 Between winter and spring "To see the Thing itself is essential." Edward Weston
 Fort Desoto State Park David duChemin:: "It is [.[ life that counts , , , photographs just amplify it, celebrate it, bring clarity, and engage with it . . . the camera helps slow it down a little by grabbing those little moments that we'd otherwise forget and make them a little less slippery—a little easier to hold for a while longer." I'm reading Elaine Scarry's book On Beauty and Being Just; in it she writes about beauty suddenly appearing before us and how that changes our outlook on the world in general. She argues that recognizing moments of beauty can change our reaction to injustice, because beauty by appearing to us forces us to pay more attention to everything around us. In doing so, of course, we come to see more clearly the good and the bad, the false and the true—something everyone needs a better grasp on these days.  Laurence Freeman: "Why does going into the desert . . . help us live better in the world of the city? The desert is more real than we imagine. The city is more illusory than we like to admit. In the desert there is nothing real to contemplate except nature itself in its simplest, barest forms . . . The real thing, the beauty met in the desert, exposes the [false] glamour of the mall."
 Laurence Freeman: "(T)he experience of beauty, meaning the instantaneous penetration of our being by the whole mysteriously present in a part . . . touches us and changes us. We don't think beauty or decide to feel something is beautiful. We cannot deny beauty nor explain it. We surrender to it."
 Spring breakers are here (and after the winter that the north has had, who could blame them?); traffic snarls, no place to park, crowded beaches. It's the best time of year for me; trees, and all sorts of vegetation turning that delicious yellow-green as they prepare to blossom. The colors of spring! yellow, green, red, white, purple (clear blue skies). What's not to love? (Well, Ok, already up to the mid 80s this week; still . . .) Oh, and occasional fog . . .
 Time change has me a bit off my usual timing, so I'm later posting. Then this morning, as I opened the blinds, there was the world in one of its most lovely forms . . . good way to begin the day (for me anyway.)
 Gary Snyder, writing about a new form of "nature writing" wrote: " I propose this to turn us loose to think about 'wild writing' without preconception or inhibition, but at the same time with craft. The craft could be seen as the swoop of a hawk, the intricate galleries of burrowing and tunneling under the bark done by western pine bark bettles (sic), the lurking at the bottom by a big old trout—or the kamikaze sting of a yellow jacket, the insouciant waddle of a porcupine, the constant steadiness of a flow of water over a boulder, the chatter of a squirrel . . ." (or the graceful gliding of a pelican and its sudden straight down plunge into the water, or an egret standing patiently, oh so patiently til it dips down to seize a fish, or the waves pressing relentlessly on the sand, or a palm standing tall against the water and the wind (or falling when the wind is too high). Snyder continues: "Images of our art. Nature's writing has the potential of becoming the most vital, radical, fluid, transgressive, pansexual, subductive, and morally challenging kind of writing on the scene. In becoming so, it may serve to help halt one of the most terrible things of our time—the destruction of species and their habitats, the elimination of some living beings forever."
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