Rue Des Roues

rue des roues

This is the Street of Wheels in L’Isle sur la Sorgue, Provence, France. The town once had seventy waterwheels, all powered by the Sorgue river, driving mills for grinding grain, making paper and weaving silk. Nowadays the river turns fourteen vestigial wheels driving the tourist circuit around the town. We came here on holiday and stayed in the house on the right by the street lamp. Continue reading “Rue Des Roues”

Frames of reference

Tree Of Life

brain tree

I’ve been reading Lawrence Weschler’s Everything That Rises: A Book Of Convergences. The title comes from Flannery O’Connor’s collection of short stories, Everything That Rises Must Converge. She took her title from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s Omega Point which contains the lines: Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge. Continue reading “Tree Of Life”

Frames of reference

Tree Of Heaven

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This is The Rowley Gallery joiners shop in the summer of 2012, a black wooden shed perched on the flat roof of the ground floor workshop. Access is by spiral staircase and it’s where I join picture frames. It sits in the shelter of a towering tree-of-heaven, Ailanthus altissima, which in my early days here I remember as a self-sown seedling. No-one paid it too much attention, but before long I loved its dappled light in summer, and in winter I measured the sky through its mesh of branches. Continue reading “Tree Of Heaven”

Frames of reference

Elizabethan Oaks

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Hatfield Park in Hertfordshire (not to be confused with its namesake Hatfield Forest in Essex) is home to an extraordinary number of venerable old oak trees, many of them believed to be over 1200 years old. A walk around the park might be described as a tour of the Stations of the Oak. Continue reading “Elizabethan Oaks”

Frames of reference