Trajectories

Crest Canyon crossings

Extension

New life

In the middle of the boneyard (and this photo), a new Torrey Pine rises! 

 

Torrey Totoro was keeping watch!

Outlook

Torrey Pines Extension

Plenitude

Late December

What a year it's been..

Deck the halls

 

 

 

Yuletide greetings from Torrey Pines Extension

Advent colors

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

Seasonal colors

Shadow puppet

Can any pine but the Torrey pine gesture as exquisitely? No wonder they so charmed Tsuyoshi Matsumoto! (That's Palomar Mountain in the distance, btw, the pic taken looking northish from the TPSNR Lodge.)

TPSRE ablaze

There was a brush fire today in the Torrey Pines SNR Extension! 

The area's indispensable photographer Herb Knufken posted a photo as it was just starting - taken from across the lagoon, in Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve itself. After many hours, the work of 150 firefighters, many water-dumping aircraft and some evacuations, 23 acres were burned, including trails we hiked just half a year ago. 

Following the fire in real time, not from across the lagoon but from across the continent, brought back scarred memories of the Witch Fire in October 2007, a much bigger conflagration which seemed, until the fierce winds changed direction, likely to destroy the whole town in which I grew up. And more recent memories, too, like the path through a kind of tree-tunnel which we walked just last December...

At the base of the pine / 松本

It's become clear to me that it would be good to articulate where I'm coming from as I write about religion and trees. This is something I do in my classes, where I ask students to write an "eco-spiritual" self-portrait in our first week together - and I do, too. It seems important for my book too. I'm not a botanist or an arborist, have never lived in a tree nor, come to think of it, planted and tended one. I'm not even given to hugging trees. Why should anyone be interested in what I think about religion and trees? The point isn't that there's an objective or best vantage here - trees, and treescapes, differ widely. But I grew up knowing of this diversity, and - in the coastal desert of Southern California, where, I found myself writing, "every tree was a miracle."

The most miraculous trees were our precious neighbors, the Torrey Pines, perhaps "the world's rarest pine tree," who carve out loopily sublime silhouettes on sandstone bluffs against the sea, eloquently expressing the ardors and joys of existence. I will have come to know them at the same time as their most famous chronicler, Japanese American artist Tsuyoshi "Mat" Matsumoto, whose pencil drawings have come to define them. 

Reading up a little on Matsumoto I learned that he was born in Hokkaido in 1908, going back and forth between Japan and the US many times before winding up in retirement in La Jolla charmed by the Torrey Pines. Child of a Christian mother, he studied not art but theology. An ordained Presbyterian minister, he studied theology and music at Union Theological Seminary in the 1930s, returning to Japan to work as an organist and active as a Christian pacifist. As militarism grew, American friends brought him back to the US, where, after a few years ensconced in the Japanese American community in Los Angeles, one of his Union classmates helped him find a position teaching music at an American Missionary Association-run school for African Americans in Alabama. 

When the war broke out, Matsumoto was arrested by the local police on suspicion of espionage, only released with the help of missionary connections. He taught Japanese language at the Universities of Michigan and Chicago, after the war enlisting in the US military and teaching at the famous Monterey language institute. He became a US citizen, but returned to Japan, where his wife had spent 8 years unable to secure a visa. Based at the US military base at Yokosuka (near Yokohama) for two decades, he raised a family and exhibited art (abstract and expressionist work!), returning to New York City on retirement. Drawn by the Torrey pines, he settled in La Jolla, where he opened an art gallery. He visited the pines daily from 1973 until his death in 1981, leaving behind hundreds of drawings. 

The various accounts I've cited here, which to an extent cite each other, differ in emphasis and diverge in some details, especially concerning his work as an artist. Did he run a gallery in New York before the one in California? Was he self-taught - guided by the pines themelves? Or is that, during the 1960s in Japan,  Matsumoto began intensive study of pines, the Japanese symbol of good luck and longevity—there was also a personal element in that “Matsumoto” means “root of the pine.” One way or the other, I suspect he helped other visitors to the Torrey Pines to see them as Japanese see pines, as rugged, deep-souled survivors in an often cruel and inhospitable world. I know I see trees - not just pines - that way, too.

(Images from here, whence also a random religion-and-trees factoid

those trees in the screen-like spread at top, which stood at now bark beetle-ravaged High Point in TPSNR, had been christened Matthew, Mark, Luke and - the big one - Mary. )

Aus einer Wurzel zart

Star of wonder

Bali Ha'i

Erosion reveals all sorts of colors along Torrey Pines State Beach but

this time the usual golds and ochers were supplemented by blues!

Surging out from wave carved caves beneath the bluffs it seemed as it

 ancient waves had been petrified! Lovely illusion...

Beach pointillism

Actually it may be remembering pine forests in the snow

Mary, don't you weep

My first experiment with generative AI that transforms words into images, something called Firefly which comes with Adobe. For any prompt it conjures up four images, which you can then tweak by choosing art or photo, a range of styles and moods, and of course altering the wording of the prompt. As with ChatGPT's glib words, the images can be pretty cheesy, and the four often offer a demo-graphically balanced set of images (as for "tree teachers" above).

But some of the images can be quite lovely (until you fully process that these are fake photo-graphs), like these gene-rated from a few sen-tences about torrey pine trees. But the coolest thing is that you can add to all this an image of your own for "reference" - colors and textures, I gather. Still, there be monsters. As I played around with more and less specific and more and less obscure prompts, I decided to see if it could generate something like an image I'd recently enjoyed at the Met, of Jesus, his mother Mary, her mother Anna, and her mother, too. Though I just put in Jesus, Mary and Anna this was a bridge too far; instead of Anna I kept getting Joseph. For fun, I added a photo I took of a voluptuous tree spirit I took at the "Tree & Serpent" show of early Buddhist art. 

And got these remarkable painted statues of holy families (the Indian "reference" I sent was just carved red sandstone, not painted). But wait. This Mary is bearded! What's confounding isn't that Firefly got things so wrong but that it's so convincingly wrong.

Wallking on sunshine

White sage

Beach life

Always something happening on the beach...