Random scenes of unexpected beauty

[oursin]

Thinking (for some reason) of experiences of heart-lifting beauty in circumstances that were less than ideal.

There was, of course, the lapwings on Lundy thing. This was on a really badly thought-through holiday in the West Country in a campervan in April at about the midpoint of the Slow Motion Train Wreck relationship. The weather was cold,

Comments

[sartorias]

Thank you for those images.

Bent olive trees...I wonder if all ours outside here are straight because there's never any wind or weather.

[oursin]

I find it hard to imagine olive trees that aren't gnarled!

[sartorias]

They have extremely rough bark, and some of the branches can twist--but no more than other trees. The trunks are all straight.

[egretplume]

I was shocked by the olive trees in Spain because they looked exactly like a Picasso painting of themselves.

Once I was leaving the apartment of a man I was seeing. It was a bad relationship and he lived in a bad part of town and everything was bad, even the wet weather, but as I walked by the rundown stripmall shopping center, a gigantic gorgeous rainbow appeared, touching down in the parking lot beside me, and lasted the whole time I walked along. It was vibrant and glowing, not a faint shimmer, and seemed unreal.

[richenda]

lapwings are good.
But I'm puzzled. Aren't shags and cormorants the same thing?

[oursin]

Yes and no - birds with confused identity!

[richenda]

Thank you fo r the link, which isn't co-operating at preent. There's a rhyme somewhere about a cormorant or shag, isn't there/

This chap Anon has been writing some perfectly lovely stuff

[eileenlufkin]

The common cormorant, or shag
Lays eggs inside a paper bag.
The reason you will see, no doubt,
Is to keep the lighting out.
But what these unobservant birds
Have never noticed is that herds
Of wandering bears may come with buns
And steal the bag to hold the crumbs.