Early-December moods

Still sticking with the early-to-bed-early-to-rise routine and finding it extremely beneficial in terms of mood. Well, that and cats. My routine continues to be to go to bed before ten and wake before six, catch the sunrise, and go for my walk(s) during the daylight hours, to make the most of the sunlight. Today, the day was eight hours long, we'll lose another 15 minutes by the Winter Solstice (which falls on 21 December this year), and by 7 January the day will be eight hours long again. We are still in astronomical autumn (until the solstice), but as of the beginning of the month, already in climatic winter. Having said that, other than the snowfall on 23/24 November, there's been no snow or frost since then, nor is any forecast for the next seven days.

Below: the view down the lane to Grobice. Usually waterlogged and boggy about a third of the way down, right now acceptably dry. 

Below: "Oak, hazel, hawthorn, gorse and sandy tracks/ Better for sport than farming, I suspect." Echoes of Chorleywood Common, as described by John Betjeman in Metro-land.

Below: the hunting season traditionally kicked off on 3 November (the feast-day of St Hubertus, the hunters' patron); at weekends, I can hear to occasional crack of rifle fire in the forests. Having said that, the hunters' pulpit in Machcin shows no sign of use, no spent cartridges or empty małpki (100ml vodka bottles) in evidence, no tyre tracks in the vicinity.

Below: well, they never did manage to lay down that asphalt before Sunday's election... The road to Gaj Żelechowski and Dąbrowa Duża is due for a proper surface, which will be hugely beneficial for local traffic. It will form a direct route towards Konary and the DK79 south, cutting over 2km from the journey which currently meanders through Machcin, Dobiecin and Rososz.

Below: low sun, leafless trees. Just think – in six months' time, it will be early June! Again!

Below: around the corner from home. A new house is being built along this stretch of farm track, while another is being extended upward with a second floor. Gmina Chynów is on the move. People want to live here.

Below: portraits of my cats as they transition out of kittenhood. From the left – Arcturus, Pacyfik, Scrapper, Céleste and Czester. Everyone a character, conscious and agential. 

This time three years ago:
 Matter, materialism, metaphysics and magic

This time four years ago:
Short roads to nowhere

This time five years ago:
Mole control

This time six years ago:
Poland's education paradox

This time seven years ago:
What I was going to say at COP24 (but didn't)

This time eight years ago:
Milton Keynes

This time nine years ago:
Warsaw by night, early winter

This time 12 years ago:
Burn less gas and do Ukraine a favour

This time 15 years ago:
Early evening atmosphere

This time 17 years ago:
Toponyms – how many names has Jeziorki?

This time 18 years ago:
On the road to Białystok

Making the most of the Light

On days like yesterday and today, one should get as much time in the sun as possible. Below: straight after breakfast today, I set off for a quick half-hour stroll to commune with the sun. Direct flow of photons into the brain, and my mind is working optimally. In joy.

Below: late this morning, looking at the back of my house. 

The kittens are all outside enjoying the day. Below: Czestuś on a stump of the cherry tree 

Left: the five kittens out and about, on patrol, together, with mum Wenusia and myself watching on, on the lane at the bottom of my drive. In the foreground, Céleste, behind her to the left, sniffing the ground, Arcturus; the black-nosed and black-chinned Scrapper peeking out of the crack in the tree; the ginger Czestuś holding onto the trunk vertically, and at the top, Pacyfik.

Below: Chynów station at around 16:40, yesterday, with the Olsztyn to Kraków Żeromski InterCity express passing through, while a Warsaw-bound Koleje Mazowieckie service has a scheduled wait on the side platform to allow the express through on the 'up' line, overtaking a Radom-bound all-stations service (which was slightly delayed). Today the Radom train was minute ahead of the Żeromski – just as it should be.

Below: electricity poles and mobile telephony relay tower, red, gold and green foliage, blue sky and traffic on the DK50.

Below: ulica Miodowa, Chynów, the rays of the sun as it approaches the horizon glance over the top of the rip corn and light up the trees 

Below: today's sunset, an advancing bank of wispy clouds catching the colours. On the horizon, between the trees, the water toward in Drwalew.

The afterglow the followed yesterday's sunset. Below: crushed velvet dusk at the end of my lane, where Jakubowizna meets Chynów before the railway line. The Sublime Aesthetic in one photo.

This time four years ago:
Wrocław klimaty

This time seven years ago:
Track modernisation, south of Czachówek

This time eight years ago:
Swans growing up

This time ten years ago:
On the eve of Poland's change of government

This time 11 years ago:
Bilingualism benefits the brain

This time 15 years ago:
Crushed velvet dusk in my City of Dreams II

This time 16 years ago:
Going North, the quick way

This time 17 years ago:
Glorious autumn dusk

This time 18 years ago:
Last man voting?

Autumn most splendid

On a day like today, fix the polarising filter and set off to catch that klimat. Jakubowizna and neighbourhood on the most perfect of autumn days.

That Kodacolor moment, so familiar. A part of me.
 

The clouds on the horizon, the wires, the slight rise and fall in the land catches it for me.

Left: looking west along ulica Miodowa (lit. 'Honey Street') towards Chynów. The orchards on either side have been harvested; in the middle distance, a ripening field of corn. On the horizon, the forest that stretches from Wola Pieczyska to Sułkowice.

Below: abandoned building amid a mown lawn, Grobice. Much as I'm against the mowing of lawns, I do appreciate the mid-century modern aesthetic.

Below: Grobice, main street. Perfect weather.

The kittens are four months old today. Here's Céleste up a ladder and Arcturus up a tree. All five love climbing, and the trees in the garden do nicely as climbing frames on which the kittens hone their skills.

This time two years ago:
How much spirituality do I need?

This time seven years ago:
Whoops! Clumsy

This time nine years ago:
Mystical experiences at 37,000ft

This time ten years ago:
The staggeringly high cost of tax collection in Poland

This time 14 years ago 
One stop beyond

This time 15 years ago:
Who am I? (Kim ja jestem?)

This time 16 years ago:
First snow, 2009. Ghastly!

This time 17 years ago:
Train links to town improving

This time 18 years ago:
A beautiful Sunday, south of Warsaw

Catch the sun, make the most

Astronomical summer is coming to an end. So whenever the sun shines, make the most of it. I woke this morning before six, to catch cloudless skies that would become overcast by 10 (according to the forecast on my phone). Feed the cats, eat breakfast (scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on matzos, coffee, pressed apple juice), and set off.

Below: early sun streaming through forest – that is exactly what I want to catch this morning. The crunch underfoot of dry leaves and twigs. It's good to realise that I'm minutes by foot from the woods. A contrast from yesterday's urban post.

Below: the track from Machcin II to Grobice, under a gorgeous mid-September sky.

Below: forest crossroads, unasphalted track. To the left: Machcin. Straight on for Rososz. Right for Dąbrowa Duża, and behind me – Adamów Rososki.

Below: the edge of town, where the villages meet.

Below: the way back home. Thinking about lunch. 

Below: I get home to find Wenusia still feeding the kittens (not so small any more!). the 14th week is approaching an end... She looks a bit pissed off, if I may say so...

This time six years ago:
The City (of London) in its morning glory

This time 14 years ago:
Waiting for autumn

This time 15 years ago:
Made in England to last

This time 16 years ago:
How the S2/S79 looked back then...

This time 18 years ago:
Endless summer, Park Łazienkowski

Country sky, city sky

Early June, moving along. Shady days. It gets dark now just before nine, but there's not been much sunshine over the past few days.

Below: clouds threaten to dump rain on my walk, heading south from Chynów towards Krężel and Michalczew. Fortunately, it stays dry all the way out (and back by train).

Below: a rare sighting of a Koleje Mazowieckie push-pull loco running light. This is the class of engine (EU47) attached to the double-decker 'accelerated' trains (the ones that stop at only more important stations). These services run on the Radom line on Mondays to Fridays, so seeing an engine on its own on a Sunday is a great surprise.

Below: trackside scene looking from ulica Kolejowa ('Railway Street') towards the orchards south of Widok. Note the flock of woodpigeons on the medium-tension electricity wires.

Below: ulica Kolejowa looking south towards the level crossing on ul. Spokojna. That dot on the asphalt is a distant pheasant.

Below: I spot this hare making its way across the road south of Janów, before it crossed the railway track and disappeared into the Watraszew forest. Before long, the bells of the church in Michalczew start calling the faithful to Mass; several cars pass this way.

And into town. Below: Stalin's gift to the Polish people glowers over Pijana Wiśnia, run by Ukrainians and playing Angolan Kizomba dance music on Fridays. The only drink served is wiśniówka – cherry vodka. A weird concept, but it works (there's three Pijana Wiśnias in Warsaw).

Below: Plac Grzybowski. The sky is beginning to bruise. To the left, the Church of All Saints, where my father was christened in 1923. To the right, the Cosmopolitan Twarda 4 tower.

Below: ulica Grzybowska. Changed beyond all recognition since my father's boyhood. Sky like from a zombie apocalypse.

This time last year:
A vote for Europe

This time three years ago:
Savants, UFOs and psychic abilities

This time four years ago:
A proud moment

This time five years ago
Rail progress - Krężel to Chynów

This time ten years ago:

Aberdeen, dour city

This time 12 years ago:
Fans fly in for the football

This time 14 years ago:
Cara al Sol - part II

This time 15 years ago:
Still struggling with the floodwaters

This time 16 years ago:
European elections - and I buy used D40

The time 17 years ago:
To the Vistula, by bike

This time 18 years ago:
Poppy profusion

Full blossom

This is it! The peak of the apple and cherry blossom, coinciding with a day of perfect clarity of sky. Time to snap the fruit trees in flower, the glory of the neighbourhood!

Below: where the orchard ends and the forest begins.

Below: a young male deer between rows of apple trees bedecked in blossom. Note the dandelions in a line along the grass. Today and yesterday I spotted several deer and a similar number of hares. 

Below: a trio of hares between the trees, near Gaj Żelechowski yesterday. And a propos of wildlife, I cannot ignore the birdsong; blackbirds, blue tits and the Eurasian black cap (Sylvia atricapilla, kapturka). Most beautiful and complex at this time of year.

Below: even the commercial orchards, neat rows of apple trees under hailstone-proof netting, are blooming. This one is in Adamów Rososki. Overhead, an Emirates airliner is on its way from Stockholm to Dubai.

Below: not every fruit tree is in blossom this year. These biennial-bearing cherry trees that are not tended the year round bear fruit (and indeed flowers) much less profusely every second year. My apple trees, which produced a bumper crop last autumn, are showing no blossom this year.

Although the sky was perfectly clear from dawn to dusk, it was rather a cool day, with the top temperature not exceeding 18°C, and a night-time low of just 1°C forecast. It's like the Ice Saints have come early! Tomorrow will also be an optimal day for viewing the apple blossom of Chynów and district. Unlikely to last until next weekend. The cold means the scent is not as entrancing as it was on warmer days, when the head swims in the perfumed air.

This time 13 years ago:
Testing the Boris Bike

This time 14 year:
Corruption: reasons to be cheerful

This time 16 years ago:
Bicycle shakedown day

This time 17 years ago:
Jeziorki in full bloom

On Consciousness (Pt III) - Lent 2025: Day nine

Having explored consciousness as we perceive it, I want to push the boundaries further in terms of what else could be considered conscious. We know we are. Pet owners know their cats and dogs are. Dolphins, octopuses and crows are. We know this from their behaviour. Rodents? Hard to deny. But further down the food chain? 

If we acknowledge panpsychism to be a credible philosophical position, the idea that it's consciousness all the way down to the smallest particle must be taken seriously. 

"But is a rock conscious?" the sceptic may well ask. "Go on then – ask it." "Are you aware that you are a rock?" No answer. 

But consider the quark, deciding whether to spin up or spin down. Has it agency? Is there will at the subatomic level? What's quantum entanglement all about? Is it just random spooky action at a distance? Do atoms have any say in which molecular bonds they end up?

We need to take an imaginary jump and look at the way matter organises itself. A carbon atom may indeed find itself part of a rock. Alternatively, it may find itself part of a living cell, as part of a molecule of protein. Did it have any choice in that?

One boundary for consciousness may be that between life and non-life. You may reasonably posit that if an organism can metabolise, grow, reproduce and respond to stimuli, even it is monocellular, if may be aware. Returning to the rock, it is organised out of atoms and molecules, like a monocellular life form, but without the hallmarks of life. 

Now, let's zoom right out.

Rupert Sheldrake has long held that the Sun, for example, is conscious. It's less ridiculous a proposition than might appear at first sight. Famously, J.M.W. Turner's last words were: "The Sun is God". The religions of ancient civilisations deified the Sun. A conscious Sun, says Sheldrake, benignly brings us warmth and light, while steering mass coronal ejections away from our planet that's come to depend on electronics. A conscious Sun that's part of our conscious Milky Way galaxy, within a conscious Universe. God in All, All in God. Possessed of an Ultimate Purpose.

When the sun shines (which at the moment it isn't), my mind is brighter, sharper; thought and consciousness runs deeper, qualia moments are recorded and flash back more frequently and more vividly than when I'm under cloud cover. In sunlight, I'm in an altered state. But should I live in a country where the sun shines all the time, this effect would quickly be muted, becoming commonplace. I live (and have lived) in a country where sunlight is at a premium, and is appreciated.

More controversially, I am noticing a correlation between vivid dreams and cloudless nights. This suggests that it's more than just photons striking my retina and exciting greater neuronal activity; it suggests neutrinos flying through the earth and interacting with my brain. More controversially still, there are the Kordylewski clouds (discovered by Polish astronomer Kazimierz Kordylewski in 1966); concentrations of interplanetary dust orbiting the Earth along the same path as the moon, on either side of it (below, courtesy of Wikipedia) at the Lagrangian points L4 and L5, where the gravitational pull of the Earth and the Sun are in equilibrium. [Many people first became aware of Lagrangian points when the James Webb Space Telescope was positioned at the L2 point, beyond the far side of the moon, in early 2022.]

It is my conjecture that the sun's rays – photons – are filtered by the Kordylewski clouds, diluting the Sun's influence upon us (and our consciousness). Neutrinos (whether they come from the Sun or from the Cosmic Microwave Background) get through whatever! 

The interplay between one's own consciousness and that of the Cosmos should at least be considered!

Tomorrow: The Ghost in the Machine – can inanimate objects possess consciousness?

Lent 2024: Day nine
Stages of Life – where are you?

Lent 2023, Day nine
Physical reality and the metaphysical

Lent 2022: Day nine
Precognition and willing the future

Lent 2021: Day nine
Original Sin - yes, it exists

Lent 2020: Day nine
Can praying bring luck?

Machcin's wetlands icy – but dry

The hard frost continues (it was -9°C overnight), so having checked out the wetlands to the north of Sułkowice, I decided today to see what the situation is like in the 'Nawiedzone mokradła' ('haunted wetlands') that lie in Machcin, between Dąbrowa Duża and Rososz. In the spring, this is the breeding ground of dozens of cranes; would I be able to locate their nests?

On my way there (a 50-minute walk from home), I was overflown by said dozens of cranes, flying west (i.e. away from the wetlands). There were more individuals in this particular formation than I could cram into frame, given the long telephoto zoom I was using.

As they passed overhead, I got a tighter shot of the leading quartet.

Where are they going? Since late December, I've seen gaggles of cranes overhead, most recently two days ago. The common Eurasian crane (Grus grus) normally flies off to winter in warmer climes by the end of November to return in late February. This year, it's like they never really left... Climate change is confusing these days.

On, on to the wetlands. To my surprise, wet they're not. Whereas the last time I visited (in late summer), the grassy tufts were islands surrounded by stagnant water, and the reedbeds in the middle distance were impossible to reach, today I find that the water-table has dropped to the point where I can see no ice. Each tuft is separated from the next by a grassy valley; I move forward by hopping from one hillock to the next or by walking around them. Every now and then, there's a drainage ditch; in them the pitifully low water has frozen solid. Here I can progress more comfortably towards the reeds. Below: the line in the middle is the start of the reedbeds, which stretch on back to the treeline. 

Below: inside the reedbeds. The only way through is along the drainage channels, which look to be man-made, excavated to facilitate water flow through the wetlands. Some of the reeds are over two metres tall. Water at the bottom is frozen totally and absolutely solid. No chance of wet socks today.

Common cranes nest in a variety of shallow freshwater wetlands such as large wet meadows, bogs, forested swamps, sedge meadows, and lake edges. They generally prefer large, isolated nesting territories that are free from disturbance. Now, is this the remnants of a crane's nest? Or just a random scattering of sticks? Some are the thickness of a human forearm...

Using the drainage channels I turn south and do something I've never done before – reach the far shore of the wetlands. 

Left: here on the margin between marsh and forest, I come across evidence of tree felling – though by whom? Beavers or humans? It seems the beavers had first crack, but I see evidence of chainsaw as well as teeth. Young birch trees make for good fence posts...

Below: out of the swamp and into the forest behind Dąbrowa Duża, where pines prevail.

Back to Jakubowizna, then; another gorgeous day, under a clear, bright sky. Below: is this Stella-Plage? Are we on Oxshott Common? No, this is a short walk from Jakubowizna. Sunshine brings out the best in me.

In total, I walked two hours. And in that time, I did not see another human being. Luxury!

This time two years ago:
Right-of-way cobble
[the authorities soon crumbled!]

This time three years ago:
Sunshine, I need the sunshine

This time eight years ago:
Consciousness outside the body

This time 11 years ago:
Sustainability and the feminisation of business

This time 12 years ago:
Lent kicks off (somewhat earlier than this year)

This time 13 years ago:
Feeling at home on the ice

This time 14 years ago:
Wetlands in (a milder) winter

This time 17 years ago:
Railway miscellany