Hello, Spring! When you arrive, the party gets started: life comes back to life. Springtime boosts our moods with radiant colors, enticing scents, and warmer, longer days. The dawn chorus of birds sing, “Hallelujah!” And here comes the Spring pageant of peas, asparagus, lettuce, strawberries and herbs. Spring, we can eat you! A less jubilant […]
The storied neo-noir film director Samuel Fuller observed, “Life is in color, but black and white is more realistic.” This sums up the problem with winter: too realistic. When photographing a winter landscape, you must scrutinize the resulting image to detect any trace of color. Occasionally, a shrub’s foliage, berries, or a foraging robin will […]
To technology-glutted moderns, the celebration of the New Year may seem like a fleeting one-day inebriation, a hiccup in the 365-day trajectory it takes for our planet to complete one orbit around the sun. May their hangover cure include realizing that without the sun’s heat and light, they, like the Earth, would be a lifeless, […]
Hail spring, farewell winter, and a rousing welcome to the spring equinox for precisely positioning the earth—and us—in time and space. We watch in awe as the solar conductor rouses the vegetative orchestra to life, transforming fallow plots of land into flourishing gardens. Let there be life! The equinox provides a YOU ARE HERE moment […]
by George Ball This is the season when we appraise the year passing, and gently outline the year ahead, tracing tentative personal goals and plans. Even as our country inexorably advances towards the dreaded fiscal cliff, it is likewise a period when the press routinely diverts us with articles highlighting our era’s grand acquisitors and […]
by George Ball I saw a Wall Street Journal article a couple of weeks ago about surprising, nay stunning, modern and contemporary art auction results. Old records were smashed and new ones set. Many were paintings of majestic importance and quality, such as Jackson Pollock’s. Yet others were for art works as trivial as—of all […]
by George Ball October closes with Halloween, the most misunderstood holiday, due to its roots not in horror but in rain. Just as seed is the first and the last—the seed and the fruit—so too are rains the alpha and omega of the growing season. Only after the dry heat of summer and early fall—unique […]
by George Ball The beaks of birds tell their story. Technically, the term is “bill”, short for “mandible”, of which there are two, the upper and lower. Most people call them “beaks,” and birds don’t seem to mind. A short, blunt, clearly triangular-shaped beak with an obviously sharp point allows finch-like birds to pierce, tear, […]
by George Ball From time to time a blog “seeds” a following blog with a new idea or thought. Last week I touched on ‘La Dolce Vita’, a movie that prominently featured the “paparazzi”, which were new at that time. Media conglomerates mushroomed after World War II across Europe, fueled by new technologies of inexpensive […]
by George Ball Now’s the time when the birds feast on berries and seeds. I’ve often puzzled over this rich diet of 100% birdseed. One friend conjectures that it’s probably good for long flights southward. Another friend maintains that birds congregate around feeders and baths more to “socialize” (what diction these days!) than to stock […]
