this is a continuation of the thing about the lizard in the corner of the picture. now can you see it?

I’m now having lots of experience of looking for tennis balls. Today I found one by treading on it. It’s that time of year when the fallen sycamore leaves (a good year for sycamore colour, in spite of the rain) are not much brighter than the smudgy yellow of a tennis ball. Yesterday I walked round and round in circles deliberately, the ball being lost in an open space in Clissold Park; it hadn’t flown into tangles of ivy and brambles. I covered every inch of possible ground and some impossible ground and in the end I did find it. When I saw it I couldn’t believe I’d missed it for so long. It seemed so obvious. So of course you can walk along a path three, four, five times and still see flowers you didn’t see before. And on little visited mountains there are plants still waiting to be discovered.

I think I’ve developed quite a good eye for plants, but the tennis balls could prove me wrong.

Even as so many species become extinct, others are discovered. (the dying and the new born.)

I’ve spent a lot of time recently looking at my photos, mostly ones of flowers, on the computer, wondering if I can get better prints. I don’t do photoshop, but I play around with the exposure a bit, and I crop them, often not sure if I want to see more closely or from further away. I feel lucky to have seen so much, and I’m greedy for more. I often do it when words or thoughts seem beyond me, I just want to look. Many of the names escape me now.

Of course more often than criss-crossing a mountainside looking for plants I search for tennis balls in the park, or criss-cross this house, unable to remember where I’ve left a book or my wallet.

Now I’m looking for something I wrote the other day, about the parallel between walking in circles and thinking and writing in circles, with reference to my having repeated myself over and over again, my mind moving on deeply scoured paths. There are currently several documents that I write in: this one is called ‘for the blog’. But I could be writing in ‘landscape, walking’ or ‘gardening columns’ or ‘diary late november’. Or I might copy something from one document into another. Sometimes I have to look at each to find myself. But now I can’t find it anywhere, the sentence or two about paths and the connection between walking and thinking in circles. Not in the recycling spot either. Actually just about everything could be filed under recycling. Recycling means going round in circles.