What’s madness ...?

A good example of the deception of photography. This was a brief bright moment and then the camera never saw the light of day again as it got wetter and darker, the waterproofs went on and then, as I got to Small Water I swapped waterproofs for swim gear and jumped in in the pouring rain. Fine in, not so fine coming out and trying to get dressed. In the end though it was a better plan than my earlier decision to do some sorting of photographs. One look at the first album and happier times and I realised which was the greater madness and headed out to Haweswater reckoning that the weather would put most off. I was right, didn’t see anyone up there.

In a Dark Time - Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.