A glorious one.
And an uncanny, mysterious one.
It is easy to forget that the Ljubljana Marshes are, after all, a giant marsh when they bask beneath the prickly sunlight of spring. The land softens in memory then, appearing almost welcoming, almost tame.
These two liftoff places are less than a kilometre apart in space, and the two kite aerial photography sessions separated by only two weeks in time.
But what a difference …
The winter face of the Marshes is bleak, brown, grey; the ground refuses to mirror the sky. The sunlight, filtered through lingering cold clouds, is diffuse and feeble, absorbed and contemplated rather than enhanced and reflected back. The landscape feels withdrawn, unwilling to reveal itself, as if every the remains of long forgotten harvest and brittle reed has quietly decided to endure rather than to bloom again.
The spring face is all smiles.
Two-faced marsh.
A vast expanse ruled by Nature, a refuge for plants, insects, and animals that have finally found repose here, a safe place far from encroaching civilization.
The most altered landscape in Slovenia. Changed, redesigned, forced upon. Burned, cut, shaped into unnatural rectangles, wounded.
A farmer’s paradise, a fertile bowl; black soil sprouting all kinds of food and fodder.
An unforgiving land, resisting cultivation, sabotaging every effort, destroying hopes and dreams, sucking life down into wet, dark, cold nothingness.
A beautiful, shining, sunny, happy land.
A beautiful, strange, uncanny, bizarre land.
Two-faced marsh.
One face soothes, the other remains aloof.
The kite, of course, does not care. The winds above the Ljubljana Marshes are steady, the sky enormous. The kite simply flies. It rises and drifts above the contradictions without judgement, carried by currents older than memory.
Like the Marshes, which simply are. They don’t trust us, but they do let us project upon them, upon this happy, strange land, whatever we wish.
The moist, heavy, dark soil will swallow our words as if they had never been spoken.
The green, sunlit waste will ignore our thoughts and remain oblivious.
The Marshes trust no one.
Perhaps they trust a kite: a kite is as artificial and as natural as the Marshes themselves. A kite will never hurt anyone.
Kite aerial photos shot with Insta360 on Cindy delta and on The Venerable Old rokakku, and with Nikon P330 on The Original Blue rokkaki, all kites made by master Janez Vizjak.