19 October 2015

Moss drop

I'd stopped to search the overcast sky for the falcon I'd heard calling around the top of the No. 1 Line track late this afternoon. No luck, although just hearing these marvellous birds and knowing they were so close was lucky enough.

Then I got distracted by some pixie cup lichens growing on the long-fallen, overgrown tree stump on which I'd been standing. As I photographed the lichens I realised the stump also had a profuse growth of beret lichens, and as I photographed those, I noticed this tiny tuft of moss caught in a water drop and suspended from a line of spider silk. The more you look, the more you see.

(P.S. If, like me, you can see at least one face in this drop, you might be interested in this article, which discusses pareidolia.)

[Update, 20 Oct. 2015: I published another post on Pohanginapete this morning: An hour upon the stage. It's long (about 3500 words), so allow plenty of time if you're interested enough to read it.]


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5 comments:

  1. Barbara Butler McCoy20 October 2015 at 00:42

    WHOA! This is perfectly elegant. It is magic. (And, noting the time stamp for this post, I cannot quite wrap my head around the fact that you are more than twelve hours ahead of me here in Atlanta!)

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  2. Zhoen20 October 2015 at 15:15

    Stunningly confusingly lush.

    I sometimes see faces, but I've trained myself away from it. Source of terrible childhood nightmares, terror of eyes.

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  3. pohanginapete23 October 2015 at 10:34

    Barbara, sometimes it's nice to have a headstart on the rest of the world. ;-)

    Zhoen, I can understand that. I can remember being terrified by a particular pattern on the curtains in the room where I slept as a very small child.

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  4. Lisa25 October 2015 at 08:02

    I love this. As Barbara says, so elegant - and, I know it's a weird word to use, but it looks so innocent. I'm trying to think what I mean by that, and I don't know if I can quite express it. It's as if you have caught a moment, a tiny moment of beauty, that no-one was meant to see,that the moss was just caught there in the raindrop for no reason except that it happened. And so it feels like private, unpurposeful loveliness.

    That doesn't quite do it, but it's as close as I can get.

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  5. pohanginapete26 October 2015 at 22:00

    Lisa, I love that: '... just caught there in the raindrop for no reason except that it happened.' It does it for me. :-)

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