so california right now

So I'm at lunch today, devouring my delectable In-N-Out burger & fries on the sunny patio under the palm trees and hugging the freeway, and it strikes me just how very california this is.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I'm still in love with this place.

photo credit: unsureshot (flickr)

look

Last Sunday I walked three and a half miles in the rain.

Somewhat drowsy from skipped breakfast and a week of late nights, I experienced my surroundings as in a dream:

cheerful yellow daffodils alongside a shadowy asphalt river

pumpkin-orange doors centered on a silver-gray façade

blushing petals discarded in circular patches on delicious green rain-soaked lawns 

all shining dully in this translucent blue-gray light sailing on cool gusts of freshly washed air

and everything was so achingly beautiful.

And it occurred to me that I am in a stage in my life that is largely dominated by aesthetics.

(No doubt you'll have noticed, if you have been following my recent musings here.)

And I don't think that's a terrible thing.

The aesthetic quality of any entity is an essential part of its being. I'm not saying that everything should be judged solely in terms of aesthetics; indeed, this would be limiting almost to the point of ridiculousness. Ignoring aesthetics entirely, on the other hand, would be just as tragically laughable.

Within biological systems, aesthetics play a key role in perpetuating any given species. Aesthetic beauty holds amazing potential to inspire the beholder, and artistic creation—which exists not without the aesthetic—can easily mimic the divine. Aesthetics are not everything, to be sure, but certainly they merit our consideration. 

At the moment I have nothing more profound to say on the matter, except that we ought not overlook that which is here to be looked at.

28: vine

I spent the afternoon in Napa.

Yes, a day in wine country. And I don't drink. 

I inhaled the volatile esters of some nice fruity cabernets and for once in my life the smell of alcohol didn't make me physically ill. As my friend tasted and compared the 2003, 2002, and 1999 vintages, I read the lovely, sometimes fanciful descriptions of the different varieties, one of which was purportedly "opulently structured." 

We got to see the Quixote winery, the whimsical Hundertwasser's last design. (I mentioned the Austrian architect once before.)

The landscape in Napa county is stunning: all that greenery and the rows of old-growth vines rolling by, the occasional babbling brook, and dramatic open skies. Plus, wildflower season is coming on, so a rainbow of poppies and my favorite yellow daffodils were popping up along the roadside. And the air is so clean and refreshing. The word idyllic comes to mind. So does fantasyland.

As my friend made his purchases, I checked out the labels for design inspiration. Eponymous is nice, as is Blackbird. And there was another one that I made a mental note of, but I've forgotten it already. This is why I usually write things down.

As we drove back toward the city, the odd little world of monoculture and almost surreal natural and societal environment melted away behind us. And yet I know that somehow it still exists. As do a lot of other microcosms that I have little to no contact with in daily life. In some ways, it's not really that small of a world, after all.

(all photos mine, of quixote winery)

21: replenish

I suddenly want to be a farmer.

I have been reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan's fascinating exploration of our nation's industrial food system and some possible alternatives. Representing the alternative in food production, Joel Salatin attained something akin to rockstar status once he was featured in Pollan's book in 2006.

Mr. Salatin spoke at Stanford on Thursday evening. Several hundred people turned out to hear him, and he did not disappoint. Certainly no country bumpkin, he is clearly a very intelligent man who is entirely devoted to (a stance which includes motivation by love) his farming by smart and unconventional (oddly, most conventional methods in this country are simply counterintuitive) methods. Plus, he is a thoroughly entertaining speaker (not to mention inspirational, even though that sounds kind of cheesy).

A self-described "Christian libertarian capitalist environmentalist lunatic," Salatin is the owner of Polyface Farms in rural Swoope (pronounced swope, with a long o), Virginia. His "beyond organic" farm is grass-based and thrives on naturally-evolved interspecies relationships. He calls it allowing chickens to express their chickenness, pigs to express their pigness, and so on. As descriptors of Polyface, words like holistic, circular, and sustainable join the ranks of idyllic, pastoral, and communal.

As a Christian, Salatin believes that his mission is to be a steward of the land and to return it to its Garden of Eden state. 

There are plenty of good reasons why people of faith ought to be conscientious of the way they treat the earth and all its inhabitants, including humans of course, but also all other forms of life. I remember attending an excellent lecture with Julie in our freshman year of college. Professor George Handley spoke about LDS perspectives on environmental stewardship. I don't remember any specifics now, but I do remember getting a general impression that I might articulate as "Duh, why don't more people see how much sense this makes? The gospel + environmentalism = resonance." I really ought to write more about this another day; I think it's just one facet of how the gospel can be applied, as we like to say, to everyday life, and with eternal consequence for good. (I just discovered this LDS Earth Stewardship website; will be checking it out and likely reporting on it here later.)

Mr. Salatin reports that, based on the demographics of current U.S. farm owners, about 50% of the nation's farms will change hands in the next 10-15 years. Somehow I find that really exciting. Without too much imagination, I can see myself in a decade or so farming a nice green patch of land in the central valley, perhaps. Maybe you'd like to purchase the farm adjacent and we can be neighbors as we return to our agricultural heritage and commune with the land and its creatures?

(photo: turkeys at Polyface, by Spicy Bear)

13: crawl

It's raining again, like it was last night.

When I left home this morning, though, it was not raining. Walking through the courtyard toward the street, I nearly stepped on a six-inch long earthworm that had ventured out to check out the sunshine while the pavement was still wet, I suppose. I don't really know why worms appear on the surface after it rains: maybe to escape underground flooding? Anyway it's a delicate balance, it seems, since they dry up if they stay out in the sun too long. I've seen the evidence. Can you imagine living in a body so fragile that it would shrivel up completely after, say, a day at the beach or an afternoon in the park? And that's it. No more earthbound wanderings.

I remember tiptoeing up and down the long driveway in front of our house, dodging the scores of worms that would wriggle across the black pavement after a summer rainstorm. I was always really sad to see one that had dried up, and sometimes I would whisper to the others that they should be careful and go back home soon. On other days I might look more closely at this same terrain and see a single ant trudging along, and for some reason I found it fascinating to watch how it reacted when I placed my foot directly in its path. Ever tenacious, it always set immediately upon an alternate route.

In the fall I would gather helicopters—maple seedpods—by the armful and release them (the higher the starting point, the better) just to see them whirl ecstatically toward the ground. A related hobby was exploring the beds of impatiens (of which we had tons when I was very little) and popping the seedpods. They have a sort of rubbery, elastic epidermis, and when they are good and ripe, they have inflated like little balloons that, at the lightest touch or gentlest squeeze, burst and curl up on themselves. It was always so satisfying to play a part in that transformation. I could entertain myself for hours with these simple activities, micro-interactions with nature, just outside my front door.

Sometimes I miss that purity.

(photo credit: ian boyd)

skywatch flashback

[Kabah, Yucatán, Mexico. June 2006]

Highlights from my visit to this site:

1) watching the golondrinas (swallows) flitting in and out of the archways

2) witnessing the outburst of an exhausted student in the group, who exclaimed, among other things, that I and two of my friends should just go back to the U.S. because we thought that we were Mexican. what?

Watch the skies from your desktop:

a year in preview: ABCs of 2009

Ah, the new year's resolutions. I never really liked that terminology. I think it's because the word resolution implies that a person means to do away with a problem that was left unsolved at the end of the last year, possibly due to a broken resolution made at the beginning of the last year. And so the typical new year's resolutions tend to be about the same every year, most items on the list remaining perpetually unresolved.

I am certainly not immune to the allure of new beginnings, but I prefer to think of the new year as a blank page rather than a blank slate. I'm taking pen to paper on a new chapter, not an entirely new book. And I didn't burn everything that my life wrote in previous years.

Well, now that I've set the semantic scenery (a conspicuous linguist am I), I give you now my list of twenty-six goals, predictions, and dreams for this year that we number 2009. Question them, critique them, adapt them into your own lists, make alternate suggestions, mock them; just please, don't call them resolutions. Thank you.

ABCs of skylark's 2009:

Adventuring

Bizarrities

Canadian escapade

Dinner parties

Eccentric acquaintances

Forest exploration

Grad school applications

Hikes with new buddies

Iphone purchase

John Steinbeck pilgrimage

Kiwicha in Bolivia

Long bike rides

Modern dance

New blog

Oboe performance

Published translations

Quechua classes

Romance and heartbreak

Sufjan live

Twitter tweets

Underground art

Vegan experimentation

Weekend in Austin

Xerophyte adoption

Yuppietown to hippietown

Zapateao

sky of eighteen winters

Lake Kittamaqundi, Columbia, Maryland

26 December 2008

roots and wings

[columbia, md. 25 dec 2008]

Here I am in my childhood home:

walls and roof, trees and sky.

Happy Holidays & Happy Skywatch Friday!

skywatch friday, week 18

[from the archives: provo, utah, october 2007]

Behold my beloved cottonwoods,
undressing in preparation for winter,
outside my last apartment in Utah.

skywatch friday, week 17

[22nd st at indiana, san francisco]

Thanksgiving day:
silhouetted stubby claw trees (not their scientific name)
reaching toward wintry grey clouds over the city.

See more at Skywatch!

skywatch friday, week 12

the rainy season is upon us.



[palo alto caltrain station]

alias

I saw this on a couple of friends' blogs, and it looked like fun. And since I am somewhat frenetically trying to make up for a long dearth of verbal blog posts, it seems fitting to throw it into the mix now:

1. Rock Star name: Cleo* Marguerite** (first pet + current car)
2. Gangster name: Dulce de Leche Snickerdoodle (favorite ice cream + favorite cookie)***
3. Detective name: Green Golondrina (favorite color + favorite animal)
4. Soap Opera name: Ann Columbia (middle name + city where you were born)
5. Star Wars name: Davem (first 3 letters of your last name + first 2 letters of your first)
6. Superhero name: The Orange Tamarindo**** ("The" + 2nd favorite color + favorite drink)
7. Nascar name: Huck Rex (grandfathers' first names)
8. TV Weatherman name: Sheer Shanghai (5th grade teacher's last name + major city starting with the same letter)
9. Spy Name: Spring Daffodil (favorite season/holiday + favorite flower)
10. Cartoon Name: Blackberry Scarfie (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now + “ie” or “y”)
9. Hippie name: Granola Bar Redwood (what you ate for breakfast + favorite tree)
10. Rock band name: The Wandering Blizzard ("The" + favorite hobby + favorite weather element)

*my neighbor's cat when I was little. I've never had any pets of my own.
**actually the Stanford shuttle bus, named after Leland Stanford's favorite horse
***in my opinion, this is seriously flawed gangster name methodology
****okay so maybe this is my second-favorite drink, but the orange hot chocolate just didn't have a very nice ring to it

skywatch friday, week 10

It's been a very busy, but very enjoyable week. Maybe I'll write about it once I sleep it off. Anyway my point is that this Skywatch Friday post comes a little later than usual, but at least it is still Friday where I live, so it counts.



[through a glass darkly. stanford, california]

skywatch friday, week 8

[stanford, ca]

skywatch friday, week 7

[machu picchu, peru, 16 june 2007]

more skywatch photos here

flora and civitas

[haight st, san francisco]

[castro st, san francisco]

(Really, I'll be writing more once I get internet access in my new apartment. I promise!)

skywatch friday, week 2

[by California Avenue Caltrain station, Palo Alto]

check out others' skywatch posts here

so happy

("so happy" dahlias at golden gate park)


Okay, I wanted to wait until it was official, so I filled out the paperwork today and I can now announce that I got a job, and one that I am quite excited about at that. I am really rather shocked by how quickly things fell into place and I am looking forward to what should prove to be a terrific experience. I am just delighted to be in this area and to have a new purpose. At last I feel like I really belong just where I am.

another reason why i love this city

Yesterday I decided to go explore Golden Gate Park. I really wanted to see the bison, but I'll have to go back another day for them because I didn't make it that far. I was on foot, and I had come on foot from the library downtown, and the park is huge. Inside the park are several museums, conservatories (the plant kind, not the music kind), lakes, sports fields, playgrounds, specialized gardens, picnic grounds, and so on. Oh, and of course the buffalo paddock. Seriously. Buffalos (ok they're really American bison, but who can tell?) in the middle of the city.

All throughout the park there are roads for motor vehicle traffic and countless paths for walking and biking. Few places can make me feel so content as a woodland path carpeted with pine needles. And the smell! A mingling of redwood and eucalyptus and I don't even know what other fresh greenery. Oh, it's lovely.

A side effect of having discovered for myself this marvelous place is a really (in many ways) brilliant sunburn. My face got sunscreened in the morning but my arms, unfortunately, were neglected. And you know, even when it's very sunny, you don't realize that you're getting burned when the air temperature is only about 75 degrees. It's a few hours later that it hits you. And then you run over to Safeway at 10 at night because you know you won't sleep well without some concentrated aloe vera gel, only to find that they're all out and you have to settle for an inferior aloe-tinged lotion.

If you are at all familiar with my photographic tendencies, you know that I have a particular penchant for photographing flora. Tree trunks, flower blossoms, curiously-shaped succulents, weeds gone to seed, you name it, and if it belongs to the plant kingdom, I'd love to take a picture of it. And Golden Gate Park is a fine place for introducing your camera to some lovely plant specimens. Take a look: