California is calling

Para mi amigo Mac, quien, además de ser poeta y fotógrafo, ama la madre tierra. California is calling.

"One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made, that this is the morning of creation. That mountains long conceived are now being born, brought to light by the glaciers, channels traced for rivers, basins hollowed for lakes. When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. The whole wilderness in unity and interrelation is alive and familiar. The very stones seem talkative, sympathetic, brotherly. Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. This natural beauty hunger is made manifest in our magnificent national parks. Nature's sublime wonderlands, the admiration and joy of the world.

-John Muir   (Cited in Ken Burns' documentary The National Parks: America's Best Idea)

Andrei Tarkovsky at the Tide Pools

Today we went to the tide pools at Crystal Cove State Beach.  I filmed this short video mostly because the way that the sea grass was dancing and swaying in the tide's vaivén was beautiful and mesmerizing, but also because it reminded me of the opening shot from Andrei Tarkovsky 1972 film Solaris (below).

Un poema que recordé el día después de mi cumpleaños

"Como latas de cerveza vacías"

-Ernesto Cardenal

Como latas de cerveza vacías y colillas

de cigarrillos apagados, han sido mis días.

Com figuras que pasan por una pantalla de televisión

y desaparecen, así ha pasado mi vida.

Como automóviles que pasaban rápidos por las carreteras

con risas de muchachas y músicas de radios...

Y la belleza pasó rápida, como el modelo de los autos

y las canciones de los radios que pasaron de moda.
Y no ha quedado nada de aquellos días, nada,

más que latas vacías y colillas apagadas,

risas en fotos marchitas, boletos rotos,
y el aserrín con que el amanecer barrieron los bares.

Like empty beer cans, like empty cigarette butts;

my days have been like that.

Like figures passing on a T.V. screen

and disappearing, so my life has gone.

Like cars going by fast on the roads

with girls laughing and radios playing...

Beauty got obsolete as fast as car models

and forgotten radio hits.

Nothing is left of those days, nothing,

but empty beer cans, cigarette butts,

smiles on faded photos, torn tickets,

and the sawdust with which, in the mornings, they swept out the bars.

-Translation by Thomas Merton. Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Anthology. Steven Tapscott ed. Austin: U. of Texas P., 1996. 298