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Heck, it’s hot!
Early …
Early … and oh, so calm and quiet – my soul, and the loch.
I’ve been watching a heron for a quarter hour or more. And I think he / she has been watching me.
And then on towards mid-morning. Hot, dry and very out of puff after the climb up to St Anthony’s Chapel but, all year round, the view is always worth it. And above the sound of my heart’s pounding I hear ‘rest awhile’ – and I do. Then it’s time to wend my way down towards breakfast …
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Reflection
The one just minutes from the other – reflection is a feature in the presence of each, ancient and modern.
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Atop Salisbury Crags
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It has been a hot and sticky day in Edinburgh – but the humidity made for some beautiful misty views across the Firth of Forth to Fife this morning – and a modest degree of satisfaction about having hiked up to the top of Salisbury Crags – a healthy contribution to today’s 17,500 steps …
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Holyrood Snapshots
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Mixed weather, changing by the minute, makes Holyrood an exceptionally photogenic place. Morning and evening walks, often along the same route, showcase the dynamics of the area. Here ancient and modern meet, and it’s said that time spent alongside any body of water is good for us. I have a favoured bench beside St Margaret’s Loch in the shadow of the ruins of St Anthony’s Chapel. There I wonder sometimes whether a stranger might be able to tell how much I love this city and its marvellous mix of cityscape, countryside, seascape and skyscape all in one?
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Maintenance & Back Up
Please note that after some (back up) technical issues and data loss this site is currently undergoing maintenance from 7th August 2025 onwards.
Some historical posts and photos will be temporarily unavailable or containing broken links.
I hope to complete the lengthy process of manual restoration over the coming months. Newer posts, from today, of course, should be unaffected.
Thank you for your interest.
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Summer days
26th July and it’s a busy, hot and humid late afternoon in Edinburgh. It’s going to get livelier, quickly. In the course of the next four weeks the population will increase by more than a million people come for the numerous festivals, including the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Edinburgh International Festival, and the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. Ticket sales for these events often exceed 3-4 million.
Street performers draw huge crowds on the Royal Mile, colourful posters, city-wide, announce who and what’s on where, in 265 venues. Eyes and ears are entranced by the Castle as home to the spectacular Tattoo, there’ll be astonishing acrobatics, comedy, every kind of music and drama imaginable, millions of meals served, laughter, appreciation and energy in the very air. By way of a sample, one of my favourites last year was the charismatic Camille O’Sullivan, seen here in Reading, whose Loveletters at Edinburgh’s Roxy will be another sell-out. Summer days and nights …
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Suntanned
Well, sun-tanned isn’t exactly accurate. I actually look like a traffic light! Lakeland has been soaking up the sun this week, and time on a lake is reflective in more ways than one! Fabulous, though, whichever way you look. Green, blue, and – from our perspective – reaching up to life and light …
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Morning
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and it strikes me that
this city has come alive
like this through aeons
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Edinburgh haar
Edinburgh’s sea haar
rolls oe’r the land in silence
softly touching all
Edinburgh’s sea mist, which arrives rolling as surprise, with stealth, and in silence, is restful to tired eyes. It carries a soft damp chill, like breath in a snowy landscape, or a kneeling to retrieve fruit from a freezer. It’s Edinburgh character. It’s gift. It’s a picture. It’s reminder of the rolling panoply of nature-imbued life. And watching the landscape going and coming, and coming and going, softened, and thereby refreshed, it’s as though one were summoned by love.
Happy are they for whom
haar-softened edges come to
show the world anew
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Sunlight
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I’ve enjoyed a lovely afternoon with one of my Lakeland neighbours today – a good catch-up generally, and a sharing of our love for gardens and sunlight illuminating flower and leaf particularly. Buds still tight on my beloved acer tree have, in the last 24 hours, opened into fresh and beautiful leaf, and as for the blossoms and flowers in my friend’s garden … they’re spellbinding! The first and the last photos here were made in my garden. The others, in his.
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Everything listens
not to produce some
thing but just to acknowledge
the good in paintingthe brush moves without
urgency and colours touch
listening paperand my listening
and that of paper and brush
colour memoryand in the quiet
something of silence settles
deeper than colour
Before colour becomes form, before brush becomes movement, there is a moment of stillness where everything listens. And in that stillness, and in that listening, in mere wisp of movement, in the slightest glance into light – a gently persistent voice invites me to attend to ‘something … deeper than colour’
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From the mindfulness bench
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What we need is here
Wendell Berry – from The Wild Geese
A meditation on presence, play, and the scent of red leather
A wonderfully pale blue sky has framed Dumfries and Galloway in the last couple of days. Warm sunshine, together with the provision of a lovely ‘mindfulness bench,’ just big enough for two people, and overlooking the pond and Dalbeattie Burn at Colliston Park, made it an absolute pleasure to spend a couple of happy hours in this 9.5 acre park playing with my younger daughter and grandchildren. Yes, we shared some mindfulness, and – as is quite often the case after a time of stillness – the light scent of my daughter’s red leather jacket lingers with me now. My teenage grandson spoke of being willing enough, but needing practice at writing 1000 word essays, and of enjoyment in working with his hands. His younger sister ‘took us’ all – by way of an imaginary tractor, to Kirkcudbright – 42 miles away, ‘for fish and chips,’ returning just in time for (actual) donuts from Dalbeattie bakery before we went our separate ways. Flowers, sunshine, sky, running burn, meditation, conversation, warm scent, dreamscape and donuts …
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It is a serious thing / just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in the broken world
Mary Oliver – from Invitation
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Carlingwark loch
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at Carlingwark loch
the pale blue sky was touched
by wisps of angels.
To the one who watched the sky
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Look at the sky. That’s enough – Rainer Maria Rilke
we write in dusk what
morning might understand …
… he’d penned thus far. The sky now very pale blue, and crossed by pink floss, he’d wondered – ‘is that a satellite, or a star?’
And in the way of such things, stillness descended as it often does when the answer doesn’t really matter, nor whether satellite-or-star is near or far.
And from time to time, amid the gentle reverie, he became aware of illuminated windows, some with orange glow, one a string of white fairy light, to the right a flickering quadrant, and several with the kind of log-fire-warmth one sees mid-winter through the steamed-up panes of an Edinburgh bar.
Fleetingly he wondered whether any behind those windows were ever aware of his being at his window – from over there, from just beyond entirely clear focus, afar.
And then, on Thursday morning, aware of windows having featured in his deeply restful dreams, he found a small sage green envelope had been pushed under his door. There was a thoughtfulness about the sort of chosen stationery, with the slightest trace of scent about it, for special sorts of notes – he’d seen once or twice before. And – with quiet delight – he’s contemplated the content of that note now, for a week or two, or more:
To the one over there who watched
the sky when I did, thank you for being
a quiet lantern in the dusk. We never
spoke, but your stillness reached me –
and towards the end of a frenetic day
it mattered, and quietened me, more
than I can say
Sometimes he was mildly aware of an angel at his shoulder. Tonight, in a quiet light, he heard her whisper
You looked at the sky
like it was enoughIt was
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Sometimes we meet ourselves in the gaze of another, across silence
There are moments when the soul touches the world, and the world gently touches back
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes – Marcel Proust