Happy New Year! 2008

I read this recently and thought it a good
sentiment for the coming New Year.

It’s Too Late for Later

“Later” was a luxury for previous generations and civilizations. It meant that you
could paint the same landscape, see the same animals, eat the same fruit, climb the
same trees, fish the same rivers, enjoy the same weather or rescue the same
endangered species that you did when you were a kid — but just do it later, whenever
you got around to it. If there is one change in global consciousness that seems to
have settled in over just the past couple of years, it is the notion that later is over.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/16/opinion/16friedman.html



I was going through my years pictures and found some pretty good bird photos and interesting landscape.

It is with a special poignancy I think on some of these amazing things I saw last year.

This bird here is a Scissortailed Flycatcher, at a rest stop on Interstate 10 nearing Van Horn, Texas, in May 2007.

The landscapes are from December 2007 going south over the mountains at Las Cruces, NM, trying to escape a snow storm as I drove east.
















I'll post a few more seeming exceptional bird and landscape photos over the next few days.

...back to New York City

A poet friend said how my prose sounded like Chinese poetry, another said something about Basho's, Narrow Road to Far North. I'd read that alot, back when I was reading Rexroth and Snyder, I'm reading it again.

Well, I woke in Buena Vista, CO to a Fuji like scene.

It rained all night and that was the first rain like that I've seen this summer camping.

I drove through the Ghost Ranch on my way out, I always look at everything like I may never see it again.



Somehow it feels good, it may be just as it is extra charged with emotion.

The clouds were coming up but that particularity, Ive talked of was not there, although still beautiful, the clouds were still close to the horizon and the sun needs to be higher, shining down through, to make that intens-est dance of light and dark.


I saw these two people walking along the road I saw them last week about 30 miles south. They are very dark from living outside I guess. They are dressed in what look like rags but embroidered somehow with bright color.



Hopefully some people that escaped the streets of NYC, on their own trip.

I drove up over mountains to Tres Piedres and then north to Colorado. There were thunderstorms all day and I took over 300 photos slowing me down considerably.






I don't have my paint with me just my flashe acrylic, but I probably won't paint this leg.


I was filming a storm along the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Flashes of lightning
everywhere.







I reached a summit and I was looking back down the other way at the storm-- a mountain bluebird, they are electric blue colored, sat at a nearby fence post.

I filmed it until my hand was tired and as I looked up from the lens, the bird had flown up vertically, a flash of lightning and bam, thunder! The lightening and the blue of bird-- moments later another flash like a thumb stamping out a bug and a round ball of fire-- which lasted more than a moment.

A few miles back I'd just seen a rainbow and lightening simultaneously.



Never had seen any of this before.