Lunar

On a clear night, earthshine makes visible the dark side of the moon!

Supermoon!

seen from Oakland

Half moon over the Pacific

静夜思

We've entered the sixth week of our intensive Chinese class! And while we're still drilling on pronunciation and learning simple conversation about who's in your family and what you'd like to drink and when you start class (giving directions is next), our teacher marked the occasion by giving us a first poem!

床前明月光

疑是地上霜

举头望明月

低头思故乡

It's by 李白 Li Bai (Li Po) and apparently appears in every class (like this one). Still, it's exciting to recognize more than half of the characters, and to be able to sort of imagine how they might say

In front of my bed, bright moonlight,

Can it be frost on the ground?

Lifting my head, I gaze upon the bright moon,

Lowering my head, I think of my hometown. 

Slice of orange

Still pretty new moon just above the horizon

(in reality closer to the color of a blood orange)

One more day in Del Mar! Always a pleasure! (Yes, that's the moon.)

Lost in space

It was overcast in New York last night, so no supermoon for us. But I suspect it's more impressive in super telephoto images like these, from the Guardian site, which also recall my perhaps unsurprising discovery that the moon looks different from different places on the earth's surface; these two are from Auckand (above) and from Amman (below), and the Copernicus lunar ray crater is at 2 o'clock in one, 4 in the other.

Out of the blue

My Spanish relatives, who just flew home today, were amused at how excited we get at sunsets - and, especially, that my father and I leap to take pictures of them. Why do we? Hard to say. Perhaps if they'd seen tonight's, which offered pleasures to southwest, west, northwest- and above! - they'd understand. It was completed (as grace completes nature!) by the sudden appearance of the new moon. Earthshine
(which we've seen before on this blog) made it a perfect ring.

Last full moon of the - decade!

Reunions

Took an old friend from Paris to MoMA this morning, and so had a chance to gambol through the standing collection, and be charmed again by David Smith's "Australia" (whose name I had not noticed before), and to see the show "Tangled Alphabets," dedicated to the work of two Latin American artists who've not been the subject of an exhibition in the US before, and didn't know each other. I'm not sure what showing them together achieved, but it was good to get to know them, especially the Argentinian Léon Ferrari, whose drawings in incredibly fine lines inspired by writing (and music) entered further dimensions of wonder when translated into dense sculptures of finest wire. And then I popped into "Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West," which was a hoot: photography and the West do come into their own at the same time, as the exhibition argues. Home! And then I encountered another old friend, Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez, NM" (I was a big Ansel Adams fan as a teenager, and probably had this picture on my wall even before I lived in New Mexico). For some reason, seeing it again made me tear up.

Clair de lune

世の中は

何にたとえん

水鳥の

はしふる露に

やどる月影

Being-in-the-world:To what might it be compared?Dwelling in the dewdropFallen from a waterfowl's beak,The image of the moon.

I wrote this poem by Dôgen on the board and it anchored our discussion of Zen ethics last Wednesday. (Translation in T. P. Kasulis, Zen Action/Zen Person [U of Hawai'i Press, 1981], 103) If you want to say it in Japanese:

Yo no naka ha
Nan ni tatoen
Mizutori no
Hashifuru tsuyu ni
Yadoru tsukikage.

Pictures from South, Center and North

Here are some pictures from my trip from Melbourne to Adelaide, Adelaide to Alice Springs, Kings Canyon and Kata Tjuta and Uluru, Alice to Katherine to Darwin, and Kakadu. This is Percy's Bar, the corner of our block in Melbourne, dim in the predawn. The Overland takes ten hours to get to Adelaide. The scenery was fresh green from the autumn rains. We had some rain, too!I stayed overnight in Adelaide, and paid the Botanic Gardens an early morning visit before the midday departure of the Ghan. It was, of course, autumnal... very nice contrast with my last visit, half a year ago. The Ghan - oops, the train staff never failed to say "the legendary Ghan" too us up past Port Augusta, the northernmost point of Spencer Bay - the last body of water I'd see until I'd crossed the continent south to north! Vast country in both directions, the Flinders Ranges in the distance below. Next morning the land had turned a sort of ochry red (the same color as the supposedly "pink city" of Jaipur), and we crossed several dry river beds on our way to the Center.


In Alice Springs a friend of a friend of a friend (indeed the friend of two different friends of friends) took me to the telegraph station around which the settlement grew lay. Sunset shadows stretched long and a rock wallaby said hello! All around the ripply ranges of the "caterpillar dreaming" of the indigenous population.



Next day it was off to Kings Canyon, a stunning landscape, a bumpy moonscape of beehive-shaped conglomerate which fell off into a deep canyon with sheer pink walls (above) and at its center a narrow valley full of water and trees known as the Garden of Eden (whose water you've seen).



From there on to Kata Tjuta (the Olgas). It's too time-consuming to keep formatting, so here are a bunch of pictures, make of them what you will!















































Off in the distance our first views of Uluru (Ayers Rock), whose strange scaly skin looks different from every angle and in every kind of light.



Back in Alice Springs I went to the Desert Museum (where I heard the amazing Djukurpa described yesterday). It also has a fantastic birds
of prey show (at right a fan-tail kite), a "nocturnal house" where you can see marvels like the thorny devil above, which looks more like a manga-inspired toy than a real animal, and some of the flowers which will soon blanket the desert around Uluru...



Back on to the legendary Ghan, which has only gone north to Darwin since early 2004, although it's been planned since the 1880s. (Notice the red termite mounds among the blurry gums out the train window.) It stops for a few hours in Katharine, where I went on a little "whistlestop" canoe excursion with some people I'd met on the tour to Uluru, and was befriended by a little red dragonfly.


And then after desert dryness the tropical ocean breezes of Darwin! Darwin too has a Botanical Garden, lovely coastlines with lodes of ochre used for millennia by Aboriginal artists... and in the Anglican Cathedral someone has interpreted the signs of the Evangelists in a way evoking local (and ancient) Aboriginal art. Here are a few snaps...


And last but certainly not least the ancient ancient landscape of Kakadu national park, which I'll let you wander your way through... you'll see the Escarpment of 2 billion year old rock which can look like the ruins of ancient fortresses, some of the rock paintings at Ubirr, cathedral termite mounds, a spider, a screw palm, the consequences of cyclone and flood on a riverbank forest, and the moon - if not quite in that order.