Home Again

“Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
― Mary Oliver, Upstream; Selected Essays

After a lovely Christmas in Saskatchewan, we are back in Calgary. We saw lots of critters on the drive yesterday. None on the road, thank goodness. I will post more on this but I wanted to include a photo of what I consider the most fascinating animal in Canada, the Pronghorn Antelope. Yesterday we saw the largest herd we have ever seen, a very welcome sight.

https://forum.americanexpedition.us/pronghorn-antelope-information-facts-and-photos

https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/pronghorn

https://nhpbs.org/natureworks/pronghorn.htm

Happy Holidays

“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
 
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek 

Venice Floods

Anyone that knows us, knows that Venice is our favourite city. We were there only a few weeks before the floods this year, This photo is taken of the area directly in front of the walled garden of our hotel.

More images of the flooding
https://mymodernmet.com/natalia-elena-massi-venice-flood/

Morning Mist

"I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field"

Mary Oliver from Upstream

Winter Walk Dec 11th.

  "No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you're an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and the heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. What ever you know about their true natures is grafted on top of that." 

from Isle of the Dead

by Roger Zelazny

Summer Phoebe

 "What will the creature made all of seadrift; do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

Ursula K. LeGuin
The Lathe of Heaven

Jay in the Garden (Hi Nessa thanks for stopping by)

""Oh look!" 

There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple, 

Fearless and gay as our love, 

A bluejay cocked his crest! 

Oh who can tell the range of joy 

Or set the bounds of beauty? "

from A Winter Blue Jay

by Sara Teasdale

" I would clothe you in feathers

You are too bare in your long bones when the wind

sighs in the snow

You are the movement of birds"

from Words from the Aviary

(for Monique)

by D.G. Jones

It is snowing today. but I am cheating these photos were taken during a snow fall in early Oct. I suspect my favourite winter birds are the Dark-Eyed Juncos, who appear with the snow and disappear when it does. This year we had lots. They really seemed to be interested in the small seeds that fell from the volunteer weeds in  the patio, which we left in place. The Juncos interest me  because of their subtle colours and also the variation between birds. According to the Canadian Wildlife Federation our weeds, twiggy yard and lack of a fall cleanup was just what Junco's like. We also had a lot of fall warblers so this is a strategy we plan to stick to. 

http://cwf-fcf.org/en/resources/encyclopedias/fauna/birds/dark-eyed-junco.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIx6n5mtWI5gIVRCCtBh16bQHXEAAYASAAEgJxPPD_BwE

Haunted Florence

“Every moment of the night

Forever changing places

And they put out the star-light 

With the breath from their pale faces” 

― Edgar Allen Poe

Florence Sept. 2019 / The Arno River rose to its highest levels today since 1992.

“Everything about Florence seems to be colored with a mild violet, like diluted wine.”

Henry James

It does not seem to end.

https://www.theflorentine.net/news/2019/11/flooding-tuscany-florence/

Venice Sept 2019 Reflections

“White swan of cities slumbering in thy nest…
White phantom city, whose untrodden streets
Are rivers, and whose pavements are the shifting
Shadows of the palaces and strips of sky.”


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Venice 2019 Thinking of you.

Florence

"Through these old streets I wander dreamily; 
Around me Florence sweeps her busy tide of life." 

-William Leighton

The River Arno, Florence

AND I: “Through midst of Tuscany there wanders
A streamlet that is born in Falterona,
And not a hundred miles of course suffice it; Dante, Purgatory, Canto XIV, trans. Longfellow

2019 Canadian National Poultry Show

Yesterday we travelled to Olds Alberta with our friends Lynda and Jan for
2019 Canadian National Poultry Show in Olds. The show was great, there were many different varieties of ducks, geese and particularly chickens. The patterns and iridescence of the feathers on these birds as incredible and something you would never see from a photo. Should you get the opportunity to see this type of show I would really encourage you to go. 

We also had a lovely lunch at Grouchy Daddy's, we all gave it a thumb's up. 

https://www.grouchydaddys.com

Dante and Florence

"But I will make another tongue arise

As lofty and more sweet, in which expressed 

The hero’s ardour, or the lover’s sighs,

Shall find alike such sounds for every theme

That every word, as brilliant as thy skies 

Shall realise a Poet’s proudest dream"

from The Prophecy of Dante

Lord Byron

Happy Halloween

“The scythe fell and lay in the grass like a lost smile.” 

From The Halloween Tree

Ray Bradbury

The Basilica di Santa Croce, Florence (Dante is actually buried in Ravenna)

"When Truth shall strike their eyes through many a tear,

And make them own the Prophet in his tomb "

from The Prophecy of Dante

Lord Byron

Florence 2019

“Rejoice, Florence, seeing you are so great that over sea and land you flap your wings, and your name is widely known in Hell!”

 Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy 

The Statue of Neptune, Florence

"In 1559, Cosimo I de' Medici launched a competition to design a fountain at a time when a new aqueduct was also being built, the first to bring running water to the city.^[2] The plan was for a statue of Neptune as the primary element, in a chariot drawn by sea-horses, symbolizing Florence's command of the Mediterranean. Initially, Baccio Bandinelli was the sculptor chosen but he died before work began. Sculptor Ammannati was hired to take over and completed the work with assistants and collaborators. The face of Neptune is said to resemble that of the Grand Duke Cosimo.^[3]

The 4.2 meter tall Neptune figure, made of Apuan marble, was completed in 1565 in time for the wedding of Francesco de' Medici I to grand duchess Johanna of Austria.^[4] Florentines were not impressed and called the statue "Il Biancone" ("the white giant").^[5][6] The work on the basin and other aspects of the fountain required nearly ten years. Ammannati and his collaborators added around the perimeter of the basin in a mannerist style, reclining, bronze river gods, laughing satyrs and marble sea-horses emerging from the water. The pedestal on which the statue stands is in the center of the octagonal fountain. It is decorated with the mythical figures of Scylla and Charybdis. The final work was completed in December 1574. The statue on display today is a copy made in the 1800s when the original was moved to the National Museum.^[7][5]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fountain_of_Neptune,_Florence

In Florence our hotel opened the breakfast buffet at 7:00. We found by being up when it opened, we could have a nice meal and then hit the mean streets of Florence. This way we could avoid the crowds for a few hours. A lot of the museums opened a 8:15 so that helped. The fountain, a copy but impressive for all that, was turned on about 8:00. 

I really loved the coloured marble we saw in some statues and church architecture. 

“In that book which is my memory,
On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you,
Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.”

from Vita Nuova

Dante Alighieri

Murano Italy (Art Glass)

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Florence and Venice to be met by a big snow storm. While visiting Venice we took the water bus to Murano the island of the glass blowers. We collect art glass but we did not buy any there. The number of stores was overwhelming and the quality varied wildly.  According to signs in some shop windows lots is imported rather than produced locally. One rule of thumb we adopted was to avoid shops with glass clowns in the window. Murano is lovely, a sort of mini Venice and well worth a visit even if you are not shopping for glass. Instead we visited the glass museum. 

https://museovetro.visitmuve.it/en/home/

Then we ate probably the best meal of the trip while sitting next to the canal people/dog watching and visited a church that boasts, as well as the normal saintly bits, dragon bones. My wife and I love to visit old churches when we travel and this was a beautiful example with a two story Byzantine exterior.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dragon-bones-of-santa-maria-e-san-donato

As on our previous trip we bought our glass at the shop of Vittorio Costantini in Venice. His wife Graziella is also on hand to chat with visitors and display the pieces they have for sale. (his personal collection, also on view is incredible). They are two of the nicest people you could meet and his lamp work sculptures of birds, fish, insects and other denizens of the microcosmos he finds so fascinating, are outstanding. 

http://www.vittoriocostantini.com/en/home-2/

Murano Museum 

Florence 2019 (There and back again)

"He saw clearly how plain and simple – how narrow, even – it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."

from The Wind in the Willow

by Kenneth Grahame 

Venice 2016

And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying 

something about Venice.” 

from Invisible Cites 

By Italio Calvino

Dorothy Badlands

"out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the 
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived 
processional of space."

Stone's Secret
Margaret Avison

Ant and flower, Dorothy

Love: as though the stars
rushed in upon a void, and in extinction
left a flower.

Disintegration in a Dream of Love
D.G. Jones

Dorothy Alberta

"unconscious of the hand of time

that makes all things vanish, all fade,

all suffer change.

And they live today as if they were forever,

when they are here only for a day. 

And I observe, and I am like them

only for a day "

from Early Morning

by Louis Dudek

https://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/alberta/dorothy.htm

Dorothy Alberta

"INTO my heart on air that kills 

From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content, 

I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

And cannot come again."

from A Shropshire Lad

by A. E. Housman 

Warblers

"One brilliantly cold Alberta day
the teacher wrote on the blackboard
'1928' -- for the first time. Everything was changing "

from A Seed of History
by Margaret Avison

One advantage of having an overgrown weedy tip as a yard is the number of birds in this case warblers that stop by during migration. 





In one hour, I photographed one or more of the following Yellow-Rumped Warbler, American Redstart, Wilsons Warbler, Hairy Woodpecker, and possibly a Yellow Crowned Warbler. One problem with the current software programmers love for updating software that was actually working fine, means most of the photos from that session are now lost. I am not taking credit, it is all on them. Just saying.



"Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing."

from Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear
by Gwendolyn MacEwen