Our Place in the Landscape

The lines of mist that still streak the valley after dawn hang above the frosted leaves lying beneath the trees. As each day's light shrinks towards the Winter Solstice, the dawn comes late and the light levels dim long before the afternoon is over.

Last night it was brighter after sunset than the hours before as the Full Moon rose and lit the air with a clarity that was sharper than the diffused sunlight of the day as the air cleared and cloud cover dispersed on the winds so it was still for a while.

So there was a frost this early morning, but not for long. Some cloud cover returned though there was also plenty of pale-blue sky and clear sunlight. Now it is afternoon and the rain has returned. In such ways the weather shifts the feel of days and nights, shifts the look of the land from day to day or even within the passing of the current few hours of sunlight.

What of our weather clocks, the ways we internalise the passing seasons, the transformations from Spring to Summer, from Autumn to Winter, and within those seasons from one day to another, from one feature of the weather to another. If the nature of what we see changes with the clarity of the light, the falling of rain or snow, the thickening or dispersal of cloud, the pressure of the air; does our knowledge of how or why this happens remove us from it as much as the heated rooms and protective rooves under which we take shelter?

Do we still have a place in the landscape that we look out upon as an objective space, or do we no longer belong there? The question seems to need asking, but also to need refusing. Our place cannot be denied but at the same time our separation is also undeniable. With such contradictions we live and work and play in a world of our own creation, but equally in one that creates us as inexorably as it creates the shifting of the winds, the tides, the weather.

So the lifting of the mist in the valley this morning still feels like a subjective fact of which I am a part, rather than something merely watched and noted.

Weather Lore

Pressure falling, so that the clouds drift
in and down over the high ground and under
currents of dry air which slowly uplift
pushing and pulling the rain in from far


out on the Atlantic – ocean currents
driving the moist winds forming the damp air
for a damp island’s weather, shaping the bent
tree branches on western coasts easterly.


In the dark a wind gets up, another change
of air for this island in the northern seas
buffeted by tail winds from the remains
of tropical storms and hurricane breezes;


temperate considering its latitude
because of what prevails above the stream
that flows our way. But if we get a rude
blast from the north-east, bringing a snow storm


on cold air from Siberia, the Steppes,
swaying our drift from the oceanic
swell and lull that feeds our dreams, our precepts
swing with the weathervane and a cold snap


turning away from western themes to face
harsher music, different spheres of influence,
until the vane swings back and we re-trace
again the steps of the transatlantic dance.

Sixteenth Century Weather

The Shepheardes Calendar

September

Diggon, I am so stiffe, and so stanck,

That vneth may I stand any more:

And nowe the Westerne wind bloweth sore,

That nowe is in his chiefe souereigntee,

Beating the withered leafe from the tree.

Sitte we downe here under the hill:

Tho may we talke, and tellen our fill,

And make a mocke at the blustring blast.

Now say on Diggon, what euer thou hast.

Were the seasons in a different configuration in the 16th century? September seems rather early for the leaves to be blown off the trees and I've noticed this elsewhere since deciding to use The Shepheardes Calendar to mark the passing months. Either Spenser was not particularly accurate in this or changes happen at different times now. The New Style calendar, adopted in 1732, means that we are thirteen days in advance of Spenser's time. So this might account for part of this effect. But surely not all of it.