June Blooms

Two views of the Buddleia globosa in front of our house, which attract butterflies and passersby with phone cameras.

Persistence

The first sunny days of spring (after Daylight Savings Time anyway) revealed blooming jonquils (above), grape hyacinth and tulips in the yard, as well as the calla lilies that persisted through the winter...

     April Pink #1 2014 (click for full photo)

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

Cloudminding#2 by WSK

"There is no possibility of true culture without altruism."

Susan Sontag

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

 Green October #2 by WSK

“Besides an outer light and eye, sight requires an 'inner light,' one whose luminance complements the familiar outer light and transforms raw sensation into meaningful perception.”
Arthur Zajonc
Catching the Light

The Hummingbird Chronicles

       Green October #1 by WSK

I have no doubt that 2013 will turn out to be the warmest year on record for the North Coast.  It's nearing the end of October and we're apparently living in San Diego, though the sunny days in the 60s are followed by increasingly colder nights, now in the low 40s.  So it's a pleasant sort of surreal so far.

The hummingbirds seem hungrier, I don't know what that may mean.  Flowers are still blooming but my feeders are emptying as fast as they usually do in January, maybe faster.  I'm pretty sure we have three regulars now, and maybe four.  The larger hummers with the longer beaks I took to be migrants turn out to be residents who are now feeding regularly here.  That suggests there's also a pair of the smaller, rounder ones.  But there are seldom more than two around at a time, though I have seen three at the same time--two competing for the feeder and one flying by.

The past week or two we've also been hosting a number of small white butterflies with a black spot or two on their wings.  Dragonflies follow the hummers when they get near the feeders, while the hummers also have to deal with the webs that industrious spiders weave and re-weave after a wrecking wind.  Spiders pose at the end of web strings in our windows like Halloween decorations.

The hummers provide entertainment as they buzz at each other and then suddenly alight on the clothesline side by side, then spin off and return to feed on opposite sides of the same feeder.  They know me and often come around when I'm outside.  Once recently I was watching one from the kitchen door window, as it maneuvered around an almost but not quite empty feeder.  It clearly wasn't getting all it wanted, so it tried each side, then flew underneath it and tried that, then flew above it and tried the top.  Then it flew directly opposite where I was watching and hovered in place looking at me, as if to demand, how do I work this thing?

Otherwise they have me well trained.  Two feeders well stocked.

Update: So of course the day after I posted this the weather changed abruptly.  After these weeks of unseasonable summer, for the past few days we've gone directly to unseasonable winter.

Deadly Beauty

Those lovely blue blobs in the foreground of this photograph of a lake are frozen methane, which are now solid but will melt into air.  Methane is one of the more potent of the greenhouse gases.

We don't get much autumn up here in far northern California.  For those of us who remember it from other places, or even for those of you in those other places, this is a pretty neat time lapse film in which you actually see the leaves change color in Central Park, NYC.

There are a lot of these time lapses videos now. I like this one not only for the Northwest landscape but because it holds onto each scene longer than most. Frankly, I am distracted by doubting that these skies are real, matched with the landscapes. Otherwise, there are several really powerful scenes, like dreamscapes. I still also question whether time lapse gives you much more to meditate on than time, rather than landscape. We apparently can't handle stillness. Anyway, the imagery is beautiful.  Happy Monday.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“We have destroyed the forest, our rivers run dry, our wildlife is all but extinct, our climate ruined...but I pass by the woods I’ve saved from the ax. I hear the forest sighing...I planted that forest. And I think: perhaps things may be in our power. Perhaps the climate itself is in our control.”

Anton Chekhov: Uncle Vanya (1897), as adapted in English by David Mamet from a literal translation (1989.)

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.  The great instrument of moral good is the imagination."

Shelley
(a quote I copied in a notebook in 1966.)

Chill Out

And remember: the planet you save might be your own.

Emerson For the Day

"It is the marriage of the soul with Nature that makes the intellect fruitful, that gives birth to imagination."
Thoreau
[click photo to see it all]

Speechless

"You can't pray a lie."
Mark Twain (Huckleberry Finn)

The week's "news"--Rush Limbaugh, Judge Richard Cebull, Joe Arpaio, Sanctimonious, Richney, etc.--is beyond comment, beyond absurdity, beyond irony, beyond the pale.  Meanwhile we are rapidly distracting ourselves beyond the point of no return.

Enjoy Your Planet.2

This one stays on the sky.  I haven't seen a sky this starry in many years.  Hard to believe there are places where it can still be seen.  Once again, best seen on a big screen.  And once again, I could do with a little less time lapse and some longer scenes, it goes by too fast.  But beautiful anyway.

Enjoy Your Planet

Yosemite HD from Project Yosemite on Vimeo.

As part of our after-circus cleansing, here's this video.  It's pretty spectacular full screen, the bigger the better.  Personally the time lapse was sometimes too much--I'd rather linger in some of those spots, with this gorgeous resolution.  But when it gets to the meteor shower--well, the experience wouldn't be the same without the waiting in the cold, the looking in the wrong place and looking back too late, the sudden surprise, the hot tea, etc. but I have to say, it was very satisfying to see a night's worth of shower in this compressed form.  Anyway, enjoy your planet.

Reality Check

Hereabouts the rains have come.  Our rainy season started Wednesday with a slowly building storm that's in its third day on Friday, with about four inches of rain total so far.  The forecast is the traditional solid gray for the forseeable future, with quiet periods between storms (next one is Sunday.)  So while this is a relief mentally, the disappearance of sunshine is its usual emotional drag.  But at least one of the hummingbirds is negotiating the swinging feeder.

Meanwhile our friends Mike and Alice are more than 3,000 miles into their epic cross country trip, doing what retirement is supposed to be for.  These photos are stolen from the blog they've created to chronicle their adventures, which is right here.  This mountainscape is from New Mexico.





They're probably in California by now, and will fly off to Hawaii for a couple of weeks before figuring out a route back to Pennsylvania.   Happy trails!

Walkabout

Some say quickly, some say more gradually, all say painfully, but this is all going to end.  It's still such an odd feeling to have my end in sight at the same time as human civilization and much of the natural world as we know it perhaps. 

Meanwhile there are lovely days like Monday, another sunny one, so I took a walk in the community forest.  It's not supposed to be sunny in January.  We should be in the middle of our rainy season.  Last year the rains were late also, but we wound up with our normal amount of rain or a little more.  But quantity isn't the whole story of normal, and normal is what the ecosystem depends on.  We're hearing of drought effects in some places hereabouts already this winter.  These redwoods, second and third growth in this forest, need a specific climate, and if this is the pattern of the future, they'll be endangered.

But a lovely day is a lovely day, warm in the sun, and quickly cold when it went down.

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

...one of those uneventful times that seem at the moment only a link between past and future pleasure but turn out to have been the pleasure itself."

F. Scott Fitzgerald
Tender is the Night

Emerson for the Day

"If your heart does not want a world of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one."

William James
photo: Big Bend