The Japanese walnut tree always attracts attention. With its beautiful variety of leaf shapes. And a wonderful symbolism: immutability, timelessness and long life. Goethe wrote a poem about it in 1815:
See this trifle in my garden:
tree leaf from the orient,
adorns with its secret value,
insiders well known.
Does it live as a single being,
inwardly divided into two?
Or, on the contrary, does the exquisite
twosome one recognisable image?
Slowly maturing ideas
shed light on those questions.
Don't you feel I am in two
loner in my poem?
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
From Suleika
Translated from the German by Mimi Laman
What do you see? At a young age I could spend hours peering over plains; looking for animals or beautiful light play, a horizon. My seeing started to change with the camera: getting an eye for an expression in a face, caught by a composition, seeing not.. Read more…