Hello friends, welcome to Little Ray of Moonshine! I am ‘little Ray’, and I’m so happy you’re here.
I’m a Celtic born, Texas bred twenty-something adventuring through life, armed with a dram, a journal, a Swiss army knife, a German sense of practicality and a French spirit of delight. I have always been interested in so many things that I do not think I will ever know what I want to be when I grow up. My curiosity and love of books have given me a broad and diverse knowledge base without my having ever attained a full set of marketable skills in any one area. However, the test of many years has shown me that there are some things which I will never give up; I have always loved music, traveling, writing, reading, art, food and drink, and being out of doors. Since I do not know what I will be when I grow up, I will have to be content with knowing what I will be for now. I will be an ambassador for my passions.
To this effect, I’ve divided littlerayofmoonshine.com into three general categories, which may be noted above. In each section, I will write about one or another little thing that is currently shedding a little sweet moonlight on my life, in hopes that I may shine a little on yours.
tl;dr – Pull up a chair, pour yourself a dram or some tea, and read some stuff.
*Please be so kind as not to take the ‘inking’ bit too seriously. Not all of my visual works are done in ink, but ‘what I’m arting’ just doesn’t sound as well.
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“The full moon, well risen in a cloudless eastern sky, covered the high solitude with its light. We are not conscious of daylight as that which displaces darkness. Daylight, even when the sun is clear of clouds, seems to us simply the natural condition of the earth and air. When we think of the downs, we think of the downs in daylight, as we think of a rabbit with its fur on. Stubbs may have envisaged the skeleton inside the horse, but most of us do not: and we do not usually envisage the downs without daylight, even though the light is not a part of the down itself as the hide is part of the horse itself. We take daylight for granted. But moonlight is another matter. It is inconstant. The full moon wanes and returns again. Clouds may obscure it to an extent to which they cannot obscure daylight. Water is necessary to us, but a waterfall is not. Where it is to be found it is something extra, a beautiful ornament. We need daylight and to that extent it is utilitarian, but moonlight we do not need. When it comes, it serves no necessity. It transforms. It falls upon the banks and the grass, separating one long blade from another; turning a drift of brown, frosted leaves from a single heap to innumerable flashing fragments; or glimmering lengthways along wet twigs as though light itself were ductile. Its long beams pour, white and sharp, between the trunks of trees, their clarity fading as they recede into the powdery, misty distance of beech woods at night. In moonlight, two acres of coarse bent grass,undulant and ankle deep, tumbled and rough as a horse’s mane, appear like a bay of waves, all shadowy troughs and hollows. The growth is so thick and matted that even the wind does not move it, but it is the moonlight that seems to confer stillness upon it. We do not take moonlight for granted. It is like snow, or like the dew on a July morning. It does not reveal but changes what it covers. And its low intensity — so much lower than that of daylight — makes us conscious that it is something added to the down, to give it, for only a little time, a singular and marvelous quality that we should admire while we can, for soon it will be gone again.”
-Richard Adams, Watership Down