On Saturday, while Paul was teaching a workshop in Santa Cruz, I wandered up the coast. Just north of town there was a farmers' market, where a glowing array of kale, spinach, beets, lemons, bags of salad greens spiked with orange edible petals -- well, a big early spring bounty was laid out on folding tables under temporary tents. I loved that a lot of the vendors -- under signs with names like Happy Dog Farm and Bright Boy Produce -- looked like the young men who fascinated me around 1970: beards and long hair, handmade knit caps, "ethnic" clothes -- ah. Who gets to be so lucky, that a style that conveyed mystery and beauty when you were 17 returns (or never entirely vanished)? Blessings on California! Then I drove further up the coast, near Pescadero, and took a back road to Butano State Park, for a hike in a deep cool redwood grove. These photos were taken looking down from a wooden footbridge into Little Butano Creek.
6 comments:
Mark
what incredible photos
the inner luminosity of the rushing water you've captured is wondrous
art quality work- but then coming from you i'm not really surprised.
i seriously hope you might do something permanent with these pics- perhaps print them and fram thenm in triptych?
just a thought
David@Montreal
Your visit to California has been fertile. Thank you for recording the journey. California's riches are not in its budget, at the moment, but in the convergences of living beings and the natural world and the third realm or state that results from those convergences. Muir knew it. Jeffers called it, among other things, transhuman magnificence. Now you, Mark, point to it via Happy Dog Farm.
Just finished reading Firebird, Mr. Doty.
Nice photos! I just recently stumbled upon your blog. You suddenly became real to me....
They never entirely vanished, which amazes me. In that area near Pescadero, there is an environmental camp where both of my kids went when they were in fifth grade. My older daughter went back in high school to be a camp counselor for the fifth graders, and loved it, even though she's not a hippie type. All the counselors take nature-themed names (you know, like "Twig" or ""Moss" or something.) If everyone eats everything they take at dinner, so that nothing goes into the compost bucket, the director puts the bucket on his head and does a dance as a reward. It's unbelievably sweet, and who knows, maybe at least some of the kids will try to take better care of the earth.
Hippie types, both men and women, tend to be attracted to being therapists as well as all kinds of other healing professionals (body workers, mindfulness teachers, etc.) In particular, a lot of them show up in this trauma training program I'm doing - go figure. And, we were at Esalen last week and that's practically hippie central.
Some souls are just what they are across time and and space, and they never disappear.
Beautiful photographs, Mark. The farmers' market sounds like sensory feast.
My partner (husband!) bought a tshirt from some farmer boys at one of the farmer's markets here in Berkeley. Melon Hunks, said the tshirt. The farmer boy said, "We only have pink left. You know you're okay with that."
Post a Comment