The birds left a few hawthorns. Just so does the year begin on the deer trail high up on the hill.

Hawthorns are a part of the grass. Fir trees, too, all alone in the wind.

That’s the solar wind, actually.

If you live in a forest, you don’t get views like this, but here on the grass you can see all the way to the centre of the solar system.

The slope is the physical manifestation of gravity. Under the high winds blowing east off the distant sea, the missing soil in the space of the valley air becomes a vacuum and lifts up, not against gravity, but against the pull of gravity on water, as the water rises to rejoin the ocean overhead. And that sun? It’s a lens in the cloud. In the following image, you can see the sun itself above the lens, far away.

I left these images dark, because in that form they show the physical forces at play here so well. Light and colour can get in the way of seeing the force of water, for example, flowing high above the world.

And trees following it up into the clouds. Those branches we see everyday?

They are rivers.

Flowing into the sea.

To the heart, the winter dark is never dark.