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please do see the gallery of slides, updated regularly from now on on the above link.

Sliding is the best way to travel. Through seasons and through places!

Every week, something new happens. Flowers bloom, fall, fruits ripen, leaves yellow, bees, ants, different species of butterfly appear in succession, the older ones lie dead, bugs and leaves. The quick passing of seasons, its gone before you know it, has always been a close pain in my heart. I have wondered, is it the passing of time that worries me? Not so much I think. Then? It’s that I start loving everything about the day, the place, get used to its daily routine, and in a few days, its gone. So, ‘sliding’, as I will call it, is an activity that I am finding keeps me up to date with the slight shifts in seasonal time. Like three days back, I discovered that the oak forest we had been visiting last two weeks suddenly has a new set of flowers floating, rotting on the stream and a whole new set of butterflies and bugs too! They follow the flowers to the water, dying upon it, drowning, with their suckers still attached to the juicy flower nectar. The old proverb of the moth and the flame, I think I would like to rephrase it a bit!

So here, so far, is a collection of the last two weeks near Bunglow-Ki-Kandi, Uttarakhand, at a height of 5000 ft.

Within this two weeks, we saw the transformation from final days of cool spring to a warm summer. The summer heat arrived late this year. The last of the air borne seeds dispersed, berries plucked, the wild dandelion and daisies in their last bloom, and then they dried and turned brown. The sudden shift, and the first two days of heat had an immediate effect on the fruits that were waiting to ripen for a while now. Plums and apricots. Almost daily, we find moths, butterflies and winged insects die at our doorsteps.

One learns a lot about the textures of nature when one works with crushing them, keeping them intact, peeling them, scraping them … extracting juice fibre or transparency of their surface. The varieties of structures in organic matter is most exciting. And many times surprising. For instance, I did not expect the plum leaf to be so dry and tough, when ground, even when pasted to pulp with the help of water, its juice is still opaque! While its peel gives beautiful translucence.