On a very rainy day here a photo from Florence 2019

“I crossed over to Broadway and walked north to 

Twenty-fifth Street to the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral

dedicated to Saint Seva, the patron saint of the Serbs, 

I stopped, as I had many times before, to visit the 

bust of Nikola Tesla, the patron saint of alternating current, 

placed outside the church like a lone sentinel.

I stood as a Con Edison truck 

parked within eyeshot. No respect, I thought.

from M Train, Patti Smith

Cedar Waxwings

We have had a flock of 5 or more Cedar Waxwings hanging around the

backyard for the last couple of months. They are such elegant birds.

"Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations.

Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies

like a snowflake falling on water. '

from Flying at Night 

by Ted Kooser

First Flights

“Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams;

I crown me with the million-colored sun

Of secret worlds incredible, and take

Their trailing skies for vestment when I soar,

Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume

The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.”

Clark Ashton Smith

Farm the Original House

"This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory. As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidarity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past,"

from Memory-Hold-the-Door
by John Buchan

"Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on."


from IN THE SECULAR NIGHT
Margaret Atwood

Winter waxwing

"Pan, who and what art thou? he cried huskily

"I'm youth, I'm joy," Peter answered at a venture, 

"I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.”

― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

A wet spring and lots of blossoms.

“Not as the plants and flowers of Earth, 

growing peacefully beneath a simple sun, 

were the blossoms of the planet Lophai. 

Coiling and uncoiling in double dawns; 

tossing tumultuously under vast suns of 

jade green and balas-ruby orange; 

swaying and weltering in rich twilights, 

in aurora-curtained nights, 

they resembled fields of rooted serpents 

that dance eternally to an other-worldly music.” 

― Clark Ashton Smith, Lost Worlds

Alaska Days

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, 

striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through 

space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, 

the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty"

                  from Travels in Alaska

                       by John Muir

In 2015 My wife and I took a round-trip cruise from Vancouver B.C. to Alaska with her mother. We decided that cruise culture was not for us, I likened it to going on vacation and not leaving the hotel. However the scenery was beautiful, and the staff unfailingly pleasant. So we were distressed when we observed how poorly the crews of the cruise ships were treated during the early stages of the pandemic. I think during this period of minimal travel that I will look back at some of the photos from that trip and remember some of those experiences. 

Cactus Spain 2020

Welcome Home Sandy

"There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind."

from Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein