Prehistoric
There’s a sacred place at Almaden Quicksilver Park that few people know about. A hike there is refreshing to the soul, yet could be exhausting to the body.
It’s a fair trade.
12-HIDD
2 Replies
11-PYNE
Happy New Year!
The Adventure Begins – another year of living with the questions about life & work.
What can done within the confines of 365 days which enlarges the lives of more than one person? Taking a day-long nap isn’t the answer, although at 5 AM that’s the first thought that occurs to me.
In 2022, it was 36 degrees outside in Northern California.
Dressed for comfort, on my back porch at 6:30 am, I could see the stars while drinking my first cup of coffee – ah, the pleasure of that first sip.
All energy moves in waves & particles, but the ocean wave is the only wave the naked human eye can see.
If time is the lesson willing to be learned, the wave is time’s expression. It comes again & again. It keeps saying:“Will you know me now?”
Life’s Work: A Memoir (2022) by David Milch
In 2025, the moon was a waxing crescent, spiritually representing a time for new beginnings, setting intentions, and stepping towards a new goal. It symbolizes growth and potential, and is considered a phase for initiating action and building something bigger.
10-CONT
Movement
It has always been the individual who calls the group to a larger vision, who insists on compassion and fair play. When the goal of the group ceases to be the individual, that group goes into decline.”
The Sun Magazine
Time is the essence, time is the season, time ain’t no reason, got no time to slow. Burn out the day, burn out the night, I can’t see no reason to put up a fight. I’m livin’ for givin’ the devil his due.”
Blue Öyster Cult
09-SHOR
Pathway
Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.
Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.
Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)
All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.
Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”
-Leo Tolstoy
08-CONE
Visualization
Today we are blessed with, and can appreciate, millions of colors. Before the cones of our retina could distinguish between #EFFing blue and pink #FEE, who could say those colors existed at all?
We are organs of a larger organism. It knows us, although we do not know it. I’m a vessel of whatever that larger organism is, its instrument, rather than the source of the scenes. So a lot of what I do is try to get out of the way. That’s the way I work on my writing.
Life’s Work by David Milch (2022)
07-TAGA
ChessMap
Chess skills are most helpful when you are playing chess. However, when you climb & jump on rocks, your entire brain & body are put to work.
The board & pieces are all the material, but the METAGAME dynamic is certainly a factor in competition. The Royal Game by Stefan Zweig is about losing the battle to a weaker player who uses a novel psychology.
That’s me at the board, on the right, maybe 20 years ago.
06-SNOW
Cruising
There are furious debates about whether or not vehicles are environmentally friendly, even though no one realizes that one side of the debate is talking about bikes and the other side is talking about trucks.
05-TOWN
San Pedro Square
Here they sat at a social breakfast table–all of the same calling, all of kindred tastes–looking round as sheepishly at each other as though they had never been out of sight of some sheepfold among the Green Mountains.
Chapter 5: Breakfast – Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Coffee drinking in the morning is what makes getting up in the morning such a pleasure, makes life worth living. And coffee gets one moving, and you know: moving is good for you.