“Already with thee! tender is the night,
And haply the Queen-Moon is on her throne,
Cluster’d around by all her starry Fays;
But here there is no light,
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways.”
Moonset at sunset in Nova Scotia. All photos by John McPhee ©
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
Kejimkujik Lake
Summer Shower
A Drop fell on the Apple Tree –
Another – on the Roof –
A Half a Dozen kissed the Eaves –
And made the Gables laugh -
A few went out to help the Brook,
That went to help the Sea –
Myself Conjectured were they Pearls –
What Necklaces could be …
- Emily Dickinson
Isle Haute in the Bay of Fundy.
“Sciences provide an understanding of a universal experience. Arts are a universal understanding of a personal experience. They are both a part of us and a manifestation of the same thing. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity.”
The Milky Way, the brightest part of our home galaxy, arcs overheads in Halls Harbour, Nova Scotia. The Coathanger, a tiny star asterism, can be seen near the top centre.
“I am a child of the Milky Way. The night is my mother. I am made of the dust of stars. Every atom in my body was forged in a star. When the universe exploded into being, already the bird longed for the wood and the fish for the pool. ”
Photo gallery
Wild sunset clouds over dartmouth. - john mcphee
Asperitas clouds in halifax in june 2014 - john mcphee