Dreams, Moments, Travels
My mother-in-law’s smiling face and her excitement seeing her daughter make these stays with us worth everything “the son-in-law” has to endure. This is her fourth trip to the United States, and she’ll be here only 25 days compared to her previous trip in the year 2000 of 29 days, but still much longer than her first visit back in 1996 when she was here for a mere 14 days. We have big plans for Jutta, with our most adventurous road trip yet mapped out. We leave in a couple of days.
There’s an intimacy here with our belongings that weren’t being had in the condo. Most of what we owned was in places we weren’t living in and, hence, didn’t really see. What I mean is that we spent the majority of our time in our office in front of our computers or our bedroom sleeping when we were at home and so we’d walk right by our stuff.
Here in the loft, we can see almost everything we own from wherever we are. The first photo shows the bookshelf in the background that bisects the room, so our bed, seen above, is in a separate space to a degree. Our bed is a queen-sized futon and suits us fine as we abhor king beds due to the vast distance between us.
Little things like coming home and immediately seeing the pots we bought at the Ute Mountain Pottery shop outside of Cortez, Colorado, make us smile. As for the frog in the background, that plushy had to be put up high in a place where our cat Andy couldn’t jump as he had a thing for it that, while funny at first, got old fast.
While some may find it tragic, this is the hub of where our lives at home revolve. We are addicted to computers, not just the internet but the multitude of things we can do with them around art, coding, organization, and learning. I sit on the right and Caroline on my left. In front of me is our bedroom, seen two photos above, and in front of Caroline, our living room while on her left is our dining room. In a few hours, Jutta will arrive from Frankfurt, Germany, to spend about a month with us. We are about to learn just how livable our space is.
Well, I turned 40 yesterday and so far, no existential crisis is appearing on the horizon. On the contrary, things are terrific, and life is amazing. When I was a kid in the 70s, I used to hear people talk about “mid-life crisis” like it was a form of menopause or cancer. Turns out that maybe being suspicious of the stupidity of adults to glom on to every idiotic, fearmongering bit of nonsense that could justify their anxiety was insightful. Guess I’ll have to see how the next decade rolls out.
This reminds me of the thistle we saw at the ocean last year. Click here to visit that trip.
Can you tell from the lush green colors that we’ve had some spring rains? Trust me, this is lush for the Arizona desert.
We are heading in the general direction of Tucson, following the road for as long as the wildflowers pull us forward.
What’s not to love about these explosions of color? Makes me wonder about how one cultivates that sense of reemergence and new growth as the seasons unfold. Every month should be springtime in our heads, and every day another Saturday.
The Arizona spring is a terrific time when things have a chance at life. In a couple of months, the heat will start bearing down on our balcony putting much of what we’ve set here in danger of dying. But for now, it’s perfect, and it’s beautiful.
Driving south to visit new places and stopping along the coast because a selfie in front of the water always makes for a nice shot of two happy people.
Our first visit to Mission San Juan Capistrano down here by Dana Point. This might be the most beautiful garden of all the missions we’ve visited to date.
Nothing like recent rains to add details to already beautiful plant life.
From the mosses on the walls to the crumbling facade, Mission San Juan Capistrano is wearing its age well.
Infinity is found deep within.
So if infinity is found deep within, what happens when we never manage to go beyond the surface of things? We crumble and fade away and ultimately will be unknown, just as most of us are to ourselves. Those who teach about spirituality in an organized Christian way only find value in the soul, which will remain elusive and foreign to those who cannot fathom the depth of where they are allowed to travel but are too afraid to venture.
The rain pauses with waterdrops clinging to paddles of this succulent before falling to earth or evaporating back into a gas as water and plants live in a symbiotic balance where the cycle of life is in full bloom.
The altar of God, the altar of gold, the altar of power: we kowtow before the altar but not that of ourselves. We are taught that the altar of ego is evil, and yet we are told to bow before those who are achieving greatness as defined by power structures that control the masses. We are deserving to be sheep with less freedom than a drop of water falling from the sky.
Snow and sky, green and blue, power from the wind, energy from the sun, and yet we move through the environment unaware of most everything except the next off-ramp where clean toilets have been promised because our personal needs are deemed more important than the energy we derive from the imagination that has been inspired by the exploration of nature.
Is the ultimate reward really salvation when the rainbow is a terrestrial phenomenon that our eyes are perfectly tuned for? The glory of life is a daily gift that too many have turned into a torment that becomes their living hell, at which point they try to sell it to the rest of us as a kind of normal. They are wrong. Long live the rainbow and the exhilaration that is found beneath their arc.
Another Friday night drive out to Los Angeles, California, yesterday. We are enjoying the rain we Arizonans covet so dearly here on this glorious Saturday morning. You probably don’t recognize the background, but I do. It’s one of the flood control channels that is pushing water to a larger channel that I’m very familiar with because we are in West Covina, and I used to walk by this spot frequently as a kid on my way to the West Covina Fashion Plaza (as it was known at the time). At another time in my youth, I worked across the street here on California Avenue at one of the two Barro’s pizzerias that existed at the time, which was about 1978.
Out and about exploring Los Angeles and heading over to visit with my father.