Seven swans a-swimming

Happy 7th day of Christmas! You'll notice some exquisite cholla lace from Borrego has joined our Nativity scene, but the Magi are still days away.

Mountains aren't mountains and river's aren't rivers

Behold O. W. Gray's 1783 masterpiece of anti-ecological data visualization, "Mountains and Rivers"! The squiggly lines are the world's longest rivers, suspended like snakeskins. The mountains of the several continents (color coded) are arranged below - note the red flares marking volcanoes! Check out the fine details here. 

 

For a contemporary folly, here someone shows the magnitude of the world's great river systems by imagining them flowing out into space!

Why am I showing these to you, you may wonder? Because one of next semester's classes is a reprise of "Religion and Ecology," which I've promised will focus on "Buddhist perspectives," most especially Dogen's "Mountains and Rivers Sutra." This has in turn reconnected me to some of the excitement of the "Sacred Mountains" course I taught eight years ago. Gray's is of course the absolute antithesis of Dogen's "mountains and rivers" but perhaps useful on our way to recognizing that mountains are not mountains, rivers not rivers, although mountains are mountains, rivers rivers!

Late December

What a year it's been..

Desert flora

Anza-Borrego hasn't seen rain since April, but the desert finds a way

Rock torrents

In Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, stumbled on a wondrous place known as Rainbow Canyon for the range of colors of metamorphic rock tumbling through it. The trail goes up eight dry falls (exciting!) in a valley clearly carved over aeons and aeons by powerful masses of water. But the wonder of it is that the snarled stone so often looks like water itself, gliding and folding and swirling and even splashing...

Just desert

In a manger

Wishing you a blessed Christmas, shepherds before kings!

Deck the halls

 

 

 

Yuletide greetings from Torrey Pines Extension

Inhuman solidarity

Seen, I gather, in SF... The nerve! Humans thought of this mockery.

Open palms

Venite

Volcan

Back to Volcan Mountain, after seven years. Happy rediscoveries and a new one: the redwood I'd noticed had recovered from calamity by turning a branch into a new tree in fact did it on both sides!

Afterthoughts

Balboa arbor

Some trees of Balboa Park

 

 

Advent colors

Late afternoon vibes in Crest Canyon, and over the ocean...