10 March 2026 – In downtown Vancouver this year, winter was a slow learner.
Finally, this very day, it remembered what to do.
Snow!
For the first time this year, I put on my winter coat.
I go out in the slop — real slop, not AI-generated — where this graffito…
says it all.
Posted by icelandpenny on 10 March 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/03/10/slow-learner/
5 March 2026 – Isn’t “angularities” a wonderful word? All knobbly, just like the shapes it describes.
Vocabulary is not in mind, as I set out, though light certainly is. We had a prediction of rain; we received sunshine, and I revised plans accordingly — a long, happy walk to the noon-hour Dance Centre performance, not a quick dash to a rain-splattered bus.
My route will take me down to False Creek, then west along its north shore to Richards or Granville before angling north into town.
Light! After days of drizzle. Blazing sky above the new-build just off Main at East 5th.
Then my eye tumbles down the building, to land on those shadows streaking across the pavement.
I’m set. I have my imprint. Never mind blazing sky: I want the angularities of light and shadow, as they dance with every building they meet.
Into the N/S alley between Main & Quebec streets, and it’s dance-time.
Standing at the intersection of this alley with the E/W alley between 5th & 4th avenues, I am as goggle-eyed…
as this vintage mural on the wall beside me.
Horizontal shadows running along that flowered wall to the north…
vertical light bursting through shadows, right at the corner…
shadowed walls both sides of the E/W alley, but look how those flowers pop with colour, even so…
long rays of light across the shadowed intersection with East 4th…
and a whole sequence of shadows to pull me on north, from the puddle just to my right, down the muted wall to the blocky rectangle at the intersection, and on across the street into that well of darkness beyond.
Bubbling pools among the condo towers, N/W of East 1st and Quebec…
where light & dark translate to marine tones of green & blue.
An old friend, at Science World: the Tower of Bauble. But this time I notice the shadows more than the mechanisms…
the way a shadow-shaft enters from below and emerges on the right in an arc of colours.
Shadows, I now realize, can be a lot more interesting than the objects that create them. Boring-old, routine-old, perfectly ordinary fencing along the edge of Creekside Park…
is a lot more intriguing when thrown as Mondrian-esque patterns on grass & concrete.
Similarly, shadows of flags at the Plaza of Nations ferry dock…
are much more enjoyable than the shamefully faded real flags above our heads.
I may be besotted with angularities, but I’m willing to make exceptions.
For example, for this curve encircling a False Creek viewing bench in Coopers’ Park.
Back to the angular:
the entrance to an underground garage at the foot of Drake Street.
Then, waiting for the construction worker’s nod at Drake & Richards, heavily cordoned for the delicate crane operation taking place between existing towers, I take a picture that has no relationship at all to light & shadow. (Though it has angularities a-plenty.)
It’s just very much of the moment, and I am suitably awe-struck at the sight of that worker in the top-level cage being positioned by the crane.
Camera tucked away after that: time to step smartly and get myself to Dance Centre.
Where, to my complete surprise, light, shadow and angularities all reappear.
The stage setting is entirely in the play of light and shadow, and the Ne.Sans Opera & Dance performers are accompanied by, first, the music of Philip Glass and, second, the Cello Suites of J.S. Bach.
Glass, Bach and contemporary dance! I think they fit perfectly, each with each other, and I then try to puzzle out why. Perhaps because the word “angularity” is already in my head, I add an adjective, and I am satisfied. “Flowing angularity.” That’s it. The angularity of the exquisite precision of every note, both composers; the angularity of the exquisite precision of every gesture, all three dancers — but also the flow of the music, the flow of the dance.
Then I think about my walk, about its angularities, and I add “flowing” to that experience as well.
The flow of light particles; the flow of the wind; the flow of time; the flow of shadows moving with time to new angles and positions; the flow of my time, my steps, my thoughts; the flow from that walk to this post.
Each instant its own angle, dancing in a constant flow.
Posted by icelandpenny on 6 March 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/03/06/angularities-of-light-shadow/
1 March 2026 — Sub-categories of landscape. Skyscape and streetscape and alleyscape and (why not) trailscape. Plus a final skyscape flourish, courtesy of a friend and moon-focused, to round it off.
A completely arbitrary grouping! Just how I happened to cluster what I’ve noticed, over the past few days.
This brooding late-afternoon sky, (precisely 5:24:43 PST, said my camera), with reflected last slivers of sunlight in a few windows and early neon glowing on the streets.
The next morning, walking to Gallery Jones on East 1st Ave, I’m hit first by a smellscape of warm cinnamon bun…
and then, peering through the open door, see the cause of the aroma: stacks of newly-baked buns in this wholesale bakery, with a worker wiping his cheek as he advances on yet another tray.
From streetscape to alleyscape, somewhere to explore until the gallery opens its doors. Never mind, who needs curated art on walls when the alley offers a Blue Period worthy of Picasso?
All the textures, all the varieties of blue in that wall of corrugated metal. Whether long shot, as above, or up close to the window (which in turn frames reflected skyscape).
The same blue on the adjacent wall, providing a sleek, smooth No Parking backdrop…
for bicycle parts that are definitely & definitively parked.
Another cultural excursion the following day — this one for Maximilien Brisson’s glorious creation, Scorrete lagrime mie, at St. Anselm’s Church on the UBC grounds.
The church sits right next to various trails into Pacific Spirit Regional Park and, post-concert, I am pulled onto the Salish Trail…
by this sentinel tree, this doorman tree, imposing in his winter greatcoat of emerald velvet.
The trailscape unfolds around me.
Next up, an arched branch…
proving that left-over tassels of autumn red are just as striking as winter moss green.
To my left, farther away, another arched branch…
proving that (nyah nyah) you can have just as much impact, stark naked.
Round another bend in the trail, where first a ragged spire of ancient tree trunk…
and then a fresh-cut end of tree trunk…
prove that, in the bravura sweepstakes, red cedar always wins.
Back home, delighted with memories of both the concert and the trail, I open a text from a friend for yet another delight. It’s a skyscape photo to round off my collection…
her (7:55:07 PST) moon tribute to, as she points out, “the 12th day of the lunar new year.”
Thank you, ST.
Posted by icelandpenny on 1 March 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/03/01/scapes/
26 February 2026 – From far off, even from medium far-off, the stainless steel in Natalie McHaffie’s sculpture Solo appears to be exactly what it is:
solid bars of stainless steel.
When I move in close, my cheap-end-of-the-range (and very old) iPhone cannot cope.
It reads that solid steel as a lustrous fabric rippling in the breeze.
Entirely misleading.
Also magical.
Posted by icelandpenny on 26 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/26/up-close-misleading/
24 February 2026 – Rays of sunshine flashing all over the place, and colours bouncing around with them.
Well, no, not literally. But it looks, it feels, like that.
I stand at the intersection of E. Broadway & Main, deliberately missing two green lights, transfixed by the transformation of the Yarn Bomber’s “Be Kind” slogan and companion heart.
After years of exposure, the colours have faded and the wool is bedraggled. Construction screening now hides all that, and today’s sunshine throws us the words and image in dramatic, high-contrast relief.
Moments later I turn into the alley that will lead me to the Salvation Army drop-off centre, my eye primed for the bounce of light, colour and shadow.
Barely into the alley, and a perfectly ordinary wooden staircase delivers all that.
A few more steps, and look: green/yellow wooden pole, blue/pink/black garbage bins beyond, and down there in the distance, the turquoise blunt end of a Sally Ann truck. (I just have to stand in this ramshackle alley and look around. Colour smacks me in the eye.)
Even this tattered fabric car-shelter is on the bounce. Metallic silver, varying shades of blue in the window panel, and a vivid yellow RESERVED on the pavement for extra impact.
How fitting that right at the Scotia St. end of the alley, just where I turn into the Sally Ann compound, I find the splashiest colour bounce of all: this 2020 VMF mural, Vancouver: a People-Powered Future. (I later learn the artist, Oakland Galbraith, is only 12 years old at the time, which makes it even more wonderful.)
Next day, more sunshine, more bounce — starting with my own slight geographic bounce, down to the Devonian Harbour Park on Burrard Inlet at the edge of Stanley Park.
I happen to think the park’s signature sculpture installation is OK-fine, but not outstanding. Today, in all this blazing sunshine, it is outstanding. Today, there is nothing solo about Solo (Natalie McHaffie, 1986); it offers a whole conversation among its elements.
Neon-bright turquoise cedar panels play against stainless steel framework that seems to ripple in the light…
and, together, they throw sharp black outlines against the green grass.
Later, at the eastern end of my walk, I eye the bright edge to each peak on the Canada Place fabric roof…
and realize the sun can throw sharp white outlines just as easily as black.
Clever old sun.
Posted by icelandpenny on 24 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/24/on-the-bounce-2/
21 February 2026 – Still, poised, suspended on its plumb line.
Waiting.
Waiting for spring.
Posted by icelandpenny on 21 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/21/waiting/
14 February 2026 – Yes, we amble. We are ambling. Were we in West Yorkshire, mind you, we’d be bimbling. But we are not there. We are here in West Vancouver — in Ambleside, in fact — and we are definitely ambling.
(If you’d like to get all lexicological about these delightful words, I suggest you click on the post bimble or amble? in the Walking the Wolds blog. It will equip you to win any pub quiz on the topic, any time, anywhere.)
However my mind is not, at the moment, deep in these words. It is, like my eyes, focused on this building.
We are closing in on the Ferry Building Gallery, which indeed began life more than 100 years ago as a ferry terminal but is now a community arts hub.
The art begins outside, with a giant Pacific squid…
which was constructed last August by eco-artist Nickie Lewis from all-natural materials, and will remain on display until those natural materials begin to decompose.
No sign of that yet, the fibres and their ornaments are still full-on dramatic & vigorous.
Close to the door, a Witch Hazel shrub bears its own ornaments, a spray of bright new blossoms.
Not why we’re here!
We’re here for this:
the Gallery’s Interlace exhibition, whose seven artists have in common their primary materials of fabric, thread and wool.
Woven hangings (Shield, Haley Hunt-Brondwin)…
explosions of silk, leather, wool and thread (Home, Lorna Moffat)…
intricately looped & stitched…
artificial sinews (Untitled, Reggie Harold), looking very natural…
and then what, from a distance, could pass for an impressionistic painting of a stroll (an amble, a bimble) in the forest.
It is indeed forest, Stopping by the Woods (Eric Goldstein), but step closer and you see…
the play of burlap fibres, gold foil, resin and wood.
In the Gallery alcove, 13 circles making a circle. Moon Circles (Madwyn McConachy) is the artist’s tribute to the 12 monthly moons plus the “mystery moon,” the blue moon (on the left, with bright blue wool).
Over on the right and a little lower down, the Red Sturgeon Moon of August…
a “stitched medication on season, subtle change and belonging, within the natural world.”
Finally, we take ourselves back into that natural world.
We look south & east across Burrard Inlet toward Stanley Park, where a freighter is about to make its way under the Lions Gate Bridge and on to its assigned anchorage in the Port of Vancouver.
We head the other way, west along the Seawall toward Dundarave. The rain is holding off, and gulls & crows are busy exploring the sands, with one more crow swooping in to join them. (Yes. That is a crow flying over the water, not a Coot in the water.)
Down through Lawson Park, with a naked deciduous tree to our left, a clothed evergreen to our right, and, poised high between them, a ghostly sun wrapped in cloud.
More gulls in the kiddy playground, this time perched high on a shipwreck mast.
(One, but only one, of them is real.)
Across one of the rivulets feeding into Burrard Inlet, a long view back toward the bridge…
and then the next rivulet, with its point of rocky foreshore and a patient mum who holds her toddler by the hand. She is watching her slightly older son do what children always do, faced with water and rocks…
namely, hurl the one into the other.
We also watch, but only for a moment.
Then we do what adults do, at mid-day after a gallery exhibition and a pleasant amble along the Seawall.
We lunch.
We walk purposefully (not amble!) up to Marine Drive & into the Vietnamese restaurant Wooden Fish, where we give ourselves over to the pleasure of heaping bowls of Bun Cha.
Posted by icelandpenny on 14 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/14/we-amble/
8 February 2026 – I thought line & light were already magic. Then came the surprise.
The first “line” is, literally, a line-up.
I’m walking north on Quebec, and I see what is surely the year’s first sidewalk line-up for a cone from Earnest Ice Cream.
I almost join the line; don’t; almost turn back to join the line when I see this fellow ahead of me enjoying his cone so very much.
But I don’t. I walk on down to False Creek.
Where quite different lines greet me — racing shell pods just this side of the Olympic Dock, their vertical above/below lines bisected by the horizontal line of the water. And, bouncing all around, scattershot rays of sunlight.
Anchoring the east end of False Creek, more lines — all those triangles that slot together to make Science World’s big round geodesic dome. Plus sunlight, playing favourites with a few of the facets.
My eye is in for the rectilinear. Then I get distracted by this evergreen.
Nature doesn’t do rectilinear! But, lines are lines. Just… different lines. And still the bounce of light, above, behind, and filtering through.
Back to the rectilinear…
and back to nature.
The silhouette of the crow, the curve of the branches; everything drenched in light.
I turn south along the little creek that flows through Hinge Park. There has been some reed-clearing here, I think, creating a more defined line through the water. I learn on the railing, watch ducks paddle their rounded lines through all those verticals, real and reflected.
And then… and then I realize I’ve just cocked my head, probably pulled a quizzical face.
What is that sound? Faint tappings, rhythmic, and, even fainter, the crooning of an almost subliminal voice.
I follow my ears on down the creek-side path. Then I see it. A bit farther south, spanning the creek. The industrial pipe cum “railway engine” cum pedestrian bridge…
cum percussive instrument.
Thanks to the three people sitting on top.
I am enchanted. Look! A boy at one end, a couple of 20-somethings at the other; all three tapping sticks against the metal, woven into each other and into the recorded soprano vocal line that inspires them.
The young men remain seated. The boy moves around, explores other surfaces.
He braces against the “smoke stack”…
and then, sure-footed, turns to make it his own next musical instrument.
I lean there until the music ends. The boy disappears down thriough one off the cut-outs, obedient to his mother’s call. The young men notice me, and wave. I applaud, then tap my heart. They tap their hearts, and throw their arms wide in my direction. I throw my arms wide, right back at them. We beam at each other.
Magic.
Posted by icelandpenny on 8 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/08/line-light-magic/
3 February 2026 – Determined to put at least a bit of knowledge behind my obsession with moss, I have begun to read Gathering Moss (Robin Wall Kimmerer). as recommended by a wise and dear friend. It is a splendid recommendation: Kimmerer draws on both her academic status (botanist, university professor) and her heritage (enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation) to present the scientific data of bryology in the larger human context.
3 February 2026 – Determined finally to put a bit of knowledge behind my obsession with moss, I have begun to read Gathering Moss (Robin Wall Kimmerer), recommended to me by a wise and dear friend.
It is a splendid recommendation. Kimmerer draws on both her academic status (botanist, professor) and her cultural heritage (enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation) to present scientific data about bryology in the larger human context.
Just two chapters into the book, I bring myself to the Camosun Bog, on a suitably rain-tinged day, with new eyes.
Signage welcomes me at the Camosun Street entrance, down there at the bottom right of the map…
and Kimmerer’s words shimmer in my brain.
“With sophisticated technology we strive to see what is beyond us, but are often blind to the myriad sparkling facets that lie so close to hand. … Mosses and other small beings issue an invitation to dwell for a time right at the limits of ordinary perception.”
I greet what I think of as my Sentinel Log on the way in. I am still ignorant of all the mosses it bears, but more appreciative of them than ever.
I am almost impatient with this blaze of Red osier dogwood — it’s not why I’m here!
I am here for what first appeared some 3,000 years ago, the transformation from marsh to bog.
I stand at the heart of the bog, admire its waters at their full winter strength, surrounded by bog plants and mosses and, beyond that, the forest of Pacific Spirit Regional Park.
All those other plants first tug the eye, but, look, mosses on hummocks in the bog waters and all along its edges.
“Learning to see mosses is more like listening than looking,” says Kimmerer. “Mosses are not elevator music, they are the intertwined threads of a Beethoven quartet.”
I dutifully read about the Bog Laurel…
but I am looking beneath the Laurel, beneath the Labrador Tea, beneath the Bog Cranberry…
to the moss. The mosses. The bryophytes.
“A true moss or bryophyte is the most primitive of land plants,” explains Kimmerer. They lack flowers, fruits, seeds and roots; they have no vascular system. “They are the most simple of plants and in their simplicity, elegant. With just a few rudimentary components of stem and leaf, evolution has produced some 22,000 species of moss worldwide.”
I pause for another sign. (I always read signs.) Thirteen species of sphagnum moss, here in the bog.
I walk on. I marvel.
And I marvel some more.
Among all the glowing greens, some of the soft reds the sphagnum moss sign has just invited us to notice.
I take a spur path away from the loop encircling the bog, off into the surrounding forest.
Kimmerer murmurs in my ear: “Looking at mosses adds a depth and intimacy to knowing the forest,”
Here at a curve in the path, a knot of ferns and moss. I nod at them, smile, think of the ferns and mosses on my own balcony.
Another Sentinel Log, this one guarding the 19th Avenue entry to the bog…
and finally, I turn back.
I nod farewell to this log’s Camosun Street colleague on the way out…
and then — of course — keep right on noticing moss, with every step.
Here, a side lawn bordering Camosun Street…
here, the crotch of the tree at the bus stop…
and finally here…
right here, on my own balcony at home.
Posted by icelandpenny on 3 February 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/02/03/listening-to-moss/
31 January 2026 – And then…
the rain came back.
Posted by icelandpenny on 31 January 2026
https://icelandpenny.com/2026/01/31/and-then/
WALKING WOMAN 