Saturday, December 29, 2007

Birds and Books



Watching the birds on the peanuts and fat balls is endlessly delightful. There are a surprisingly large variety of birds in this, my city garden. Robins and wrens, blue tits and great tits, blackbirds and sparrows, starlings and woodpeckers, magpies and jays, wood pigeons and the ordinary London pigeons, being the main ones.
Along with trees, birds are perhaps one of my other main art themes, and this Christmas I was happy to receive some bird themed presents. Some little drawings here of 2 resin birds.

One of the new books I received is Living Water, Viktor Schauberger and the secrets of natural energy, by Olof Alexandersson. It is an amazing account of Viktor Schauberger's life of investigating the living force and power of water. he was an Austrian naturalist and forester born at the end of the nineteenth century, brought up with a love and immersed in the forests of Austria. His observations of nature and especially the way streams functioned, flowed and carried materials, lead to his developing systems of transporting logs, ways to bring water back to life and ways of controlling the flow of water.
He was passionate about working with the earth not destroying it, and unfortunately, perhaps did not understand that some people could be so wilfully disregarding of the work he did and the understanding he came to.

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