Speak to me the misty morn
Where lichen drips, the heart gladdens
Hello from the moss,
There is a strangeness to these weeks: we are still on British Summer Time, but it is definitely Autumn. Last week brought soft mists one day and a sharp frost the next. Sadly circumstances limited my ability to be out where I wanted to be, but I did steal an hour. Sometimes that is enough. I count my good fortune to be able to wander freely, with only leaves carried on the wind and rain falling from the sky.
In contrast to last week’s letters—yes there were two!—this one is image rich, sharing the visual poetry of a misty morning, and a few words. And as encore, a selection of photographs to complement last Thursday’s Prelude to Carnival.
I prepare to wrap up warm for a walk—there are traces of snow on the hills left by the night’s rain, and the wind carries a cold promise—and see if I can again record my audio voiceover outside.
We wake, becalmed in a thick sea of mist. The lawn is grazed with what might be frost and bears the hoof prints of visiting deer. The opportunity is too great to resist. The morning cuppa is essential but bowl of muesli aside, breakfast can wait. There won’t be long, so a walk down to the end of the path will have to do.
This is, in fact, a small sacrifice—here wet pasture meets birch at the edge of a pine plantation, and these trees are the first to colour. They drip with lichen as well as water. It’s a messy place, full of fallen branches, dead wood, a chaos of rushes and star moss, but with the mist and the slow rising sun it may have potential, and perhaps will gladden the heart. And so it has, and does.
A little hiccup jolted me out of my complacent assumption that visual acuity will outlive physical capacity—I dearly hope that it will; I would be lost without my sight. The threads of life intertwine: the photographs from the misty morning that I’m sharing with you, treatment for a recurring eye condition that for now leaves it blurry, and the content of A Corrected View, my letter to you this time last year. In it, I consider how photographic vision can change with time through influence, experimentation and acceptance of our own, natural, vision. Doing so allowed me to connect what at the time seemed to be disparate lines of enquiry in my practice.
This variable, unpredictable, tension between sharp and soft also brings to mind the essay I wrote about windows and mirrors in photography: Whispers in the Gallery. What does your art and photography say about you. Vision is also an axis that we move along, not always in the same direction.
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Until next week,
Encore:
Last week I took you on a walk, and encouraged you to imagine what I saw. Here are the photographs to partner my words in Prelude to carnival: A Scottish autumn arrives quietly.
The moss looks plump and a little guilty
Purple scabious still bloom, though some of their flowers are morphing through green into skeletal stars.
I lose myself in moisture-dotted webs and fading heather… most of those miniature bells, complete with stamen ringers, have taken on a skin-like tone.
The leaves—yellow, spotted, brown—sit perched and punctured as adornments on ling, flags and banners on sheet webs.
…the fiery whorled leaves of chickweed-wintergreen intensified against a bed of green moss or the lichen that carpets the walls and floor of this place with grey-green fractals
If you enjoy seeing through my eyes, the beauty and tranquility shared each week, you might wish to make a small one-off donation. To those of you who have done so: a heartfelt thank you.
All words and images copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted
Beautiful and rich, thank you
Ahh another magic walk through words and photographs! Thank you!