Here is a picture of a beautiful landscape and a clear blue sky, with a few benign white clouds, But that can quickly change to dark clouds, pouring rain, thunder and lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes. Or picture on the contrary an arid landscape with no vegetation, a hot burning sun: or again a landscape of snow and ice.
I have been reading two interesting books by Raynor Winn, The Salt Path and The Wild Silence. Raynor has a remarkable affinity with nature and she is a very good writer. Her descriptions of the land are so clear and vivid that I can feel, see, hear and smell it.
Her first book tracks her walk, with her husband, round the coastal paths of Devon and Cornwall. In her second book they go to Iceland. This is a very different country, it is a volcanic country and it is very cold. Here she makes me aware of the sheer raw power of the natural world. It is implacable, neutral, inscrutable. She take me right down into the very centre of the earth, its fiery furnace. It is a very living thing.
No wonder our ancestors revered and respected the earth.
We have forgotten this in our modern world, not everyone of course, and there are some glimmerings now, as we reach crisis point, of some people beginning to wake up.
Which brings me to my question: do we make the weather or does the weather make us? I first heard this mooted in a philosophy course, and it is something I have often pondered upon. The meteorologists can explain it all to us in scientific terms, but I wonder if there is an answer beyond that?
I would love to hear what others think about this very topical and important question.
A Room of my Own 
Hi Daphne,
About the weather: when I was living in Brussels and my parents still in The Hague, I drove very often between the two places. What struck me first as a one off and then could not help noticing again and again was the border between Belgium and Holland, no longer marked by customs checks but the sky. The Belgian side cloudy, the Dutch side sunny, with perhaps traveling clouds. Not once but usually, there was this stark difference in the weather between the two countries, visible at the border, clear in Holland, cloudy or misty, if not drizzly in Belgium. Remember the endless drizzly weeks in Brussels? And the Belgian ‘national disease’ I found to be ‘depression nerveuse’. I had never heard of it before though now it is common everywhere.
Anyway thanks for your inspiring blog. I want to make one since ages and have not yet got round to it. You inspire me. xx Verena
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Hello Verena – many thanks for your comment. I find that very interesting. I’m sure there is a lot to it.
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