Drink the Dew

September 2012

“Who has not at some time or other in his life, watched the comings and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug’s one breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that ring the colours of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with the reddish background? Who has not looked long in delight at the effects of sun and rain on a roof of brown tiles, at the dewdrops, or at the variously shaped petals of the flower-cups? Who has not sunk into these idle, absorbing meditations on things without, that have no conscious end, yet lead to some definite thought at last” (1).

Drink the dew.

“..at present my concern is to find things. My globe of memory is in free spin, with no obscure side, and although at times in its swelling and spinning it offers the queer suggestion that imagination is only memory at one, or two, or twenty, removes, my interest now is in repudiating, or in trying to repudiate, those removes, even if it ends by my finding something only as small as a stone lying on pale grass...” (2).

Drink the dew.

“O happy living things! no tongue/ Their beauty might declare:/ A spring of love gushed from my heart,/ And I blessed them unaware:/ Sure my kind saint took pity on me,/ And I blessed them unaware.

The self-same moment I could pray;/ And from my neck so free/ The Albatross fell off, and sank/ Like lead into the sea..

..The silly buckets on the deck,/ That had so long remained,/ I dreamt that they were filled with dew;/ And when I awoke, it rained" (3).

Drink the dew. 

Photography by Lucinda Coleman, reprinted with permission.

References:

 1) Honore de Balzac The Magic Skin p.137 from La Comedie humanine

2) Jessica Anderson 1978 Tirra LIrra by the River Penguin, Australia p.140

3) Samuel Taylor Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner lines 282-291; 297-300