WW: Winter day on the pond

WW: Evening sky

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Tundra swans

(Cygnus columbianus.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Migrating swans

(Trumpeters [Cygnus buccinator]. Brief stopover over two foggy days. Watching this large flock of very big birds light on this small lake in successive wings was a memorable experience.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: November lake

(Click on the photo to see it bigger.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Forest memorial

(According to information painted on its crossbar, this marker memorialises a young person. It's nailed high on a Douglas fir on the shore of a pond that's accessible from a nearby trail. It's a deeply touching gesture, as much for the simple dignity of the testament as the peaceful seclusion of its location.)

WW: Rainbow over the lake

WW: Lake on an early spring morning

WW: Find the great blue heron

(Ardea herodias.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Sunset over another pond

(Open in a new tab for full effect.)

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Sunset over the pond

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Pondside meditation site

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Early spring haiku

Appearing also on My Corner of the World.

WW: Seafaring lizard

(My nephew and I went fishing all day a few weekends ago. We loaded the boat in his truck, drove across the county, launched in a large lake, motored about two miles to an anchorage, and fished for several hours. Then we repeated the process in reverse. When my nephew pulled the boat out of his truck that evening, he found this stowaway – a Northern alligator lizard – that must have been there the whole time.

Note typical belligerent pout.)

WW: Giant Pacific signal crayfish

(This is the giant Pacific signal crayfish [Pacifastacus leniusculus]. Individuals can reach 7 inches – at which point they're real lobsters – but this one's only four.

Oddly, few eat these here, though they're the both the biggest and best-tasting crawdads in the Western Hemisphere. Commercial licenses are available, and some folks are already making a tidy living in a developing market. [My grandfather, born in 1900, made pocket money in his first decade by catching these in Portland creeks and selling them to Jake's Grill.]

The signal crayfish is now threatened – mostly theoretically, to date – by invasive species from elsewhere. Ironically, it's also wiping out native stocks in Europe, having been introduced there last century to replace the fishery in some of those very species, which had been greatly reduced by an epidemic.)

WW: Pond in winter

Street Level Zen: Expectations

"When I was a boy growing up in Kansas, a friend of mine and I went fishing and as we sat there on the warmth of a summer afternoon we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States.

"Neither of us got our wish."

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Good Movie: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring

Here's one you gotta see. No, I mean you gotta see it. Because I can't describe it. (Goes on to describe movie.)

Kim Ki-duk's Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring seems to end suddenly after half an hour, then you look at your watch and 103 minutes have gone by. Movie buffs consider this a mark of excellence. What then to say about a film that still does this to you the third time you see it?

The basic story turns on the relationship between a hermit monk (shout out to the Homeless Brothers!) and an orphan left in his charge. Together they care for a temple in the middle of a remote mountain lake that doesn’t quite seem to be in this dimension; the sun speeds up and slows down, the temple rooms have no walls, and the pier it's built on drifts – upwind – without actually moving. (Or is the world drifting past it?)

Like Heraclitus' river, Spring, Summer is so packed with encoded clues that it's a new movie each time you watch it. The temple pet alone is fascinating. First it's a dog, then a cock, then a cat, and finally a snake. Why does the teenager steal the rooster? Why does the old man replace it with a cat? Is it solely to set up one of the best enlightenment metaphors ever filmed? (Plus that cat is an awesome actor. Uncredited,

of course. The Man strikes again.) And what's up with that (apparently winterised) snake?

And the koans keep coming: stunning tai-chi performed on ice by a "broken" man; a boat anchor used as penitence, from a boat that's never anchored; humiliated people literally losing their faces. And just when you're sure the whole thing takes place in some kind of snow globe, two police detectives show up. Carrying guns. And cell phones.

Unlike other "weird" movies, this one is never pretentious. Instead, Kim invites us on an Easter egg hunt, with permission to find a few even he may have missed; he's sangha, not teacher. And the insight is conveyed virtually without dialogue. What lines there are, are pithy and important. Take the old man's entire summation of the futility of greed: "The things you like, others also like."

Kim, who also plays the old hermit's successor (or predecessor, or maybe the old monk himself), gets seamless performances from his

actors: Jong-ho Kim as the mischievous, engaging child; Jae-kyeong Seo as an earnest, intense teenager; Young-min Kim as a man on the horns of yearning; and especially Yeong-su Oh, as the old hermit. Even the cops, walk-ons meant to inject you and me into the temple's universe, are skilfully out of synch. All of it gives Spring, Summer a fly-on-the-wall documentary feel, imparting a realism to the surrealism that, well, you have to see to get.

As a dissertation on samsara, it all could have been dull as dukkha, but in the end it's a very Korean film, full of humanity and passion. Just watching the director pull it off is worth the price of admission.

Finally, please be advised that none of this is accurate. Like sitting itself, the Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring that can be named is not Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring.

WW: Sunset over Capitol Lake

(Click on the picture to see it bigger. More on the alleged "lake" here.)

WW: Winter lake