Of Crystal Balls and Faded Fake Flowers . . .

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Another cry in the wilderness . . . journeying out into endless space . . .
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As reflections go this weekend, it's not much of a reflection in this crystal ball, a bit of sky with horizon, a double reflection actually, from the front outer surface, and from the back inner surface, the photographer doubled in the middle, the same elbow pointing up and down.
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A crystal ball on a gravestone, an overturned candle holder.
Who can say what the future holds ?
What wavering flame will light the ever after ?
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Where do the fake flowers come from that people put on graves ?
How on earth are they made ?
No machine could do this painstaking work so perfectly
I can't help but wonder if there are kids in sweat shops
Somewhere sewing these bits of synthetic fabric together,
Forming the brittle blooms, glued on plastic stalks,
And finally placed on tombstones  ?
Looking surprisingly like real flowers
Not wilting quite so fast as the natural
Yet fading nevertheless
Over the passing years
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What kind of a world do we live in
Where massive amounts of industrial and human energy
Are expended churning out fake plastic flowers ?
I find myself asking the question more and more often these days :
What if we were wrong ?
What if we were wrong about nearly everything ?
What if there was another way to live ?
A way to live with no plastics strangling our oceans,
No petroleum causing wars, no guns, no money,
No cars, no television, no movies,
No computers to send thoughts like this around the world,
No nuclear anything, no jets screaming across the skies,
No greed, no hate, no tribes bashing each others brains out,
No religions causing only divisions,
While the human race knows only endless multiplication
Subtracting intelligence from the idiocy of infinite addition
A way to live with none of this madness we wallow in today
What if there were another way ?
What if we were wrong ?
What if we were just going through the motions
Because someone told us when we were little
That this was how it had to be ?
What if we were wrong ?
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(Perhaps a subconscious tribute, it occurred to me later, to "Imagine" from Mr Lennon ? Nothing new under the sun . . .)
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" I Read the News Today, Oh Boy ..."

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Today I was dismayed to read
In a French news magazine
The story of a precarious cooling pool
Perched perilously high above the ground
And its precious store of tons and tons of spent nuclear fuel
In the badly damaged building of reactor number four
In a place called Fukushima
And of the radioactive nightmare it could unleash
Should the water in it happen to leak out
In the event of another minor earthquake
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And in the same story learned
That ever growing numbers of outraged Japanese
Are protesting every week now against nuclear energy
They are calling it the Hydrangea (or Hortensia) Revolution
For they have adopted as a symbol the hydrangea flowers
Which bloom in abundance in the summer in Japan
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Hydrangeas also abound in Brittany
Where I photographed a few at close range not long ago
Before I learned about the revolution in progress in Japan
So I offer these images for whatever they are worth
To the revolution, to the people of Japan, to the people of Planet Earth
While hoping it is not too late to avert the catastrophe
Which hangs suspended, fragile yet dreadful to contemplate
Over our heads.
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This evening at the dinner table
I tried to explain to my fifteen year old daughter
What the potential scale of the consequences could be
Were the water to leak and the stored fuel catch fire
But was unable to find adequate words
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The human race perhaps really is
Too smart for its own good
The sorcerer's apprentices may soon have their day
How can such stupidity exist
In a world where delicate hydrangea petals still bloom ?
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A Brittany Bouquet With Reflections . . .

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Why post a picture of of a bright bouquet ? Well, just because. But maybe it was someone's birthday very recently. Or maybe it is someone's wedding anniversary tomorrow. Or maybe... just because life should always be brightly lit by flaming pink bouquets. These flowers cut from the garden outside were seen in a house in Brittany a few days ago. My mother-in-law's to be precise. At 85 she still takes pleasure in gardening and arranging her bright bouquets.
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And for once am getting in relatively early to James Weekend Reflections, with this shot in very old glass in Brittany, in the town of Treguier. I love how the warped surface distorts the shutters and gutter of the house across the street. "Life is but a dream..."
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A few days after the black and white shots were taken shown two posts back, we went back on a much sunnier day to see the house between the rocks in a different light, and caught a bit of a reflection in the pond as well. As you can see the ocean is just behind the rocks and house. Apparently a few years ago during a storm a large wave washed over the property, submerging the car. A precarious place to live.
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Symphony in Orange Minor . . .

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Just from this first image, can you identify the subject matter here, without looking further down ?
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For the anatomically minded among you (who can't help but be a little fascinated by anatomy, when confronted with the marvellously intricate workings of the natural world, including our bodies ?) the finely filigreed lace work of this structure may conjure up memories of distant biology classes, fractals, and all the studies of the most incredible designs that Mother Nature pulls out of her seemingly infinitely wondrous bag of tricks. And no, it is not a tomato behind a dried out leaf.
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Is it clearer now ?
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The wonders that surround us never fail to floor me. Just take the human eye, for example. Compared to the human eye, even the finest of digital cameras with their millions of pixels and an assortment of lenses from fisheye wide angles to super telephotos and everything in between, still cannot compare to what the human eye can capture. And in such a small package too. The lens opening and thickness of the pupil is tiny compared to the lens on any camera, and the retina with its most amazing array of color and light sensibility is still far superior to any film or digital sensor, not to mention the visual processing areas of our brain which leave the software in a camera back in the stone age. How lucky we are to have such wonders already pre-installed as standard equipment at birth, they don't even have to be ordered as options.
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Yes, these are the fruit of chinese lantern plants. (Physalis alkekengi) They showed up unannounced in our garden last year for the first time, maybe the gift of a passing bird (?), and this year there were even more than last year, so I guess they multiply themselves. Last December I did a couple of posts about them, here, and here. This past weekend I was poking about in the garden, and saw that this year's crop had already ripened, many had gone beyond ripe, and were already showing their skeletal structures. So it was well time to harvest them.
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What better favorite plant to decorate a blog called the Magic Lantern Show ? As I delved deeper underneath their wide leaves, I found more and more lanterns in all states of ripeness, many with their fruits visible within, some empty, though with no sign of possible exit for the fruits, leaving me wondering if they had been eaten by gluttonous little scavengers ? Apparently the fruits are good to eat, richer in vitamin C than lemons, according to one website I read today, and full of other therapeutic herbal qualities. If they are not only fun to look at but healthful as well, I may have to plant more of them !
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An autumn breeze blew in a cluster of red leaves around the lanterns that had piled up outside.
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Here they are back in August already well formed, but in varying degrees of advancement. Who knows what mysterious laws govern the transformation from green to gold to rich orange while the fruit seeds develop within ? Who wrote the notes that form the pages of that long slow symphony in orange minor ?
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Finally at the end of an afternoon spent contemplating their mysteries, they whispered to me, "Take us inside, place us in a safe place, enjoy our beauty through the coming winter..." What could I do but obey them ?
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So they have now taken up residence in pottery platter on our coffee table where one can sit and ponder over them regardless of the weather out of doors, where their fine lace forms will perhaps last longer than had they fallen to the ground in the autumn rains, and withered under winter snows.
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As I sat and watched them this November evening, my eyes became unfocused while listening to the soft strains of their gentle orange ballad, and a flowing orange dream took possession of my drifting mind.
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Orange winds blew me further out upon an orange sea . . . where orange waves lapped merrily. ("Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream"?)
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May your autumn days be graced with luminous orange bliss. (for those of you in the southern hemisphere, where Spring is well along now, replace "autumn" with "Spring", and gloat a little :-)
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A Most Beautiful Place . . .

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I'm not sure that I will be able to find any words to express what I felt when I stumbled on this magical place. I had sought it out, it is true, having seen symbols on a map which suggested there might be something worth seeing there. Symbols of the slightest, vaguest sort, which simply indicated a handful of ruins. But oh, the distance between maps and reality can be infinite. No map could have prepared me for the sight of these ruins as we came over a crest of ground and beheld them there, where they stand in majestic silence, near the edge of a high cliff, overlooking a deep valley beyond.
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Hundreds of years ago men from the valley below climbed those cliffs, found a path to the plateau above, and built these rudimentary, rustic shelters where they could pass the summers peacefully alone with their small herds of sheep and goats, in an idyllic, remote, thoroughly secret place. Their women from the village in the valley would have made the hike up there as well to keep the men company, bringing food and other supplies. Who could imagine the summer nights under star filled skies there, a fire burning, the smell of sheep, their wool, milk for cheese-making. Who were these people ? Of what did they die, where are they buried ? And how did they live ? No electricity, no computers, no phones, just survival at hand. Work or starve.
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And yet they built with beauty and grace; arches that still stand when all the stones around have fallen, conquered by gravity. The sense of wonder I felt there, almost overwhelming, is unlike anything I've ever felt, anywhere. This was real. This was alive. Though no one lives there today, the place never died. It will haunt me for a long time to come, maybe forever. Already I want to go back there. To just sit quietly among those stones.
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An ancient iron hinge piece to hold up a shutter, long ago disintegrated.
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A butterfly on an acanthus bloom, looking as though he'd flown through a storm.
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Winter Came Early . . .

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Just a few days later
After photographing the chinese lanterns
For the first time (in previous post)
After discovering their existence
The snows came
To give them white coverings
While I lamented
The passing of autumn
Before its time
But even the cold crystaline snow
Could not put out their fire
So they shall be my emblem
In the coming cold months
These glowing magic lanterns
With a halo of snow
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Even on the smallest place of purchase
The snow crystals piled up improbably
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We hadn't had time to prune the hortensias
As we do carefully every fall
But the fall has fallen into the cold dark abyss
Of long winter nights
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A cold green steel fence caught the snow
Where I left our garden
And wandered off into the woods
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In the woods there were magical visions
Of snow barely clinging
To leaves not yet gone brown
A cruel winter who comes before her time
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I wandered further into the woods
On the winding path the wild boars use
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One red leaf hung on hopefully to thoughts of fall glory
Blazing reds and golds now buried in ice
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Despite some of your generous offers for Noisette's fur from the last post, as she huddled on the porch in the cold afternoon, she decided she would rather put it to good use herself . . . staying warm. Even the carnations here in the foreground were caught by surprise in the snow, almost ready for one last late bloom... frozen in the bud.
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The Fall . . .

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Just a few short weeks ago I was taken by some small splashes of color in our garden, and thought I'd try taking a few pictures, in view of putting together a little celebration of Autumn. Sometimes one doesn't have to go far or seek out exotic subjects in order to have little fun with a camera, so my own back yard was as good a place as any to start. I thought I had plenty of time to get them posted while Autumn was still in the air. Little did I know that Winter was going to start a month early this year.
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At the end of October there were still some tomatoes on the vines which had somehow escaped being harvested.

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The last of the lavender . . .

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Trumpeting orange glory to the heavens . . .
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Funny how tomatoes go wrinkled after just a few weeks, while with people it takes 50 or 60 years for it to happen.
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Noisette was pretending not to notice she was modeling her fur to an international audience.
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But the biggest surprise of the day was the discovery that a Chinese Lantern plant had somehow managed to seed itself in the side yard, and prosper there ! I can assure you we had no hand in helping it arrive here. It appeared as if by magic. What better botanic mascot to have show up unbidden on a blog named the Magic Lantern Show than a Chinese Lantern plant? A magical coincidence if there ever was one. What a crazy plant too. I'd never seen one so close up before.
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And like tomatoes, they start out green before going bright orange. Astonishing that nature could produce such a bright pigment.
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I was quite fascinated by the lantern plant . . . couldn't help but keep clicking away from all angles.
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