All day I’ve been having enormous fun with books and making a book dance out of nothingness, about things that are among the most important to me in the world, things like the world, and how words are a very old magic given from people who lived with the earth and knew some things about it. By the time I was ready to go out a-walking, a spring snow had hit, although there was no shortage of light.

Migrating Geese Sitting it Out in a Pasture Field

I thought I had a found a bit of nature. Ah, such a naive Canadian fellow. You must be smiling — if you’re not shaking your head. The geese, mind you, had a clear idea about things…

Don’t Worry. When I Walked Away They Came Back

Still, a rickety little camera and a lot of zoom in the snow, boring, right, so I walked on, and on and on, enjoying the snow. I tell you, things looked pretty good in the light. I thought that was the story. New snow acts like a lens for light, which brings up contrast, which makes things look, well, fantastic, like this…

Nature. The Canadian is at It Again

And waterfalls. And ones that no one goes to, yet. Secret waterfalls. Oh, Canada, or what!

And true Canadian that I am, raised on the Canadian myth that things start best with nothing, thought, well, nature, eh, and photography, whoa, and working together yet, huh, and that was pretty inarticulate, wasn’t it. Sheesh. The wind was nice, though, and it was good to feel cold after so many days of sun. So, horses, right. Always friendly and ready to pose…

Well, Actually, Telling Me That It’s Time for Hay

But I thought, you know, the fence, ugh. We want the wild land, the earth, her own face, and what do we have? A fence. What a bust. But then the walking started doing its magic and I started to see, not because of the light, or the camera focussing my mind, but because the world was starting to sink into me after 5000 words of some pretty crazy writing, and this is what I remembered looking at just a minute before when I took a picture by reflex …

Horses at Home

There are no prettily arranged farms in iceland, because they’re not farms. They’re cities. 

And I got to thinking, what if I stopped looking for the earth, would I find it? So I looked around …

A Fence, a Crop of Larches, a 4×4 Track

In Canada, this would be considered a portrait of intrusion on a landscape. Here, it doesn’t feel like that.

What is going on? I wondered. So I looked around some more…

The Neighbourhood Sheep Fold

Of course, by this time I was being observed, because it was still hay time …

The world is physical, and humans are among its recorders. So are horses. 

The idea of nature, as a universal quality, spread across the earth and observable by all humans equally, especially through photography, is just not true. The word ‘Nature’ might be a word whose meaning has been twisted and lost.

Nature? 

Nature is not the wild world? Then what is it?

That horse seems to know, doesn’t it.