With some regularity we come upon places in our visual field that are beautiful but can’t be entered. The restriction isn’t due to governmental regulation or arduous positioning. It’s simply a moment when the point of view of an odd stance combined with something like eccentric sunlight, transmogrifies a few middle distance elements of matter. When a weird dome of shrubs or a perplexing bend of a river or a puddle below a niche in a rock face, momentarily invoke charming scenes: a fetching grotto, a cozy folly, a bucolic fortified garden. There is an atmosphere of the will-o’-the-wisp about it all, but instead of sinister beckoning — more a playful evaporation — an occult retreating caused by a mere step or two in any direction. The effect is not unlike peering into a dollhouse or an aquarium; you can imagine yourself within but you can never be there. Also with these appearances there is a distanced air of our previous life as a child; when we knew little context but took in our surroundings with complete subjective seriousness — easily seeing a family of shopping carts as the walls around a gnome’s burrow or an overly planted Main Street median as a parapet for a brood of mystical creatures. We know not to hunt these moments, but to let them occur. Their sudden arrival calls for a particular skill: to let our senses dull, to remain still, to soften focus. It seems important to say as well, that these suggestive groupings seem only to materialize when walking. It is really only at wayfaring speeds that the parallaxing of the array of items, within the varying distances of our visual sweep, can become such an occasional theatre.