Worlds Within Worlds

Lichens and Habits

There are worlds within worlds: look closer and you will see.

Here, in The Alentejo, it is the season of rain. Heavy, insistent Atlantic rain, or fine, cloudlike cover, blanketing all in moisture, swaddling in grey. Ridgelines vanish, to reappear as suggestions, trees as spectres, and the woods mere hints. When they do appear, these ancient hillsides are clad entirely in emerald, gone is any vestige of brown, any trace of the bleaching of the long hot summer. Instead, all things grow, fast: from grass to trees, mould to citrus, and lambs to calves, they are all flourishing.