The West & Texas
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Big Bend protects a desert landscape that tends to be described with terms like: barren, waste, wasteland, a-whole-lot-of-nothing. In our first twenty-four hours in the park, we met: a bobcat, a ground-owl, jackrabbits, raccoon, bluebirds, mice, bumble bees, two bear, countless deer; sotol & yucca with flowers ten feet tall, cholla, ocotillo, mesquite, juniper. In the free fenceless desert, life overflowed. There is no such thing as a waste land! (John Locke be damned!) Every living thing we saw was thriving exactly where it was. The desert is not a place where life evaporates before the pale sandy face of death, in some horrible death-sunshine, it's where "life on earth" shows its true extent: The Whole Earth. The world isn't empty, it's full! //South Rim, Big Bend National Park, Texas
Big Bend National Park, Texas / Part of what makes the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend so remarkable is that they maintain a literal fossil ecosystem, the last remnant left of a glacial forest that stretched across the whole region during the last stretch of ice age, over 10,000 years ago. A unique subspecies of whitetail deer inhabits the mountains, unable to survive in the surrounding desert, while bears, mountain lions, and javelinas are also present. The mountains are an essential habitat for Peregrine falcons, as well as a whole host of other birds. In short, the Chisos are a veritable Lost World. Standing there, high up on the South Rim cliffs, gazing at the last of the sun's glow over the mountain-ripples of the waterless Chihuahuan sea, and thinking of all of the life held afloat by these igneous cloud-islands, I felt it. I was struck by the mountains' purposeless benevolence, a gift from no one to anyone, and I felt truly thankful for the universal coin-toss that determined whether there would be nothing or everything.
Tomorrow Will Be Better, I Swear
Mount Shasta, California // In popular culture, dark clouds on the horizon is a universally ominous symbol, a stock metaphor to foreshadow that trouble is coming. But for Californians right now, and really for anyone who loves a good storm, there are probably aren't many sights more exciting than dark clouds on the horizon.
Austin, Texas // This statue has been erected, appropriately, in front of the Texas Capitol in Austin. Forever frozen in a free-wheeling, hat-holding horse-rearing, it is an immortally idealized image of the freedom and individuality that we Americans love to enshrine in the cultural archetype of the cowboy. Yet, like most statues--going back to the divine delts and godly abs chiseled out of marble by the Greek version of photo retouchers, it represents an abstracted perfection totally unattainable to any actual human being. In this case, it's complete, free-wheeling, hat-holding freedom. In a cruel taste of irony, however, this icon of liberty is completely frozen in place.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas Sometimes you find that your mind has wandered into a fog and the only way to get the mental sun to shine again is to get away for a bit and watch a few non-mental sundowns. Travel is great therapy!
Took 3 passes to get here: Grand green valley, flat and made flatter still by the granite pyramids of the northern Rockies. Camp found near Pettit Lake, coaxed fire out of wet logs, a shelter in the small pines. One more journey for the day: step 'cross sage flats, dirt soft with fresh rain, flora adorned in green and gold. Clamber up hill, muddy feet sliding in sandals, til view is clear: the two matriarchs of this drainage, resting, like dear rivals, on each side of the lake. Yes, this is a motherly landscape! Nurturing arcadia, sheltered by rocky peaks & forest hills. Waters shallow and quenching, calm even in this weather. I think of Ocean, the airless dark, opacity of depth. The source of all life, yes—but in a far-off, murky way, like a father only known in infancy. But here, with this wet earth between my toes, I know right where my weight is resting. Deer watch on my reverence, cautious but not scared. Mind flushed and clear. snow-driven peak blown into cloud-- June's stormy kiss.
If you visit Zion National park, it becomes immediately obvious why it's named "Zion." For my money, it's probably one of the closest things on earth to a true holy land. The towering and sculptural cliffs have a mysterious, spiritual quality about them, and if you're in the right state of mind it can bring out a sense of child-like wonder, a spiritual awe, and a disbelief that we are lucky enough to have such a place exist in this universe.
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas // Shadows, in a sense, are just the remnants the night, carved out of the grand darkness by the warm rays of sunrise and shrunk ever further by the rising noontime sun. But shadows, patient creatures, are like rivers running to the sea: as sure as the sun will set they will always return to the dark everything from which they were born.
We were somewhere around the Chisos on the Edge of the desert when the wilderness began to take hold... // Big Bend National Park, Texas
Yosemite National Park, California // A classic view of one of the most-photographed places on earth.
Yosemite National Park, California // Of course, no mountain photographer's trip through California would be complete without a stopover in Yosemite. Of course, the park must be one of the most-photographed locations on the face of the planet, but when you're faced with so much concentrated beauty it's a little harder to think about the legions of light-chasers who've visited the park for over a century. I guess what I mean to say is, if it is the most-photographed place on the planet, I can see why. Here's the iconic Yosemite formation--Half Dome--receiving the setting suns's last kiss of ruby light, while the rest of the wilderness bathes in twilight.
Heart's Cradle of the Chisos Mountains
Big Bend National Park, Texas / From my notebook, resting on this 2000-foot cliff in the early morning light: Boundless nighttime unity stretches in all directions, to Mexico and on, a whole hemisphere of darkness. Stars twinkle meekly through hazy desert cloud.A moment, and the fullness of night emerges from the false headlamp darkness, detail-rich even with this sliver moon. Not long, and the winter sun rises from Mexican peaks. Shadows stretch and shrink, deep hard-edged pools of night, hiding in valley and forest, waiting for the planetary turning to return their mother, shadow-full Mother Night, from the other side. The high-walled Chisos Basin is the cradle of the park, of the impossible, desert-defying variety of life that lives there, of the morning shadows and evening shadows, of the heart of anyone who visits there, and to the mind of that visitor, of all things.
Austin, Texas // Patterns in plants are downright fascinating. That a certain type of spiral growth can be effective across so many species, to reappear again and again and again, as much as we can measure it, is probably one of the cooler things about reality. A lot of people read into this as evidence of some spiritual force or designer, but I don't really see it that way. This may be controversial, but I think that things are the way they are because they work. The golden ratio is everywhere because it just happens to be the most efficient way to grow. Without it, there would be another pattern or just no plants at all. Order doesn't exist for a particular reason, but it is necessary for our wondering about it because it is a prerequisite for our existence. Patterns like this are a reminder to me how lucky we are to have happened to exist and get to enjoy and love and wonder about things like patterns.
The Red River earning its name, reflecting a June sunrise as it cuts through the red rock of Palo Duro canyon in North Texas.
Austin, Texas I know it was a love-it-or-hate-it sort of affair, but when The Tree of Life came out several years ago, I saw it in theaters and, well, loved it. The way it visually tried to work out our own little place in the universe, how our tiny lives can matter in the face of the whole of creation, was very much on the same page with my own way of thinking. But it presented the idea the idea that the Way of Nature is distinct and opposite from the Way of Grace. Whereas the Way of Nature is, as Hobbes put it, brutish, nasty, and short, the way of grace is gentle, loving, and infinite. But I don't know, when I see the interdependence, interconnection, efficiency, and downright beauty of this world on which we live, I feel inclined to disagree. The honey bee pollinates the flower, the flower turns into a fruit that feeds other animals, and at death they donate their remains back to the soil creatures that keep the flower alive. We're a trillion trillion organisms all responsible for keeping each other alive, and, with that thought, it's hard not to think that nature provides about as much Grace as a body could ask for.
Pettit Lake - Golden Matriarchs
The two Matriarchs of Pettit Lake illuminated by the golden rays of cloud-piercing dawn. On such a morning in the Sawtooths, you'd best be careful or the mountains will cut right through you ego.
Pennybacker Bridge, Austin, TX // Something I have been practicing lately is letting the elements of the photo dictate the composition. For instance, here the extent of the branches decides the top and left boundary of the photo, and the point that the road moves out of sight determines the right boundary. In looking at other photos of the iconic Pennybacker Bridge that a lot of photos don't end up using this kind of composition , and awkwardly crop off the tree or prevent you from seeing where the road is headed. This is obviously subjective, but these are the kinds of things I like to watch out for. That just leaves the bottom as a judgment call, and with something as same as limestone, I just like to leave a little hint or border that it's there. After all, here it's more context than anything. I think this helps create a more organic-feeling composition, with fewer awkward or uninteresting spaces.
Austin, Texas Here's a classic Texas summer sunset, setting the humid sky alight behind the darkening pecan trees. It's always a welcome sight here, because it means that the temperature will soon fall from sweltering to just uncomfortable. As a bonus factoid, a lesser-known nickname for Austin is the City of the Violet Crown, and while that name usually refers to the often-visible Belt of Venus, it seems equally appropriate for the wild sunsets we get here.
Big Bend National Park, Texas // 'Getting away from it all,' 'getting back to nature,' 'An escape,' At this point sentences like this are cultural stock-phrases, cliches, go-to constructions for describing a trip to the mountains, forests, beaches, countryside, anywhere that's not City. OK, sure. I mean, I know all to well myself that if you spend too much time among walls and pavement, traffic-roar and hammer-smack, you start to get a little...off. But there's something that's been nagging at me lately about these stock-phrases. I think it's that they seem to have become less stock-phrases and more stock-motivations, stock-thoughts. They've started to color people's experience of capital-N Nature in a weird, arguably unhealthy way. They've turned our experiences instrumental (more on this word later). I first started to notice this weird relationship between experience and verbalized-reflection-on-experience a couple of months ago. A few friends and I were out exploring some local park, and as people generally do we were vocalizing our perspectives of whatever was going on at the time. As the conversations multiplied, I picked up an almost ontological difference in the way me and my more citified friends were experiencing the place and moment. It (of course) wasn't until much later, when I was zipped up in tent and sleeping bag, that I found the words to describe this difference in descriptive words—my friends were using overwhelmingly relative constructions (e.g. “being out here,” “getting away,” etc.). They were appraising the current experience in relation to some other experience, in this case the experience of being 'in Nature,' vs. that of being 'in the City.' (I want to make a note here that I generally find the word 'nature' very sticky and hard to use in a way that doesn't imply some sort of fundamental separation between 'man' and 'nature,' but considering this is Texas and there's no such thing as wilderness within state bounds it may have to do for now.) This kind of terminology is problematic partially because it's basically City-centric. “Away” tends to encompass everything and everywhere that's not City, creating a weird weighted duality between City and the entire rest of the planet, where City is so important compared to Entire Rest of the Planet that Entire Rest of the Planet is defined by its relation to City. The best illustration I can think of is another stock-phrase: The Great Outdoors. (This is basically the same problem with World Music, which as a genre tends to encompass any and all Human Music that's not Euro-American Pop.) But the real danger of these constructions is that they simply limit our ability to experience the Entire Rest of the Planet in an open, positive way. By defining Nature as not-City, we confine our thinking to some imagined Venn diagram of comparisons and contrasts. The only things that we allow ourselves notice in Nature are those that have some positive or negative counterpart in City: where Nature has “calmness” city has “hustle,” or where City has “indoor air conditioning,” nature has “heat, rain, cold, all within half an hour.” By only appreciating Nature as opposed to, in reference to some imagined external City, we only consider things like “calmness” or “heat, rain, cold, etc.” in relation to their City counterparts, not on their own experiential merits. Even more dire, the terminology of not-City keeps us from even noticing things that exist outside the imaginary Venn diagram, things with no Nature or City counterpart, things that can't so easily be conceptualized into a schema, things that are only and entirely right here right now. Ultimately, the City-centric terminology begets City-centric thinking which begets City-centric experiences of not-City Nature. These experiences, as betrayed in the opening stock-phrases, are overwhelmingly instrumental, i.e. for the sake of some external goal. That goal is largely some escape, decompression, etc., which allows us to continue living in City for a while longer before going completely off our rocker. But by experiencing Nature as not-City we keep ourselves closed off from the truly meaningful lessons that Nature has to offer (e.g. the fact that Nature and City are not actually existentially separate entities), in turn assuring that we'll keep repeating the cycle of instrumental visit to not-City, return to City, and going slightly more insane within City. It's kind of problematic. So what are we to do about this? It's actually pretty simple, I think. I'll term it here as I did scribbling in my dark tent on that first night: Listen respectfully to the everything! Trying to be totally open to the present moment and everything around us, listening without preconceived conceptual frameworks, without ulterior motive, without external reference points, but instead respecting and appreciating every thing as it currently is, and listening to the lesson it surely has to give to us. Because everything around us is just as valid and proper a part of the Universe as we are. Wherever we go, there we are: there is No Escape.
An American Basket Flower (Centaurea americana) is a Texas-native plant that's a favorite among pollenators, a fact which can be seen clearly in other images of this flower.
It's always a treat when you get to be the first one out there. Even though I was a little nervous about all of the wild fires in the region, imagining that somehow I'd get myself trapped in the flames, those few seconds right before the sun's rays broke over the horizon were just incredible. It's amazing how peaceful it can be immediately before you get the worst poison ivy case of your life....
Big Bend National Park, Texas // From the spontaneous thought notebook: Our universe itself is based on the unified dichotomy! Space & matter interplay to allow anything to exist. One can imagine the pre-Big Bang Universe as a perfect dichotomy: all matter in one place, all space separate. A simple, lifeless universe. But that didn't last, and so we have our messy life-giving wabi-sabi ordered-chaos universe instead! To favor the fullness over the emptiness, or vice versa, is a simple arbitrary value statement. Everything is totally empty, everything is totally full! Both/and, not either/or!
Yosemite National Park, California // I wonder why it is that major life events always seem to happen all at the same time. Always a dogpile of responsibilities and hassles, always with you at the bottom. Maybe it's some kind of mystical rite of passage, a heavy-handed symbol from the universe, bluntly saying that yes, it's time to move on into a new phase of your life. Maybe it's a desperate attempt by the writers to swell up viewership on their pan-dimensional cable network. Maybe it's a just flashbulb memory, an artifact of our minds, and we simply remember the pileups more easily than the leisurely times when stressful situations unfolded in an orderly single-file line. The one thing I know for sure is that when you're getting stuck in a dramatic time, there's no therapy like a getting lost in a dramatic landscape.
Bruneau Dunes, Idaho Ever have one of those mornings where you wake up; drive out to a state park; set up your tripod; and realized you accidentally passed into the other side of the monolith?
Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, Texas // An old central Texas wonder, Enchanted Rock is a plutonic Batholith that formed underground about a billion years ago, and uplifted during the Ouachita Orogeny, when South America rammed into ancient Laurentia about 300 million years ago. (The Geologic expression of it today is actually just the same as the domes of Yosemite--it's an exfoliation dome cracking into sheets because of the release of pressure.) But none of that quite explains why it's "Enchanted." The pink granite dome has a history of human visitation going back 11,000 years, and in that time it has been the subject of countless myths, both American Indian and Colonial. Perhaps we give these places special, mystical-mythical-magical names when, by the lucky inevitability of infinite possibility, they come so close to our internal predispositions of beauty that it seems such a place must have been made that way on purpose. Of course, no one could design something so perfect. If that's the case, may all rocks be thought enchanted!