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.

John Robert Cozens (1752 - December 14, 1797), was an English draftsman and painter of romantic watercolor landscapes.

The son of the Russian-born drawing master and watercolorist, Alexander Cozens, John Robert Cozens was born in London. He studied under his father and began to exhibit some early drawings with the Society of Artists in 1767. In 1776, he displayed a large oil painting at the Royal Academy in London. 1776-79 he spent some time in Switzerland and Italy, where he drew Alpine and Italian views. In 1779 he went back to London. In 1782, he made his second visit to Italy, spending much time at Naples. In 1783, he returned to England. In 1789, he published a set of Delineations of the General Character ... of Forest Trees. Three years previous to his death he became a lunatic and was supported by Dr. Thomas Monro. He died in London.

Cozens executed watercolors in curious atmospherical effects and illusions which had some influence on Thomas Girtin and J.M.W. Turner. Indeed, his work is full of poetry. There is a solemn grandeur in his Alpine views and a sense of vastness, a tender tranquillity and a kind of mystery in most of his paintings, leaving parts in his pictures for the imagination of the spectator to dwell on and search into. John Constable called him "the greatest genius that ever touched landscape." On the other hand, Cozens never departed from his primitive, almost rudimentary, manner of painting, which causes several of his works to look very like colored engravings.

See also English school of painting

All the beautiful birds flew away

back to Africa warm nests, whereas the solitary Robin has nowhere to go.
She stays and he stays and they never meet because the rule for the ones in their species
is to stay put and alone.
It´s autumn, looks like winter, miss all the colourful birds of spring
but in the pale misty days the red chest brings some hapinness,
his song big joy.

The Cow

The friendly cow all red and white,
I love with all my heart:
She gives me cream with all her might,
To eat with apple tart.

She wanders lowing here and there,
And yet she cannot stray,
All in the pleasant open air,
The pleasant light of day;

And blown by all the wind that pass
And wet with all the showers,
She walks among the meadow´grass
And eats the meadow flowers.

by Robert Louis Stevenson

Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen

Now I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing
HallelujahHallelujah
HallelujahHallelujah
Hallelujah

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you
To a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light
In every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
Hallelujah,Hallelujah

Three Little Birds

Dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry about a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Rise up this morning,
Smiled with the rising sun,
Three little birds
Pitch by my doorstep
Singing sweet songs
Of melodies pure and true,
Saying, (this is my message to you-ou-ou:)

Singing: dont worry bout a thing, ´cause every little thing gonna be all right.
Singing: dont worry (dont worry) ´bout a thing, cause every little thing gonna be all right!

Helpless

There is a town in north Ontario,
With dream comfort memory to spare,
And in my mind I still need a place to go,
All my changes were there.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless
Baby can you hear me now?
The chains are locked and tied across the door,
Baby, sing with me somehow.

Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the sky,
Throwing shadows on our eyes.
Leave us
Helpless, helpless, helpless.

Francis Bacon

The contemplation of things as they are,
Without error or confusion,
Without substitution or imposture,
Is in itself a nobler thing
Than a whole harvest of invention.

John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a
promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend or of thine own were.
Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee.

John Lilly by Laurie Anderson

Now in this book there are a lot of stories about talking animals: talking snakes, and birds, and fish; and about people who try to communicate with them.
John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank. And the whale kept asking him questions telepathically.
And one of the questions the whale kept asking was: "Do all oceans have walls?"

They Are Not Long

Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam.
Horace , Odas 1.4

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter.
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson, 1896