On indented comments, called blockquotes: just enclose the text within start and stop blockquote tags. Tags must use angle brackets < and >, but to make them visible to you I’m showing square ones:

[blockquote]my text[/blockquote]

Replace the squares with angles and you get

my text

And yet I cut through it all.

You are, of course, referring the the well-decorated b&b with the world’s longest kitchen floorboard.

I do remember a someone who would venture to an island off Scotland thereupon to paint the outlandish weather in all its various billowings. As I recall, he had adopted the Turner palette, in spirit if not in actual fact.

You had either x-ray vision or you lodged in one of those spendy high-rises that dot the Portland landscape. Oops, I forgot — I believe it was Chez Underwood that hosted you. Anyway, if it ain’t the clouds, it’s the foliage that keeps us from MS Hood’s moody visage.

As for issues from adventures, I’m thinking about the painting of fog. And trying. And thinking. And trying. But this isn’t a painting class.

How do you get those quote blocks from other comments into yours?

June:

Good to see you back. Perhaps you can concoct an issue from your adventures upon which we can glom.

Mt. Hood seemed visible enough when I was there. But then I have an uncanny x-ray vision when it comes to such things.

I’m two weeks distant from my post and a bit lost in the plethora of comments (not to mention having had a vacation and an extended bed stay between the posting and the present).

But to try to respond, however feebly –

Jay, Portland’s foliage and streets are all encompassing, all surrounding, particularly in the summer. Mt Hood never appears unless you search for some artificially exposed piece of sky from Mount Tabor or the West Hills; so to answer one of your questions — my attention was almost wholly on the small rather than the large and there were no grand vistas that loomed.

Karl, I think I was trying to get at something like you expressed — along the lines of what Tree wrote in her poem. The reversed optical illusion that this kind of experience gives one made me wonder if I wasn’t for the first time seeing truly rather than seeing through a category (Tree’s plane/bird).

I do understand that I’ve been training myself to see in this way and that perhaps it merely was a moment when my training came into full focus (as Steve, I think, suggests). But there are other possibilities, one being that nature itself is this and sometimes we can actually see it. Another is that it isn’t a “seen” event so much as it is a “felt” event, transformed, as Karl puts it, into a conventional photographic form for verbal discussion. That is, perhaps I could make similar photographs without the “feeling” but it’s the feeling that infused the morning with meaning. To discuss it, however, I had to present the photographs as evidence of the ineffable.

Anyway, I’ve lost most of the train of thought the post came from. And I see that Jay had a question that I’m not comprehending. If you keep poking at me, Jay I might do better at responding. But the conversations have gone on in interesting and fruitful directions the meantime and so I’m happy to lay this to rest.

I’ve been thinking about your Junkyard Treasures and wondering if Nature really has a special place, or if it is something we learn to like.

June,

I think that the nature that you view as art in itself is essentially that. But in presenting it to others, it becomes necessary to transform and represent it in a conventional form.