Reflections on a tarn

20 November 2014: mirrored in a lakeland tarn

What do you make of this?  I came across it, by chance, in my photographic archive. A brief image-sequence taken on 20 November 2014, High Rigg and Raven Crag, Tarn at Leaves I think.  If I had written a journal  it is lost.   
On this dreary January day in 2026 my friend Pauline and I contemplated  these images,  sharing our thoughts.
I love to see clouds reflected in water and to discover pattern in the tangle and confusion that Nature sometimes presents.  I've long loved upland tarns and their flora -  Bog asphodel, Narthecium ossifragum,  grows with cotton grass on islets and on the boggy fringe  of the tarn.  Bogbean, Menyanthes trifoliata,  and pondweeds favour  open water.  Fells rising above the tarn  look frosty and drained of colour.  White cumulous cloud is reflected in the water, with hints of blue.  I reckon there was a dome of blue sky above me and there's a sparkle in these images, where sunbeams touched down on ice. The sun must have shone  to create those reflections. 
How puzzling  they are.  The reflection of the fell shows more precisely than the fell itself,  colour of dark chocolate.  Seed-heads of bog asphodel on the fringe of the tarn are reflected upside down in the water.   Up shows upside down and black shows white- it's a mystery!!   Bogbean dies back into the tarn during autumn and winter, leaving spikes to pierce the surface and pattern the water, dark spikes on a foil of water white  with reflected cloud.    Within the chocolate coloured reflected fell  spikes of bogbean glisten ice-white.   Here are elements of the water cycle made visible. 

The image above is intriguing.  There's an islet encircled with incipient ice and frosted seed-heads of bog asphodel on the marshy shore. They're hardy and will endure through winter and long into the next summer.  A  
Further out in the tarn there are vestigial spikes of bogbean.    The striking pattern of the introductory image shows an aquatic plant that might be a sedge or a long-stemmed aquatic plant.  Ice is forming on long stems and seed-heads.  Fine ice-filaments reach out across the web of stems.    White clouds are mirrored down onto the waters of the tarn but the icy aquatic plant looks to lie above them!  
Here's the same intriguing image. 

Signs of frost on the fells and ice forming on the waters of the tarn pierced with the dark spikes of bogbean.  In  the upper half of the image, toward the right, the frosty fell is reflected in the water.   Spikes of bogbean show in the chocolate-coloured reflection,  no longer dark but pale and white.  Some flecks of bogbean must be frosted because they  reflect sunlight.  The reflected shadow of the fell shows more precisely than the fell itself.  Pockets of marshy ground on the fringe of the tarn look icy.

Over some years I've been photographing the flora of upland tarns and their marshy surrounds so I search  my archive for bogbean and bog asphodel through the seasons. Images at Loughrigg Tarn show seed-heads of bog asphodel growing on islets in the tarn and on its marshy fringes.   Bogbean  grows out in the open water and sometimes in the waterlogged fringed.    In summer, bog asphodel has a flower-spike of yellow stars - briefly over.  Its seed-heads in autumn show rich colour, then  fade to straw-colour during winter, but they endure and can often show through snow.

An orienteer's comments during January remind me that we write in the context of our times and sometimes events break though, inescapable.
 President Trump's latest salvo dismisses NATO and the forces who responded when the US triggered Article 5 with a call to arms to its allies.  Misinformation and insult wound beyond wounds sustained in Afghanistan.
Trump seeks a Nobel Peace Prize,  demands it of the Norwegian Prime Minister, seeks legacy.
There's nothing new under the sun.  Shakespeare's Macbeth destroys himself and Scotland with tyranny.  At the end he reflects 
​ Act V scene V
And that which should accompany old age,
As honour,  love, obedience, troops of friends,
I must not look to have; but, in their stead,
Curses, not loud but deep, mouth-honour, breath,
Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.
The entire soliloquy might have been written in anticipation of Trump who rivals Macbeth for abuse of power,  and tyranny, but lacks his eloquence, lacks his self-knowledge. Listening to his speech at Davos one could almost fall asleep. He drones on, inarticulate, repetitive and rambling.  Then out of nowhere a blazing attack on his NATO allies. 
'a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing.'