swallows and amazing plums

It looks as if I was wrong this morning on both swallow counts. Not only are there two twittering young in one of the nests, an adult is still desparately servicing them. Not sure what this says about swallow knowledge though. Since these young ones are not yet fledged, the prognosis for all seems grim ....

I picked three buckets of plums this morning; this has made a small impression on the tree; at a rough guess I would say there remain perhaps six to ten more buckets.

the buds of autumn

The lime tree thinks about starting again. Can this be normal?

evening beneath the lime

life in the lime

swallows, owls, consciousness, trees and ancestors

The last of our swallows has just left; it was here at 8.30am and now at 11.30 it is not; it seems to have left behind a dead baby in the nest; staying to feed it meant all the others are far in front. I wonder what kind of knowledge that swallow has about them and about its late brood.

Swallows depart, leaves begin to fall and a new owl outside tries to learn to wit.

The lime tree looks very yellow, but that's because the flower leaves (what's their proper name?) have all dried and turned pale adn there are so many of them this year. Only a few true leaves have turned.
We are overrun with plums. Please take some with you when you go.

Images of the minkie whales keep surfacing; they're out there somewhere.

I am re-reading 'The Self-Aware Universe' by Amit Goswami, professor of physics at the University of Oregon. I read it years ago (published 1993) and dismissed it. Now it is threatening me with a spiritual upheaval. To make sense of quantum physics, the easiest thing is to conclude that beyond the material world is a transcendent 'potentia' in which all possibilities exist; for Goswami this transcendence is a 'universal consciousness' in which all consciousnesses patrtake. The subtitle of the book is 'How Consciousness Creates the material world'. This is the scariest book I have ever read. Why scary? Because I keep feeling the consequences of it being true.

Not like me at all.

here are pictures of yesterday's trip round the lime tree.


from the west

from the north

from the north-east

from the east

I have also traced my ancestral manifestations of cosmic consciousness. My great-grandfather William was born in Easter Balmoral, Dee-side in 1853. His father William was born in the same parish (Glenmuick) in 1816; he was a master tailor. His father John was born in 1794/5 in the same parish and was a farmer; or perhaps he was the other John, born in 1794 in the same parish; they both married Elizabeths, so it's difficult to tell which. I can trace both of them back another two generations at least, and possibly more, but I dont know which is the direct line. Why is it so important to know?

Minkie just

A stunnungly beautiful day began with warm sunshine, which we thought was gone for the summer, and late afternoontook a boat out on the highest tide for 40 years (full moon and high pressure) to look for whales in the Firth of Forth. Not very likely but some were seen two weeks ago over on the north side.
Past the Bass rock and out across a calm sea sea beneath clear blue skies towards the Isle of May and Abbie pointing and shouting 'minkies at two o clock', and sure enough, there must have been two of them becasue straight away there was another, long flash of xbody and black fin. Quite a way off so no photo, but a real sighting, confirmed by our trusty skipper and duly reported to the sea-bird cenbtre.
Reminded me of the trip out from the south of Mull afew years back when a minkie wahle dived right under our RIB. But today's was in our back yard, so to speak. An amazing trip, finished off with a trip beneath clear skies full of gannets diving into the Firth, and a close look at the north face of the Bass rock; there's a lot of gannets there.