across the sky because it is opposite a low Sun.

Neil Young´s Harvest Moon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSh9WnEYWzo

Come a little bit closer

Hear what I have to say

Just like children sleeping

We could dream this night away.

But theres a full moon rising

Lets go dancing in the light

We know where the musics playing

Lets go out and feel the night.

Because I´m still in love with you

I want to see you dance again

Because I´m still in love with you

On this Harvest moon.

When we were strangers

I watched you from afar

When we were lovers

I loved you with all my heart.

But now its getting late

And the moon is climbing high

I want to celebrate

See it shining in your eyes.

Because I´m still in love with you

I want to see you dance again

Because I´m still in love with you

On this harvest moon.

What is a Blue Moon?

Modern Definition:

A Blue Moon is commonly the name given to the second full moon in a month.

Since a full moon occurs every 29 1/2 days, if there is a full moon on the 1st or 2nd day of a month, there is a good chance that there will be a second full (or blue moon) that month.

In 1999, there were two blue moons very close together. One on January 31st (after the full moon on Jan. 2nd) and the other on March 31st (after the full moon on March 2nd).

There was another in November 2001, but not again until July 2004.

There was a blue moon in May 2007 (and one in June 2007 for those in Europe and Asia), and December 2009.

The next ones will be August 2012, then July 2015.

And we won't see two blue moons in one year again until 2018!

Sorry, it's not really blue : (

Older Definition:

More traditionally, a blue moon was referred to as the 4th full moon in a season.

That is, each of the 4 seasons of the year has 3 months, and will usually have 3 full moons. Each of these 12 moons has a name like "Harvest Moon," "Hunter's Moon" and the like.

But, when a season occurs that contains 4 full moons, there is no name for this occasional moon and it was given the name, "Blue Moon."

That´s the meaning of the idiom “Once in a blue moon”: very rarely, not very often, as for example in: I go to the theatre once in a blue moon.

Billie Holiday, Blue Moon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYjn4JNbHWM

Blue moon! You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

Blue moon! You know just what I was there for

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for

And, then, there suddenly appeared before me

The only one my arms will ever hold

I heard somebody whisper: Please, adore me!

And when I looked, the moon had turned to gold

Blue moon! Now I´m no longer alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

The Waterboys, The Whole of the Moon

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsNTmjlf1vI

I pictured a rainbow, You held it in your hands

I had flashes, But you saw the plan.

I wondered out in the world for years

While you just stayed in your room

I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon!

The whole of the moon!

You were there at the turnstiles, With the wind at your heels

You stretched for the Stara And you know how it feels

To reach too high, Too far, Too soon

You saw the whole of the moon!

I was grounded While you filled the skies

I was dumbfounded by truths, You cut through lies

I saw the rain-dirty valley, You saw brigadoon

I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon!

I spoke about wings, You just flew

I wondered, I guessed and I tried

You just knew

I sighed, But you swooned

I saw the crescent, You saw the whole of the moon!

The whole of the moon!

With a torch in your pocket And the wind at your heels

You climbed on the ladder And you know how it feels

To reach too high, Too far, Too soon

You saw the whole of the moon!

The whole of the moon!

Unicorns and cannonballs,

Palaces and piers,

Trumpets, towers and tenemets,

Wide oceans full of tears,

Flag, rags, ferry boats,

Scimitars and scarves,

Every precious dream and vision

Underneath the stars

You climbed on the ladder, With the wind in your sails

You came like a comet, Blazing your trail

Too high, Too far, Too soon

You saw the whole of the moon!

The Waterboys, The Fisherman´s Blues

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VKouBHarIo&feature=related

I wish I was a fisherman tumbling on the sea

Far away from dry land and it's bitter memories

Casting out my sweet land with abandonment and love

No ceiling bearing down on me save the starry sky above

With light in my head and you in my arms

I wish I was the brakeman on a hurtling fevered train

Cashing a-headlong on into the heartland like a cannon in the rain

With the beating of the sweepers and the burning of the coal

Cunting the towns flashing by and the night that's full of soul

With light in my head and you in my arms

Tomorrow I will be loosened from the bonds that hold me fast

With the chains all hung around me will fall away at last

And on that fine and fateful day I will take thee in my hand

I will ride on the train, I will be the fisherman

With light in my head you in my heart…

MY MONSTER AND I

Two young tourists enter a pub in Scotland, near Loch Ness where an old man tells them a story:

A boy found a very strange egg in a tidal-pool and he took it home. He put it in a shed. When the egg hatched there was an extraordinary creature and only the boy, his sister and the handy man knew this. It grew and grew and it had to live in the water so, eventually, they took it to the big lake (loch) by van.

At the same time, there was a war against the Germans.

A coupe of fishermen saw this very big creature and showed a fake picture of the famous ''Monster'' in Loch Ness.

Afterwards, everybody goes to Scotland and tries to see Nessie.

Cris Palacio

Truisms: JENNY HOLTZER´s TRUISMS ABC

A POSITIVE ATTITUDE MEANS ALL THE DIFFERENCE IN THE WORLD

BOREDOM MAKES YOU DO CRAZY THINGS

CONFUSING YOURSELF IS A WAY TO STAY HONEST

DECENCY IS A RELATIVE THING

EATING TOO MUCH IS CRIMINAL

FREEDOM IS A LUXURY NOT A NECESSITY

GOOD DEEDS EVENTUALLY ARE REWARDED

HIDING YOUR EMOTIONS IS DESPICABLE

IDEALS ARE REPLACED BY CONVENTIONAL GOALS AT A CERTAIN AGE

JUST BELIEVING SOMETHING CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN

KNOWING YOURSELF LETS YOU UNDERSTAND OTHERS

LISTEN WHEN YOUR BODY TALKS

MOST PEOPLE ARE NOT FIT TO RULE THEMSELVES

NOTHING UPSETS THE BALANCE OF GOOD AND EVIL

OFFER VERY LITTLE INFORMATION ABOUT YOURSELF

PEOPLE ARE NUTS IF THEY THINK THEY ARE IMPORTANT

RELIGION CAUSES AS MANY PROBLEMS AS IT SOLVES

SEX DIFFERENCES ARE HERE TO STAY

TALKING IS USED TO HIDE ONE'S INABILITY TO ACT

USING FORCE TO STOP FORCE IS ABSURD

WORDS TEND TO BE INADEQUATE

YOU ARE A VICTIM OF THE RULES YOU LIVE BY

YOU CAN'T EXPECT PEOPLE TO BE SOMETHING THEY'RE NOT

Summertime

George Gershwin  was an American composer and pianist. (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) 

Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are universally familiar. 

He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works in collaboration with his elder brother Ira Gershwin. 

George Gershwin composed music for both Broadway and the Classical Concert-Hall, as well as popular songs which brought his work to an even wider public. Gershwin's compositions have been used in numerous films and on television, and many became jazz standards recorded in numerous variations. Countless singers and musicians have recorded Gershwin songs. 

Gershwin was named Jacob Gershowitz at birth in Brooklyn on September 26, 1898. His parents were Russian Jews. His father, Morris (Moishe) Gershowitz, changed his family name to 'Gershwin' sometime after immigrating to the United States from St. Petersburg, Russia in the early 1890s. George Gershwin was the second of four children.  He first displayed interest in music at the age of ten, when he was intrigued by what he heard at his friend Maxie Rosenzweig's violin recital. The sound and the way his friend played captured him. His parents had bought a piano for lessons for his older brother Ira, but it was George who played it.  Gershwin tried various piano teachers for two years, and then was introduced to Charles Hambitzer by Jack Miller, the pianist in the Beethoven Symphony Orchestra. Until Hambitzer's death in 1918, he acted as Gershwin's mentor. Hambitzer taught Gershwin conventional piano technique, introduced him to music of the European classical tradition, and encouraged him to attend orchestra concerts. 

At the age of fifteen, George quit school and found his first job as a performer. 

In 1924, George and Ira collaborated on a musical comedy Lady Be Good, which included such future standards as "Fascinating Rhythm" and "Lady Be Good". 

Also in 1924, Gershwin composed his first major classical work, Rhapsody in Blue for orchestra and piano. Rhapsody in Blue is a musical composition by George Gershwin for solo piano and jazz band , which combines elements of  Classical Music with Jazz-influenced effects. The piece received its premiere in a concert entitled An Experiment in Modern Music. Two audio recordings exist of Gershwin performing an abridged version of the work with Whiteman's orchestra: An acoustic recording made June 10, 1924, this recording includes the original clarinetist, Ross Gorman, playing the glissando . And an electrical recording made April 21, 1927.

 Both versions can be found here.

Gershwin stayed in Paris for a short period, where he applied to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. Finally, growing tired of the Parisian musical scene, Gershwin returned to the United States.
His most ambitious composition was Porgy and Bess (1935). Gershwin called it a "folk opera," and it is now widely regarded as the most important American opera of the twentieth century.

"Summertime" is the name of an aria composed by George Gershwin for the 1935 opera Porgy and Bess. The lyrics are by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, and Ira Gershwin. The song soon became a popular Jazz standard. Gershwin began composing the song in December 1933, attempting to create his own spiritual in the style of the African American folk music of the period. It is sung multiple times throughout Porgy and Bess, first by Clara in Act I as a lullaby.

Summertime 

And the livin’ is easy 

Fish are jumpin’ 

And the cotton is high 

Oh your daddy’s rich 

And your mamma is good lookin’ 

So hush little baby 

Don’t you cry 

One of these mornings 

You’re goin’ to rise up singin' 

Then you’ll spread your wings 

And you’ll take the sky 

But till' that mornin' 

There’s a nothin’ can harm you 

With daddy and mammy 

Standin’ by

Listen and Watch in a Film version of Porgy and Bess http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tElL6kWwmv4&feature=related

Now, listen to the powerful Billie Holiday versionhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4PSju9HYwU&feature=related

If

If I were a swan, I'd be gone.
If I were a train, I'd be late.
And if I were a good man, I'd talk with you more often than I do.
If I were to sleep, I could dream.
If I were afraid, I could hide.
If I go insane, please don't put your wires in my brain.

If I were the moon, I'd be cool.
If I were a book, I would bend.
If I were a good man, I'd understand the spaces between friends.

If I were alone, I would cry.
And if I were with you, I'd be home and dry.
And if I go insane, will you still let me join in with the game?

If I were a swan, I'd be gone.
If I were a train, I'd be late again.
If I were a good man, I'd talk to you more often than I do.

Pink Floyd

GOING OUT

THE SIERRA: GUARA, BIERGE and ALQUEZAR
by David Garcés Gracia and Laura Piedrafita

On a wonderful spring morning, we went to Guara on a school trip.

At first, it was cloudy but sunny. We were lucky: it didn´t rain at all!
In fact, it was hot!
As soon as we arrived, we had lunch in the park and went to the toilet.

Next, we saw a film about the Sierra, and listened to explanations about the Nature, the special flowers, the animals…but also about the geology in that area.
We also took notes because we have to do a Science Memorandum.

Afterwards, we travelled to Alquezar by bus and then we started the excursion. It was getting hotter, we sat under a tree (Olea europea), and saw some insects, flowers, vultures and small birds, too (swifts and swallows).

Then, we went down the ravine and saw the beautiful crystal clear river, running between two enormous colourful walls showing the geological strata (lime-stone and conglomerate rocks).
We even got into the amazing pale green water: it was warm.

Last of all, we climbed back the steep way with the special flowers in bloom (Ramonda myconi) to the beautiful quiet village where we had lunch again in the square, near the fountain.

Finally, we all got on the bus and returned home, happy, tired and always noisy!!!

Kevin Ayers, May I?

I just came in off the street

Looking for somewhere to eat

I find a small cafe

I see a girl and then, I say:

'May I, sit and stare at you for a while?

I'd like the company of your smile'

You don't have to say a thing

You're the song without the sing

The sunlight in your hair

You look so good just sitting there

'May I sit and stare at you for a while?

I'd like the company of your smile' 

Summer is about to arrive in Great Missenden.

 At this time of year, wrote Roald Dahl, nature starts to come alive again:

“In May the hawthorn blossoms make the hedges look as though they are covered in snow and the buttercups are beginning to appear in the fields… Swallows and house martins are building their crazy mud nests all over the place… We have a pair of swallows that have built their nest in exactly the same place on a wooden beam in the tool shed for the past six years, and it is amazing to me how they fly off thousands of miles to North Africa in the autumn with their young and then six months later they find their way back to the same tool shed at Gipsy House, Great Missenden… It’s a miracle and the brainiest ornithologists in the world still cannot explain how they do it.”

Seems our feathered-friends are smarter than you thought.

Going Out

I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
JOHN MUIR

Second Nature
When I was seventeen in 1959, the lake was as wild a place as I knew. My friend Jeremy Hooker and I would arrive there at around four a.m. in early summer, ditch our bikes in the tangle of rhododendrons, and pick out the narrow path by torchlight as we tiptoed, in existentialist duffel coats, through the brush. Still a long way from the water, we moved like burglars, since we attributed to the carp extraordinary sagacity and guile, along with an extreme aversion to human trespassers on its habitat. Crouched on our knees, speaking in whispers, we assembled our split-cane rods. In the windless dark, the lake’s dim ebony sheen was at once sinister and promising. Somewhere out there, deep down, lay Leviathan, or at least his shy but powerful cyprinid cousin.
Jonathan Raban

Ghost Species
The spectres of the Norfolk Fens
On a cold morning last January, I travelled out to the Norfolk Fens to see a ghost. First, I caught a train twenty miles north from Cambridge to Littleport, a market town on the Cambridge–Norfolk border. At Littleport I was met by a friend called Justin Partyka, and Justin drove me in his little white baker’s van up into the Fens proper.
Robert Macfarlane
http://www.granta.com/Online-Only/Video-Ghost-Species

Encounter
We face south-west towards the Isles of Scilly. To our left is a coastal hill, Carn Gloose. On our right is Cape Cornwall and beyond, exactly a mile offshore, I’m told, is a series of rocky outcrops known as the Brisons. In Priest’s Cove we hop from boulder to boulder towards a series of larger, weed-mottled granite monoliths. They stand closer to the tide edge and offer us a perfect view of the incoming tide.
Mark Cocker

Butterflies on a Wheel
Migrants meet in western Wyoming
B etween 1995 and 2005, because of graduate school, jobs, wanderlust and love, I moved across America sixteen times. Always by car, always in spring or fall. The drive I made most often was a 2,000-mile stretch between Idaho and Ohio, in either direction, sometimes alone, sometimes with my dog, once with a goldfish named Fran riding shotgun in a one-gallon water jug. Eastward, westward, I travelled the great unspooling latticework of American interstates – sun-baked juniper flats of southern Idaho, incandescent canyons of Utah, rambling prairies of Nebraska, the deep, heavy damp of Iowa in August.
Anthony Doerr
Granta 102 Essays

The Sierra

What wonders lie in every mountain day!. . . Crystals of snow, splash of small raindrops, hum of small insects, booming beetles, the jolly rattle of grasshoppers, chirping crickets, the screaming of hawks, jays, and Clark crows, the ‘coo-r-r-r’ of cranes, the honking of geese, partridges drumming, trumpeting swans, frogs croaking, the whirring rattle of snakes, the awful enthusiasm of booming falls, the roar of cataracts, the crash and roll of thunder, earthquake shocks, the whisper of rills soothing to slumber, the piping of marmots, the bark of squirrels, the laugh of a wolf, the snorting of deer, the explosive roaring of bears, the squeak of mice, the cry of the loon-loneliest, wildest of sounds. . . .
Mountain Thoughts, John Muir.

Only the unimaginative can fail to feel the enchantment of these mountains.

WORK

Work
We, Jah people, can make it work;
Come together and make it work, yeah!
We can make it work;
We can make it work.

Five days to go: working for the next day;
Four days to go: working for the next day;
Say we got: three days to go now:
working for the next day;
Two days to go (ooh): working
for the next day, yeah.
Say we got: one day to go: working for the -
Every day is work - work - work - work!

We can make it work;
We can make it work.

[Short guitar break]

We, Jah people, can make it work;
Come together and make it work.
We can make it work;
We can make it work.

We got: five days to go work, oh! -
working for the next day, eh!
Four days to go: working for the -
Three days to go now: working
for the next day, yeah!
Two days to go: working for the next day
Say we got: one day to go now: working for -
Every day is work, wotcha-wa!

(Work!) I work in the mid-day sun;
(Work!) I work till the evening come!
(Work!) If ya ain't got nothing to do!
(Work!) Ooh-ooh-ooh-oo-oo-ooh!
(Work!)
fadeout

The terrible lesson of the bee orchid

We must fight to protect not only biodiversity, but bioluxuriance

Richard Mabey

At a stroke, the bee orchids have gone from our lane. Two summers of tropical grass growth have brought the verge-cutters out early, before the orchids flower and seed, and we won't any longer be able to see those fabulous, chimerical blooms, with their velvet bodies and sculpted pink wings, just an amble from the front door. It's a man-made demise, but not the end of the world. There are bee orchids a mile away in the opposite direction, round a patch of dry wasteground used for bike scrambles. They teem in countless millions around the Mediterranean. I've seen them sometimes with extraordinary opportunist impertinence poking up on people's lawns.

Yet the neighbourliness of our local patch is something that can't be replaced. For me, settling down in a new habitat in Norfolk, they completed a circle opened up one June day half a lifetime ago, when I saw my first on a picnic in the Chilterns, and knew that I had gone through some subtle graduation in the rites of botany. And, in a less dramatic way, their passing seems like a stitch dropped, part of a great unravelling.

It is these subtle processes of attrition, cultural and ecological, that are highlighted in the new British Red Data Book of plants. In May this revealed the shocking statistic that 340-odd species - 20% of our flora - are in danger of becoming nationally extinct. Note the qualification. These are not species about to vanish from the face of the earth. Many vulnerable plants of open habitats are at the edges of their range in our inclement island climate, and are abundant on the continent. The arable weeds, such as corn buttercup, that figure prominently in the list aren't even true natives but ancient, accidental introductions from southern Europe that are doing very well in their home countries. The species chosen as the symbol of the report - the beautiful blue field gentian - is prolific in Scandinavia.

This botanical Domesday Book is less about true extinction than impoverishment: the closing down of personal experiences, the vanishing of living landmarks that help define places and communities, the eclipse of the fundamental elements of those intricate, mutually dependent networks of animal and plant that make up ecosystems. It suggests that alongside the sometimes crude index of biodiversity, we need another: bioluxuriance, a measure of the spread of organisms, of their living where they belong, not herded into biological ghettoes and token nature reserves.

Yet if we're beginning to acknowledge and document this creeping erosion of the living systems we inhabit, why aren't we more bothered? Why isn't local extinction - the first, inexorable step towards a more comprehensive termination, after all - a source of horror, of self-interested panic, of public response? Perhaps, ironically, the acceptance of the process of evolution has credited it with almost supernatural regenerative power: the great engine of life will cope, somehow. Or perhaps we believe we will eventually be able to do the job ourselves, putting back into the wild species we've nurtured in captivity, even recreating vanished plants from strips of DNA.

Extinction is a fact of life, and doesn't have the power to shock any more. Stephen Jay Gould's extraordinary book, Wonderful Life, put paid to any lingering beliefs in the sanctity of species, or the inexorable "upward" progress of evolution. Five hundred million years ago there was an explosion of biological creativity that generated a variety of life far surpassing that existing on the earth today. All of it has vanished, been discarded, without a single human lifting a destructive finger.

Knowledge makes extinction a moral problem as well as a material one. Can we accept being conscious witnesses - or worse, accomplices - in the erasure of the unique outcomes of hundreds of millions of years of natural trial and error? And do we think we know enough to draw ethical lines, decide population sizes, judge which species are of most importance - not for us, but for the biosphere?

In the 1930s Walter Benjamin described the changed status that technological intervention gave to works of art. His celebrated essay could well be retitled Nature in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." Authenticity in the natural world isn't only about humans' aesthetic experiences; it is about the actual existence of living organisms.

So many of the arguments about extinction are couched in human-centred terms. The arable weed will tomorrow be the staple crop. The wild orchid has an aura that the garden specimen lacks. Forgetting their hubris for a moment, these only work for a few species. At the end of the line, the one solid argument for the preservation of species is an a priori ethical one: they are important in their own right, simply because they exist, as part of the unfathomable intricacy of life. So, of course, are we, and if we can enjoy our common inheritance and good fortune - celebrate the inexplicable, extravagant mimicry of the self-pollinating bee orchid - then so much the better.

Richard Mabey's books include Flora Britannica and Nature Cure

WATERLOG. ROGER DEAKIN

It was at the height of this drenching in the summer of 1996 that the notion of a long swim through Britain began to form itself. I wanted to follow the rain on its meanderings about our land to rejoin the sea, to break out of the frustration of a lifetime doing lengths, of endlessly turning back on myself like a tiger pacing its cage. I began to dream of secret swimming holes and a journey of discovery through what William Morris, in the title to one of his romances, called The Water of the Wondrous Isles. My inspiration was John Cheever's classic short story 'The Swimmer', in which the hero, Ned Merrill, decides to swim the eight miles home from a party on Long Island via a series of his neighbours' swimming pools. One sentence in the story stood out and worked on my imagination: 'He seemed to see, with a cartographer's eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.'

When you swim, you feel your body for what it mostly is - water - and it begins to move with the water around it. No wonder we feel such sympathy for beached whales; we are beached at birth ourselves. To swim is to experience how it was before you were born. Once in the water, you are immersed in an intensely private world as you were in the womb. These amniotic waters are both utterly safe and yet terrifying, for at birth anything could go wrong, and you are assailed by all kinds of unknown forces over which you have no control. This may account for the anxieties every swimmer experiences from time to time in deep water. A swallow dive off the high board into the void is an image that brings together all the contradictions of birth. The swimmer experiences the terror and the bliss of being born.

Natural water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other, it transmits its own self-regenerating powers to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression, and come out a whistling idiot. There is a feeling of absolute freedom and wildness that comes with the sheer liberation of nakedness as well as weightlessness in natural water, and it leads to a deep bond with the bathing-place.

I am no champion, just a competent swimmer with a fair amount of stamina. Part of my intention in setting out on the journey was not to perform any spectacular feats, but to try and learn something of the mystery D. H. Lawrence noticed in his poem 'The Third Thing':

Water is H2O, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one,

But there is also a third thing, that makes it water

And nobody knows what that is.

O Altitudo!

An Interview with Robert Macfarlane

---

Brian Dillon

On 2 August 1802, Samuel Taylor Coleridge - who was already in the habit of scaling mountains and, instead of descending by the safest available route, making his way back down by the first, often perilous, pathway that presented itself—ascended Scafell, England´s second-highest mountain, in the Lake District. This time, on the way down, he got stuck, and found himself facing a twelve-foot drop to a ledge so narrow that "...if I dropt down upon it I must of necessity have fallen backwards and of course killed myself".
Coleridge survived, and in the account he later gave of the escapade, rehearsed some key terms from a mountainous aesthetic that has flourished for at least two centuries: the experience, he said, was one of prophecy, trance, delight, shame, pain, dreaming, madness, and laughter.
Robert Macfarlane is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he teaches English literature. He has recently published Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (2007) and The Wild Places (2007), a tour and study of the wildernesses of Britain and Ireland. Macfarlane´s first book, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination (2003), essays a historical and personal description of the mixed aesthetic, moral, and scientific modes of mountain appreciation: from the crossing of the Simplon Pass by Thomas Burnet in 1672 to the disastrous attempt on Everest by George Mallory in 1924.