Darkness and Light

Atmospheric instability is expressed in meteorology by various mathematical formulae and indices. Instability is graded as a function of temperature change over height or time. Instability causes turbulence that in moist atmospheres can whip up thunderstorms and cause cyclogenesis.

Violent storms are used in literature as a metaphor to portend evil.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/wizard-of-oz/article1277530.html#storylink=cpy

"The darker and stormier the weather outside the more diabolical the deeds done. When the clouds roll away, however, the rain has washed away all the blood in the streets and the world is clean and new again, as if all the violence and destruction of the storm served a divine purpose."
― Benjamin R. Smith, Atlas

Writer Cormac McCarthy probes inevitable and inescapable darkness.

"By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world."
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Darkness looms in an approaching storm before breaking loose into sacred mayhem.

Photographer Mitch Dobrowner chases apocalyptic storms that strike the rural landscapes of Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Mammatus, Bolton, Kansas
by Mitch Dobrowner

In Dobrowner's photograph Mammatus, the unworldly and mammary-like mammatocumulus add to the foreboding of the anvil cloud on the horizon.

Vortex, Long Hollow, South Dakota

by Mitch Dobrowner

Dobrowner's images evoke the immediacy and magnificence of atmospheric energy as it roils over the plains.

Darkness and instability invariably give way to clearing skies and calm.

"Our job is to record, each in his own way, this world of light and shadow and time that will never come again exactly as it is today."
― Edward Abbey

REFERENCES

• All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy.
• Mammatus cloud, Wikipedia.
• Ominous Storms Photographed in Black and White by Mitch Dobrownerby, Christopher Jobson, Colossal, 19 September 2016.
• Upside-down clouds grow down and cascade across the Kansas sky, Emily Benson, 14 September 2016.

A River - Time Experienced and Time Imagined

Lower Madison River

Untethered from the elevated stage of a drift boat, yet buoyed by a semi-submerged inner tube, floating a river is time experienced and time imagined.

Floating is an immersion in the lazy immediacy of time experienced ― elapsed, passing, and relative.

Floating also means confronting the existential binary state of time imagined ― beginnings or endings. We can only imagine the time that predates and postdates consciousness. We picture the future or conjure images of the past.

The story of beginnings is told by procreation in a river fishery and specifically, by the spawning of trout.

A female fashions a spawning site on the river bottom called a redd. She prepares the redd by fanning the river stones with her tail to remove lighter sediments. She creates a sediment-whisked oval depression, releases her eggs, and departs. A male follows her to fertilize the eggs.

The beginnings are as ongoing and relentlessly continuous as the endings.

Twilight of Ensuing Midnight

A fortnight from the ice break
Cutthroat trout spawn in steely kinship
A male will nudge and glide across the female
Feathering still pockets of a stony watercourse
And quivering by arteries of back-scattered light

Now below the headwaters where canyons call
The yaw of continuity counterweights solitary clouds
Our drift boat lingers between clutches of minnows
Floating closer toward an itinerary of purpose
Until the Milky Way oversees the canyon walls

Soon the stonefly hatch entices us
Three miles to a moon and upstream into July
By late August the trout’s diet is sodden terrestrials
Ants bees and spiders hasten toward a channel’s chance
Until meaty grasshoppers are September’s windfall

Yet we are suspended in a sweet water colored wheat
Like a no limit harvest of non-native species
Or browns we coax from the banks with streamers
We are a fifer’s delight in a jig under the hunter’s moon
Divining a hasty twilight of ensuing midnight

As there is an ensuing dawn, there is an ensuing nightfall. The story of endings is told by the trout's diet of nymphs and flies.

Salmonfly on Thimbleberry

The salmonfly is an jumbo-sized stone fly. It spends several years as a nymph inhabiting boulder strewn riffles before it crawls to the banks of the river after the high flow of spring runoff.

The timing of the salmonfly hatch varies and is short-lived. Once airborne the salmonfly's life as a flier might be cut short. Trout will rise to the surface to strike and consume the calorie-packed insect.

Floating the Madison immersed me in elapsed time -- that is,

"How much time do I have before the take-out point?" 

It also immersed me in passing time as I began to sense that everything has its own cadence. It is a cadence that is disconnected yet syncopated. In experiencing the of passing time my thoughts toggled between what I was experiencing and the awareness of what I was experiencing.

Floating the Madison immersed me in a recognition of relative time. My velocity was different and more directed by topography than the red-tailed hawk drifting on the canyon thermals above me.

Time on a river is time experienced and time imagined.

Brook Trout by Greg Keeler

"You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes."
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

 

Nature Writing

Mystic Lake, 1872
by William Henry Jackson

Nature writing reaches a crest when it is poetic and mysterious, yet grounded in the observational discipline of scientific inquiry.

Most often written in the first-person, readers are treated to the author's reflections and existential musing. The earthly mechanics of nature provide a wealth of metaphors.

"The grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never dried all at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls."
― John Muir

Nature writing engages our senses, coaxing from us heightened sensory awareness. At its best, nature writing reminds us training our senses enables us to see beyond mere highlight, shadow, and color.

"It's all a matter of keeping your eyes open...If I can't see these minutiae, I still try to keep my eyes open. I'm always on the lookout for antlion traps in sandy soil, monarch pupae near milkweed, skipper larvae in locust leaves. These things are utterly common, and I've not seen one."
― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Words and phrases engage our auditory sense:

"Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings."
― John Muir, The Wilderness World of John Muir

Words and phrases engage our olfactory sense:

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."
― Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg

Words and phrases appeal to our sense of taste:

"One swallow does not make a summer, but one skein of geese, cleaving the murk of a March thaw, is the spring."
― Aldo Leopold

Words and phrases appeal to our primal instinct to connect:

"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin."
― John Muir, Our National Parks

Nature writing is often deliciously multi-sensory:

"Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery."
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

From acute sensory experience, the best nature writers deftly transition to existential ruminations and philosophy. Compelling nature writing frames the alluring sensory experience with the limit of our senses, our morality:

"Autumn teaches us that fruition is also death; that ripeness is a form of decay. The willows, having stood for so long near water, begin to rust. Leaves are verbs that conjugate the seasons."
― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

"All through autumn we hear a double voice: one says everything is ripe; the other says everything is dying. The paradox is exquisite. We feel what the Japanese call "aware"--an almost untranslatable word meaning something like "beauty tinged with sadness."
― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces

Nature writers invite us to find comfort and solace:

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter."
― Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

From comfort and solace, we are gently coerced to the short leap into meditation and philosophy:

Being the Stream

Meditation is not just a rest or retreat from the turmoil of the stream or the impurity of the world. It is a way of being the stream, so that one can be at home in both the white water and the eddies. Meditation may take one out of the world, but it also puts one totally into it."
― Gary Snyder

REFERENCES

• Nature Writing, Wikipedia.
• Nature Writing.