Woad (II)

2011: Clay

I've always loved the play of water over clay.

"Woodnotes Wild"

There are many intriguing trees on the Berkeley campus. I have my favorites.

I've always thought that such trees have spirits, and Nigel here just embodies that belief in a playful way.

Here's a favorite poem from Seamus Heaney about walking in the woods:

THE PLANTATION

Any point in that wood

Was a centre, birch trunks

Ghosting your bearings,

Improvising charmed rings

Wherever you stopped.

Though you walked a straight line,

It might be a circle you travelled

With toadstools and stumps

Always repeating themselves.

Or did you re-pass them?

Here were bleyberries quilting the floor,

The black char of a fire,

And having found them once

You were sure to find them again.

Someone had always been there

Though always you were alone.

Lovers, birdwatchers,

Campers, gipsies and tramps

Left some trace of their trades

Or their excrement.

Hedging the road so,

It invited all comers

To the hush and mush

Of its whispering treadmill,

Its limits defined,

So they thought from outside.

They must have been thankful

For the hum of the traffic

If they ventured in

Past the picnickers' belt

Or began to recall

Tales of fog on the mountains.

You had to come back

To learn how to lose yourself,

To be pilot and stray--witch,

Hansel and Gretel in one.

--Seamus Heaney

Featured Creature: UC Berkeley

Loch Ness has a creature, Nessie.

There's a creature that haunts the waters of the Berkeley campus too, that lurks in and lunges from the flowing stream of Strawberry Creek:

Stressie!

Anyone who spent time in the graduate programs with me in the late 80's and early 90's can tell you the same.

And I hear that nothing much has changed.

Beware.

Cal colors. I hear if you get close enough, you can see blue and gold.

Rumors, anyway.