Tag: nature
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Falling into Fall
Unlike San Luis Obispo, which is sometimes jokingly described as having two seasons: “day” and “night,” Atascadero – over the Cuesta Grade and out of reach of coastal temperance – can boast of at least three and a half. Every decade or so it is even graced with a peek at four, when an extreme…
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The Birds and the Beasts of El Niño
Meteorologists have been promising drought-stricken California an El Niño event since sometime in 2014. That year the rising temperature of Pacific Ocean waters characteristic of the phenomenon came too little, too late to combat the Pacific “blob,” a new and puzzling region of unusually warm water and its associated high pressure system that kept storms…
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A Walk in the Tiny Woods
The first time I drove from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo I was in my late twenties. A college boyfriend had graduated and decamped to Cal Poly for a masters degree, and despite it being the time before smartphones and Skype shrank emotional if not physical miles, we embarked on the folly of a…
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The Old Sky
According to the Yanomami people, the world before this one was crushed when forces of chaos collapsed the sky, hurling Earth’s inhabitants into the underworld. Kinder deities raised a new one, and from the back of its fallen predecessor grew the forest where, when they clawed their way back above ground, the Yanomami came to…
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Lessons Learned on the Cambria Boardwalk
A morning in Cambria and a mere 383 photos later, I have made certain additional discoveries. Lessons Technical Lessons Natural I keep dreaming of taking pictures at the Cambria Scarecrow Festival. Which was, in fact, this weekend. But first I would have to get over expecting scarecrows and finding only papier mache. Trying out my…
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Thunderbird
The first time I saw a turkey vulture I thought it was an eagle. It soared along a ridge, far too large to be a hawk, elegant and majestic as it rode a thermal nearly out of sight. When my friend said it was a vulture I didn’t believe him. The first time I heard…
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The Wild Things
When my grandparents were still alive they lived in the remote Pennsylvania woodlands in a small stucco and stone home that my grandfather built himself. I spent a summer there just before my teens. I remember wandering through my grandmother’s garden of dahlias and snapdragons, mesmerized by all the color. I remember afternoons spent curled…
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Macro San Miguel
I’ve always found something simultaneously appealing and off-putting about California missions. The architecture nestles with organic seamlessness into the surrounding environment (aesthetic intent as necessity, perhaps, since at the time local building materials were likely the only viable option, but still). On the other hand there’s the way they were built and maintained: typically with indigenous laborers who, even if they came…
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Subject and Object
On the first day of my first metaphysics class, the professor asked a student to count the objects in the room. She confidently totted up the people, the desks, and had started working on the whiteboards and pens when he interrupted her. “What about the chair legs?” She looked perplexed for a moment. “Or the screws…
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Lessons Learned at the Aquarium
A weekend in Monterey and 683 photos later, I have made certain discoveries. Photography lessons learned: Social lessons learned: Monterey Aquarium California, March 2014 (for higher resolution versions see SmugMug gallery)
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