The Hourglass

Time. 300, 400, 500 years towering over a single plot of Earth no larger than a common back yard. All you've got is time. The days drop away like tiny grains of sand. But you don't feel it. All you feel is the wind in your tops and the cold winter rains. For most of your life there was birdsong and coyote chatter and little else save what the wind wrought in the nearby branches. But then there were voices and the sounds of machines, what iron and steel say to each other  when heated and fed the essence, the very blood of your own kin. You stand for ten, twenty lives of men and wind up the refined and fermented fuel sloshing around in the bowels of the very same machines that foul the air you breathe and kill off your kind with their noxious pollution. And there's nothing you can do about it. You have no voice of your own and no means of self-defense or escape. You can't build a rocket ship and settle somewhere else after the world dies. You can't wage your own revolution. You can't stop them from destroying the planet. All you can do is what you've always done - absorb sunlight and minerals and grow. Persevere. Keep stretching toward the sky. And hope they'll get it in time. You're a redwood, Sequoia sempervirens. The tallest living thing on the planet, and one of the oldest. And how do they honor you? They cut you down like so many blades of grass and fashion you into picnic tables and fence posts. They shred your skin to line flowerbeds and cut you into planks for the decks that adorn their own backyards. Sequoia. Your name means Sparrow but you are anything but small. It is from the Cherokee; another decimated and desecrated race,  driven from their lands on a thousand mile march called the trail of tears. Time. Who knows how much you have left? Surely not another 200 million years, for that's how long you've lived. You were the trees of the true Jurassic park, a trillion grains of sand ago.

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Game Eye

The daybegan with a kingfisher. An auspicious start. Somehow I saw the bird perched ina willow tree above the Inverness estuary as I was driving past at forty milesan hour. My father always did tell me I had, what he called, a good 'game-eye'.

The BeltedKingfisher is a fine bird with the keen look of a hunter. It is one of myfavorite birds. He is fast, wary and, if you're a fish, deadly. I thought ofthe Fisher King from Arthurian legend, who, I learned later, was the sicklykeeper of the Hoy Grail who lived in an invisible castle. It is said that theHoly Grail was the chalice used by Joseph of Arimithea to catch the blood ofChrist.

"Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers ofmen", He said.

Strangely, Ihave been asking for Jesus. I have been yearning to connect with my innerChrist, because I have been trying to love better, to love stronger, to love more broadly. The Fisher King. The King Fisher.Was he the answer to my prayer?

I pulledover, turned the car around and pulled up beside the willow tree. But when Iopened my door, with camera in hand, the bird took flight and was gone. So Ihave no Kingfisher to show you. You'll have to take my word for it. But I knewthat the day was going to be special. I knew that there were messages waitingfor me, wherever I may roam. I drove on.

Ten milesdown the road I'm driving beside a rolling meadow pasture. I can see for a milein all directions. Suddenly, two shapes catch my attention to my left, a pairof animals moving quickly toward me. They are perhaps five hundred yards away,mere specs on the horizon. But I knew what they were instantly, instinctively. Coyotes. I believe they were a mated pairon the hunt. That was my sense of them. Coyotes are oblivious to the drone ofcars rolling past but when a car stops and a man gets out they take notice. Thesecond they saw me approach, camera in hand, they bolted like I had taken ashot at them with a gun. I managed to squeeze off one discernable shot justbefore they vanished into the trees at the far edge of the pasture. But theimage is so blurry that it's not worth reproducing here. Again, you'll have totrust me.

Wild coyotesare beautiful animals. Their coats are thick with browns and grays and tingedwith fox-red. I've seen them in certain light when they appear almostiridescent, like a fish. They have bright, keen eyes that any dog-lover willtell you is the mark of high intelligence, and when a coyote looks at you, Imean really looks at you, it's nothard to understand how it might have been when that first primitive man wasbeguiled by that first primitive canine. Dog chose man, not the other wayaround.

The coyoteis a Native American trickster animal, much like the raven; which I havewritten about before. He is the Fool, ever reminding us to laugh at ourselves,to not take life too seriously. The coyote is also a shape-shifter, atransformer. He is both wisdom and folly. He is a paradox, and thus a symbol ofbalance. My life, at that moment in time, was out of balance. I needed thecoyotes, so the coyotes presented themselves to me. Seek and ye shall find.

Onward. Igot out of bed that morning not knowing where I was going, not knowing what Iwas seeking, but I had faith that what I needed would be found. A few milesdown the road from where I left the coyotes I spied a small herd of deerfeeding in the meadow besides the parking area at Abbott's Lagoon. 

 

The deerpermitted me to photograph them. In this image they are alert and wary andlooking off to the east - the direction of the coyotes. At this point I beganto feel the exhilaration of the wild and the promise of the open road. Animalswere presenting themselves to me. The air was cool and crisp. I was alone. Itwas a stunning morning. And I was on the road. The road, I have learned, is thebearer of gifts. The road is a ribbon whose far end lies in promise and whosenear end is wrapped around your heart, and that ribbon will pull you to whereyou need to be; if you're open. I got back in my car and followed the road.

Onward.Another few miles and there to my left is a herd of Holstein cows feeding froma concrete trough. Cows are beautiful, intelligent beings. I am neverdisappointed when I interact with cows. When I spend time with cows Iunderstand why Hindus revere them. I understand why some people choose not toeat them. To be alone among a large herd of cows is a humbling, almost sacredexperience. Cow energy is its own unique force of feeling. I have found thatthey like it when you talk to them. 

 

Fifteenminutes with a cow pays off like an hour of expensive psychotherapy. Cows lowermy blood pressure. They calm me. And they pay attention. Dairy cows are thebest listeners in the animal kingdom, and for some reason that I cannotexplain, they flock to me like moths to a lantern. When I tell you that I couldhave spent all day with these cows I am not exaggerating. I have become a cowwhisperer.

There areTule Elk out here in this part of Point Reyes and I saw them too. They aremagnificent animals. They're like horses with great racks of antlers, and if Ihad a zoom lens I'd be showing them to you now, but I did not come out on thisday with a long lens. I wanted to get close to nature. So I sped on past theelk and parked my car above McClure's Beach and headed down the trail to theocean; which does for me what a good beer does for the drinking man - it makesme feel alive. But my dilemma, when I walk on beaches, is always the same.Which way do I go? I always look for something that beckons, some feature orobject that demands investigation, to help me decide. And I saw something faraway and to my left that piqued my curiosity. It was an object lying on thesand that had recently washed up on the beach. I couldn't tell what it was butit seemed to glow so I headed left, which was south, about three hundred yardsand what I found was a Styrofoam float from a fishing net. It was paintedtaxi-cab yellow and had some numbers carved into it and two words: Happy Days.

 

It is likelythat Happy Days is the name of the fishing vessel from which this float brokeloose. But that's not what was triggered in my mind in that moment. What cameto mind immediately was the television program Happy Days that had become such a cultural phenomenon in the'70's.  Happy Days rode the coattails of American Graffiti, which had been nominated for an Oscar a fewyears before. Both films happened to star Ron Howard. That film, and thetelevision series it spawned, were seminal influences for me. The second I readthe words on this float a song began to play in my head. One o'clock, two o'clock, three o'clock rock. It was Bill Haileyand the Comets from the opening credits of the show; which I remember so wellgrowing up. I was just a boy then. The 1950's were to me what the 1980's are tomy own children now - a kooky, nostalgic netherworld so seemingly distant intime that it doesn't feel real. In the bleak, dark 70's we escaped backward toa time when the darkness seemed to be behind us for good. We had just confirmedourselves as the world's greatest nation, having stormed Mordor, dropped theRing into the fires of Mt. Doom and thus defeating the Dark Lord. But all wasnot well in Hobbiton.

The 60'staught us that the 50's was a masterful lie. The happiness of Happy Days was athickly applied veneer. It took the solvent known as Vietnam to expose us asnation of the blind. By the time we got through Nixon and the fall of Saigon wewere ready for another shot of whatever they were pouring from those malt shopfountains in 1954. My own life at the time of Happy Days was not happy. But Ifound little pockets of happiness in enough places to see me through. Timeswere hard for my family, but we had each other and were blessed with thingsmoney can't buy. To this day the 70's fills me with a kind of dread that ishard for me to explain. I absorbed every detail of the zeitgeist like somemini-black hole on legs. My heart had been broken, my faith had been severelydamaged and a poisonous resentment was already brewing in my little boy soul. Nothingcould escape the gravity of my collapsed star.

Yet, lightdid seep in. I had a mother who steered me to books and a father who steered meto nature. I was taught to find solace in stories and groves of trees. When Igo back to those places now, I reconnect to those things that make us allhuman. I reconnect to my spiritual self, and to the spirit that runs through usall, and all things.

I have beenblessed with a good game-eye. That means that I have the ability to discernshapes and patterns that are incongruous with their surroundings. A good game-eyesees through the deception of camouflage. A good game-eye sees also intooneself, and one's own little tricks of deception. The game is not always awild animal, the game is also the roles people play, the manipulations, thelies, the strategies of the ego to serve itself.

Just beyondthe Happy Days float that I found washed up on the beach is a narrow gap in therocks where one can peer beyond to the south. When I got to this spot I wastreated to something truly spectacular - the image of the sun rising up overthe ocean. All those animals, the kingfisher, the coyotes, the deer, the cowsand the elk, ushered me to this:

 

That day,which was last Sunday, was a good day to be living. And today is a good day tobe living, wherever we find ourselves. We are very lucky to be alive. SometimesI need to be reminded of how lucky I am. And that's where photography comes in.The camera is the dowser's wand of my soul. Thank you God. Thank you, Universe.Just think, it all began with a big pop.

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