21 December 2010

Big Bar0meter

As the weather shifts, Lac de Neuchâtel changes color subtly like a giant mood stone. Steel blue, Pale teal. Cobalt. Gun-metal grey. Liquid mercury. Black.


The lake is a few kilometers down the hill from where we live. On the train, switchbacking down to our town of Neuchâtel, we passengers get passing views of the lake, and each time its color shifts just a little because of our changing angle to the sun.
And every view is newly framed by the Alps behind, the forest or blurred buildings in front. 


Now that it's winter and all the leaves have fallen, we can even see bits of the lake through the trees near our house.


This view of looking down from a mountainside into a lake is both familiar and new for me. For so many years I've lived on islands in a huge ocean. There and here I stood on a mountain and looked down on a body of water, but the effect was entirely different. In Hawai'i the mountain was the island in the sea. 


In Switzerland, the lake is the island surrounded by mountains.


A little yin with the yang never hurts.



3 comments:

  1. You dispatch a provocative ripple across the lake of my life...

    ReplyDelete
  2. It's just Jillian overusing the Thesaurus... didn't want to create an account...

    ReplyDelete