The River Dulnain, upper reaches of Strath Dulnain, near Carrbridge
As I write this, it looks lilke the Scottish heatwave is coming to and end as it has suddenly clouded up and started to look stormy, after two weeks of baking temperatures and cloudless days. Here in the Cairngorms we have had temperatures of 30°C (86°F for my American readers) which for us is ‘too hot to do anything’ weather, and to have it for two whole weeks – well, thats a record! After a while we start to get used to it, then we start expecting good weather, living outdoors…
This week’s hot geek tip: to type a ° symbol, hold down the left ALT key and type 248 (only works using the number keypad) then let go of ALT.
This week’s image was taken on sunday on an evening bike run in the (relatively) cooler air, up one of my favourite glens. It had already gone 7 yet it was like mid-afternoon, although the high wispy clouds show a change coming in the weather.. Luckily I was able to plunge into a pool in the sparkling river and cool off… A few miles downstream in the village, the local youths were competing in jumping off the highest rocks into the deep pool below, still in warm sunshine at 9pm.
Its just fabulous living in a country like this when we get to enjoy it so thoroughly with our long hours of light, I feel so grateful.
Another quote this week from one of my favourite books which I keep returning to:
“The ‘now’ is just as important for Zen as the nothing and the void, the mu and the ku. It is practical Zen wisdom to do everything as if it were the only time, with utter concentration on doing it at this very moment and without thinking of future or past. It is a deep Zen conviction that eternity is ‘now!’ – not, as Christianity says, something beyond the foreseeable future and beyond death, something one might enter into at some undefined point in time. You enter eternity at each and every moment, with each and every ‘Now!’ Hence the ‘now’ counts and the idea of an endless period of time hardly exists. The past has passed, even by only a few seconds, and the future does not yet exist. It might exist tomorrow, or in a few minutes. But not ‘now’. Whoever is not living in the ‘now’ lives nowhere.”
– Joachim Ernst Berendt, ‘Nada Brahma: The World is Sound – Music and the Landscape of Consciousness’