Month: June 2016

Spawning Arctic Grayling at Green Hollow Genetic Brood Reserve. Photo © Emily Cayer FWP

Graylings sound like wild beings out of a fantasy series, but in fact they’re a type of fish found all over the world in different species, some threatened with population decline, and some stable. The Arctic grayling, found in Russia and Canada but also some areas in Alaska, Montana and Wyoming, has suffered extirpation from certain spots in the latter two states during the last hundred years or so, due to anthropogenic effects. Ted Williams reports for The Nature Conservancy:

The Arctic grayling’s spotted, orange-trimmed dorsal fin looks as if it had been photoshopped. It’s half as long as the body and just as wide; and it glows with impossible shades of violet, green and turquoise. This gaudy trout cousin was deposited by the retreating glacier in the coldest, clearest waters of the contiguous states.

So common…

One of India’s rarest birds.

One of the pillars at Gobekli Tepe.

By Sharon St Joan

In his remarkable book, Gobekli Tepe, Genesis of the Gods, Andrew Collins paints a portrayal of the possible cosmic significance of these great mysterious circles of stone pillars, in southeastern Turkey, whose origins go back nearly 12,000 years into the past, to the time of the ending of the last great Ice Age. They are believed to be the oldest megalithic structures in the world.

Obviously, no one today can know for sure what the builders of Gobekli Tepe intended or what they were thinking.

On some of the stone circles, imaginative depictions of animals are carved on the right sides of each of the great pillars – only on the right side, with no carvings on the left. Andrew Collins makes the point that these seemed to be designed for circumambulation – as devotees would have walked clockwise…

Life thrives
whether we care for it
or not.

This video shows an avocet couple in the Karrevelden nature reserve in Zeeland province in the Netherlands.

You who are the wisdom

And the treasure – on the hill where bells peal

Life and death,

Death and life,

Birth, rebirth,

Or freedom

From the ever-grinding wheel

Of strife.

Gentle,

Brave,

It is you who stay,

Who live deep in the dens of the earth,

In the rain-dark soil,

Breath

Of all being,

You who stay

When all has left

Fled far on the crane-white wings that shimmer,

And you too who encircle the stars and the moon,

You who glimmer

Like the lily,

Soul bereft

That hisses of the ending soon.

You flow

Coil upon blue-hued coil,

Your hooded heads sway,

You know all

And yet nothing,

You sing the call

Of the lakes of eternity

On the silver wave

In the night of falling snow

And the peace of the dawn-pale petal.

Shanti. Shanti. Shanti.

© Sharon St Joan, 2016

 

Photo: © Mgkuijpers | Dreamstime.com /…

By Sharon St Joan

In 1963, when archeologists first went to southeastern Turkey to investigate Gobekli Tepe, they found the surrounding hills littered with stone tools, remnants left by ancient hunter-gatherers, just on the verge of transitioning to a new age of pastoralists and farmers.

Andrew Collins writes about Gobekli Tepe in his very fascinating book – Gobekli Tepe – Genesis of the Gods. It must have been an extraordinary place for archeologist Klaus Schmidt to see when he visited there in 1994.

Who could explain these elegant, enigmatic columns – tall, well-finished and beautifully carved with animal forms – going back many, many thousands of years to around 9,500 BCE, thousands of years earlier than any other known megalithic structures? What language did these early people speak and what was their culture? What gods did they worship? What were their lives like? And what was the meaning of these…