Pied Beauty

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

The Re-Animation...

After more than a year away from the blog, I've finally returned! I have to admit, I've been out gallivanting with Facebook, experimenting with social media in a shorter format. And I like it fairly well, really I do. I especially like working with the Facebook page for my garden center, Papershell: A Garden Gallery. One of the neat things about Facebook is that it's relatively easy to communicate quickly and visually. Uploading pictures is a snap, and it's fun to swim in the stream that is the Facebook mob.

But I have really missed having the opportunity to write longer pieces, and do the sort of thinking that comes when writing longer pieces. It's not that I'm writing deep, analytical or psychological pieces on the blog, but Facebook is ephemeral in the extreme, even more so now with the rollout of Timeline.

In returning to the blog, though, I've decided to make a few small changes. I felt it was important to host the blog on my own site, rather than here on blogger.com. Wrestling with Facebook for a year or so made me really wary of being at the mercy of tech sites. I've transported all the old entries, along with the comments, to a new site under the Papershell domain name, here. The look and feel is not quite the same (now instead of wrestling with Facebook, I'm wrestling with Wordpress) but we'll get there.

I've missed our conversations and looking forward to hearing from you again. I hope you'll join me at the new site. First topic? What to do with all those satsumas from a bumper crop this year...


Join me over at the Papershell site - I'd love to keep in touch with you!