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"Great Egrets Take Flight" In Hungary

Photographers Zsolt Kudich and Réka Zsirmon

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Guillaume Revel, Armorial. Francia, ca. 1450-1460.

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Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (November 3, 2023).

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Black Woodpecker/spillkråka. Värmland, Sweden (November 3, 2019).

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Eurasian Red Squirrel/ekorre. Värmland, Sweden (October 30, 2021).

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Happy National Black Cat Day! Should it be international instead of national? Yes. But I'm not in charge so I can't do anything about it. Woodcut by Eileen Mayo, 1938. Source.

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Art by natalia drepina

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12-26-2023, 7 AM

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i was walking this morning through the brilliant autumn maples and thinking that there is something so lazy and so lovely about how in this season the earth rolls over and simply suns herself in rest; she lets go and falls and falls and falls: leaves from branches, swallows’ wings toward the earth, the blind, neutral dripping of the trees, even the way the flowers bend backwards. these are slight, intimate hours where the earth is made all strange again; strange like nakedness and like fairytales; like glances and faces from a gone-now past. sitting beneath the red ficus i realise that all of this light is just loss explaining itself through a series of colours—hectic orange, flagrant red, a kind of gold that speaks directly to god or moonbeams or silence— and i think: perfect, naked autumn: i love you for this. all my memories create themselves again for you. — x

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Just back away slowly because she is VERY SCARY! Ca. 1909. Source.

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My October Symphony. Värmland, Sweden (October 8, 2014).

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Fall, falling, fallen. That's the way the season Changes its tense in the long-haired maples That dot the road; the veiny hand-shaped leaves Redden on their branches (in a fiery competition With the final remaining cardinals) and then Begin to sidle and float through the air, at last Settling into colorful layers carpeting the ground. At twilight the light, too, is layered in the trees In a season of odd, dusky congruences—a scarlet tanager And the odor of burning leaves, a golden retriever Loping down the center of a wide street and the sun Setting behind smoke-filled trees in the distance, A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything Changes and moves in the split second between summer's Sprawling past and winter's hard revision, one moment Pulling out of the station according to schedule, Another moment arriving on the next platform. It Happens almost like clockwork: the leaves drift away From their branches and gather slowly at our feet, Sliding over our ankles, and the season begins moving Around us even as its colorful weather moves us, Even as it pulls us into its dusty, twilit pockets. And every year there is a brief, startling moment When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air: It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies; It is the changing light of fall falling on us.

— "Fall" by Edward Hirsch, from The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2010

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I always marvel at October, how it can be so full of opposites. It's as if, since the leaves are doing something so dramatic and carefree in changing all those colors, the Earth thinks it can get away with anything, and runs around irresponsible and mad for a month or two before it goes to bed. It's positively primal—full of wild rituals and cunning, changes and smoky figures dancing around fires, faces peering around the trunks of trees. October is the owl season—the long shadow season. Take that smoky smell: you don't see all that many people actually burning things, but that smell is everywhere, drifting behind the rarity of the air like hidden darkness pooling behind the light, like Earth makes it somewhere in secret and slips it into the scheme of things, thinking no one will notice. The leaves come twirling down, and the wind waltzes them round and round, blowing from every direction at once. Black cats come east, come south, who knows from where, just for this season, just to see it. The days are warm yet cold, clear yet hazy; the world lives but dies. And the sun, pretending that it's not losing its grip, that none of this is happening, pours down more and more light that's all the while thinner and thinner.

– Frederic S. Durbin, Dragonfly

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Morris Graves, Breakfast Table, 1975. Tempera on paper

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