Hey! Penny Scott has a blog!



Penny is a friend here on Bowen and someone who cares deeply about this place, and about communities. I'm looking forward to reading what she has to say about life here on Bowen.



So with Penny, Mark and Richard as well as myself, a full 0.1% of Bowen blogs. Whoo hoo!

Hello to everyone visiting because of this blog's mention at Flemming's site.



I have been following the discussion on geoblogging and the stuff happening with GeoURL, and I just wanted to share again a post I made here back in June relating to blogging place. In that post was a quote from the American nature writer Barry Lopez who says:

"The shape and character of those relationships in a person's thinking, I believe, are deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature - the intricate history of one's life in the land, even life in the city, where wind, the chirp of birds, the line of a falling leaf are known. These thoughts are arranged, further, according to the thread of one's moral, intellectual and spiritual development. The interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of an individual mind is affected by the land as it is the genes."

Sorry I don't have comments, but send me email if you have thoughts on this and I'll post stuff here. Or leave a comment :-)



And then I'll get back to talking about how amazingly warm the weather has been around here, and how clear the nights have been, with just a think waxing moon setting early and allowing the stars to shine, and the colour in Jupiter and Saturn overhead to be seen with the naked eye, yellow and buff respectively.



And while I'm at it, we had another amazing Squamish wind last night, as air got forced off the continent down Howe Sound and out into the Strait of Georgia. The winds gusted to 80 km/h, but only along a think winding sea level jetstream, which barely riffled the douglas-firs in front of our place.

My erstwhile correspondent Flemming Funch, from Van Nuys California wrote this nice piece noticing this blog and the whole notion of people blogging places. Since I added that set of links to this page, several people have remarked that we might be on to something. It's my belief that, just as weblogs link the web to itself, "geoblogs" (my term!) link people to the landscape and that is what this blog is about.



Visit some of those other folks out there and see what I mean.

Robert Brady, living in Japan, just does really nice work. Here is an entry from hsi blog, Notes From Pure Land Mountain on fire:

MORE LIGHT



...like all living things a fire is a river of need, a kind of conversation, a dialog of light with darkness, like the fire in the sky and in a leaf. The heart itself is a flame, ablaze at the sight of itself in another eye; we carry all this like a sky in ourselves, and so when we come to tend a fire, we find that delight of meeting an old friend. Just stir this bit here and the fire flares up, fuel once starved for air now fed, from ember to flame, setting new thoughts alight. Tending a fire is the whole soul's delight, much like tending to life itself; in return the fire shares more than light and warmth, if we listen to its ancient tongue, for it speaks a language that lived far before and lives yet within us: This is the way you should tend yourself; this is the way you should tend others and your world. The fire is that of us outside ourselves. We recognize this tacitly, as we do in the light of stars. When we gaze into a fire's light we gaze into a mystic mirror, upon vast and untold secrets of ourselves. What we find there we feel to our depths, but cannot say.

The same thing is going on here too, as I work through our huge pile of mill ends. It's a nice challenge trying not to burn them too hot, getting a nice bed of coals and then acheiving the ultimate trance inducing moment when the flames seem to turn to liquid and pour gently over the coals, the air in the stove literally glowing.



Ahhhhh...

The weather has been a lot clearer and warmer these days, with a couple of spectacular sunsets.



Although this is a big file, enjoy it:

I'm looking out this morning over a churning Queen Charlotte Channel. The waves have been whipped up by a wind storm that is blowing out, having lasted the better part of 12 hours overnight. There was no damage and the power stayed on - by some miracle - but the wind and rain was unbelievable. It's not like me to wake up in the middle of the night, cowering under my blankets and hoping that the trees remains standing, but that's what happened.



This is a classic pineapple express. The wind is straight out ot the southeast, coming ahead of a low pressure system that rose form the wtaers off northern California earlier this week. The air is warm - as I write it is about +8 degrees - and the rain is heavy. There are bands of rain and clouds going through now as the squall line of the storm passes over us. We typically get wind warnings for storms that pack winds of 50-70km/h, but I am certain that last night's winds topped 90km/h and perhaps even higher. This is what is referred to as "storm force," and these winds can do serious damage.



THis storm was in stark copntrast to the day I had on New Year's Eve, when I had a chance to head down to Cape Roger Curtis by myself. We have been down there a lot lately. It's really, in many ways, the spiritual centre of the island for a lot of people. To get out to the Cape involves a 25 minute hike that starts high and goes down, giving one the impression that one is really descending into something. Going deep as it were. Immediately, as the trail levels out, the serentiy of the forest becomes overwhelming. It's a mixed forest, with large groves of alder and huge clumps of sword and deer ferns mixed with wester red cedars, Douglas-firs and grand firs.



The trail, which is an old road, winds through this forest and along the shore, past a little beach to the autoimated lighthouse at the Cape itself. That's where I plonked myself for an hour or so, watching a raft of a couple hundred surf scoters flying back and forth between Tunstall Bay and the Strait of Georgia which opens up to the north west.



The swell from the Strait crashes on the rocks, and as I was sitting there it occured to me that this is a very old soundscape. In fact the sound of water against the shore has been heard uninteruppted for at least 10,000 years here, since the ice cleared from this point of land and the shoreline took on the shape it has today. And before that, the sound of waves on shore is older than life itself on earth, older than any of the ears that have evolved to hear it.



Such intense conptemplation and connection with old old history is not out of ordinary at the Cape. For me, the very sound of the word "Cape" implies a windswept headland, stuck out into the elements, buffeted by primal forces.



It was a phenomenal way to end the old year and look forward to the new one. So all the best to you who read this log of life here.



I'm curious as the new year begins, who is out there. Drop me a line just to say "me!".

Happy New Year.