Texas fall color on display

A beautiful red oak in Rosebud, Texas, with my judicial
and skilled, if I may say, use of Photoshop.

I was worried, earlier this year, that ongoing semi-drought was going to gut fall colors this year in east and central Texas. Instead, it looks like the year is, at least in selected spots, supplying perfect fall colors.

Without going into all the details, the lighting was from the right back, in other words, partially backlit, which is what you want.

Photoshop work, without giving away details, involved some dodging, some burning, some of the highlights/shadow command, moderate application of, and proper settings for, Photoshop's HDR toning command, then my usual combo of Gaussian blur and unsharp mask to finish.

Some poetic thoughts on the "real" cowboy Texas

LITTERED LANDSCAPES

Opportunisitic prickly pear

Prickly pear. Agave. Mountain cedar.

Patches of mesquite and the occasional crown of thorns.

Each sightly at times,

Picturesque, naturalistic.

But often, in the Texas Hill Country,

A sign of something else –

Man’s scarring of the soil,

Littered landscapes.

Opportunistic plants from dryland edges

Found their chance to invade

Overgrazed pasturelands, stony hills and cloudy draws.

When you eat that Texas beef on your plate,

The fuzzy-edged, grasping and extending fingers

Of the Chihuahuan Desert,

And its semidesert outliers,

Thank you.

When you admire an “authentic” Hill Country mock ranch

For artifice from drier lands

The desert flora thank you.

Yes, a few of the specimens were in place

Before Texas cattlemen, or “Old West” realtors

But not like this.

Beauty is in the eye – and the knowledge – of the beholder.

            Jan. 7, 2012

Kyoto carbon poetry

A comment from a friend on Google+, after he posted a haiku, led me to ask myself if I had a copy of this 1998 Kyoto treaty talks op-ed that I wrote all in haiku. And, I did. And yes, what follows was an actual op-ed column. (Small weekly paper, where I was publisher, and nobody to say 'You can't do that.')

Clinton seeks freer trade
With Chilean producers
Free wine, grapes, and fruit

Gephardt says "Never"
Dreaming Presidential dreams
Gore stands idly by

Newt and his minions
Will swap taxes for tariffs
Clinton: "See me next year"

He's to Kyoto
To cut back greenhouse gas growth
Subtle irony

Speaking, not doing
More global warming threatens
With his ev'ry word

Business USA
Claims the climate data is
Still insufficient

They preach doom and gloom
For our proud, strong economy
From mandated change

Clinton will stand and speak
To please Japan, Europe, home
And yet fall far short

Back in Washington
Ere his Orient Express
Reno had good news

Investigation
Of campaign violations
Is terminated

Clinton breathes easy
As does loyal Gore besides
But is it over

On the back benches
Hot Republican firebreathers
Demand impeachment

The outside person
Knows all hands are money-green
Has cynic disgust

Nature is tenacious

A pinon pine on a crag above Wolf Creek Pass/My pic

Tenacious grasp
Pinon pine on mountain crag;
Solitary life.

That lone rugged tree
Lives without one remembrance,
Growing but dumbly.

A lesson for life
That roots are oft unconscious
But still need much luck,

Refuting some rich
Who social Darwinism
Gave them all their wealth.

Desert ambivalence: a poem

DESERT AMBIVALENCE

I love the desert — in small doses.
I love its variety, if sharp and sere,
Frm slickrock redness of Utah
To the tangled shrubbery of the Chihuahuan’s edges;
From the sky blues of the southern borderlands
To Death Valley’s raw, existential rigor.
I love it all.
But in small doses.
Without sky islands,
The Chihuahuan and eastern Sonoran would hold less charm.
Likewise for Death Valley without nearby Sierras.
As for the Great Basin?
Its sky islands seem smaller and poorer to me,
And have never touched me as much.
And, so it is —
Desert ambivance.

Nov. 10, 2010

WAXING SCIENCE, WANING RELIGION

The slimmest clarion of new crescent moon
Strives against being horizonally swallowed
By a modern, urbanized mix
Of haze, smog, high-rise skyline and near-solstice summer sunset.
A totem of a more simplistic time
(Whether simple or not)
When times were measured by moons
Along with sacrifices and other aspects of worship
As the stench of old, dried, burnt blood
Coated stones, steles, tabernacles and temples;
Nasty, brutish, short and simplistic, even if not simple.
Nor bygone.
Yet today several million lobster loathers,
And a billion followers of an illiterate itinerant peddler,
Mark their calendars by that same crescent,
While well more than a billion adherents
Of a dead rebel Jew they cluelessly deify
Mark his death by that same lunar orb.
What would Earth by like without that Moon?
No science of Galileo and Apollo landings,
But no madness of Middle Eastern myths.

— May 31, 2009

BOULDER PARK PICNIC TABLE

Some reflections from hiking in a Dallas park:
















Broken down and weather beaten,
Agéd, silent picnic table
Gladed inside multi-level
Understory, has seen it all.

Sit and think and ponder do I,
Bounded within parkland nature.
Would that picnic table would speak.
That, though, will not happen for me.

Answers? I must find them inside
Broken planking only watches
Ebbs and flows of live; it acts not.
So, then, knows not sorrow, anguish.

I, though, well know painful moments
Drift and doubt and struggle bitter.
Answers? Mine all must have actions.
Drift is the most painful of all.

November: A time for poignancy

From my Nov. 2 newspaper column:

This time of year is always poignant for me.

We are full-blown into fall now, even in north Texas, let alone places either further north or at higher elevations where I have lived elsewhere in my life. With the change in seasons comes not just cooler weather, but more clouds, more rain, more fog.

The days have already been shortening, and the change in the length of the daytime speeds up the more we get into fall. The increase in cloudy days means less sunlight yet.

And then, sharply, comes this change back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time. No transitions, like moving time back 15 minutes each of four Sundays. The full hour of earlier eventide hits at once.

Again, the effect is even sharper further north, where the day has been ending earlier than this far south, and fall is often cloudier, if you go far enough north.

Poignant? Yes. Philosophical, pensive, reflective, even.

First, I think of the ludicrousness of the idea that we are actually controlling time, let alone "saving" any time or daylight as the phrase "Daylight Saving Time" would have us believe. (Someone like a dairy farmer would probably say we're actually losing, not saving, anything.)


But, if we recognize time as an elemental dimension, part of the fabric of our world that Albert Einstein identified as space-time, the idea of saving or controlling it really sounds ludicrous, or hubristic.

Do we change the defined length of a foot or meter in summer because objects expand in hot weather? Of course not.

Now, especially as a night owl, I will say I appreciate our collective action of Daylight Saving Time, even if based on a fiction.

Besides, the measuring units of time in hours, minutes and seconds, outside of daytime and nighttime, are arbitrary anyway. As I wrote in a poem:

"What was saved or conserved these last months, really,

When divisions, boundaries, and placements of time

Are all arbitrary? ...

Nothing is saved;

Rather, the human mind is slaved,

Enslaved to the idea that an elemental dimension

Can somehow be tweaked and bent to our convenience

And put to work, like a six-month summer CD, to earn interest."

But, I started this column about the feeling, the emotion, of poignancy, not as a disquisition on either philosophy or Einsteinian relativity.

First, just what is poignancy? Here's how I defined it, in another poem:

"Poignancy is

A gentle sadness tingeing life

A gentle, tender, humble sadness

One that does not diminish joys when they come

But knows that every joy has seeds of pain

Of limitation, of human frailty."

I went on to tie it to seasonal changes and nature:

"I am poignant

Upon seeing near-bare trees

Of late fall, or

Pale, thin sunsets

In February."

Some people have seasonally-affected depression. For these people, the production of, or sensitivity to, brain neurotransmitters like serotonin, is affected by the shorter, cloudier days. Some people actually need to have expensive "full spectrum" artificial lighting around them as part of their treatment for this.

That's not what I'm talking about. Rather, it's a being in touch with, and appreciation of, the changes in nature and the finiteness of life they indicate.

At the same time, those shorter days, cloudier skies and de-greening trees show that beauty can come out of change, even decay.

And this year may be a good one.

Earlier this year, I was worried that summer drought might mean a drab fall. But, early signs indicate that may not be the case.

Pecans and other early turners don't look too affected as they have started showing their colors. But, those aren't the big fall trees for us.

The various species of red oaks, offset by bur oaks and any other white oaks around, key our fall, since we are conspicuously short on northeastern maples and high-country aspen. Early signs indicate they may have some colors besides various shades of brown in their palettes, too.

Wasn’t that a nice sunset yesterday?

Including some thought provoked about atonement

It sure was here in Dallas, for the start of Yom Kippur. (I had Kol Nidre playing on the stereo at the same time.)

It made me think that if I weren’t already an atheist having sprung out of a conservative Protestant background, I wouldn’t mind being an atheist with a current Reform Jewish heritage.

How do you ask forgiveness if there’s no personal deity? It’s possible; obviously, Theravada Buddhists have been doing this for thousands of years. I, in the past, worked through how one has an “attitude of gratitude” when you believe there’s nobody to whom to be grateful.

First, if you approach this from a communal point of view, there’s other people from whom to ask forgiveness. Beyond that, and not to sound New Agey, maybe you do need to ask forgiveness from yourself. After all, if prayer is really a heart-to-heart talk with yourself then atonement is on the same line.

So there you go.

Go to the oak tree, go to the salt flat

“Go to the ant, you sluggard,” the biblical book of Proverbs advises the lazy-minded.
While not doubting that the lazy-minded exist in modern-day America, I know the opposite problem is more likely. What to do?

“Go to the oak tree, you harried and hurried-minded,” I would advise.

On the south side of our DeSoto office, we have a nice bur oak tree. It’s relatively young, but not so young as to not be able to put a quantity of the nice-sized acorns that earn it its name.
Between its leaves, among the largest of oak trees’ foliage, and the large-sized, larger-capped namesake acorns, bur oaks have very visible signs of growth. And that’s the basis for my adage.
In spring, with those large leaves, as over the past couple of weeks, it’s possible to easily observe day-to-day growth. And I do.

I usually park my car near or beneath the tree. (With our recent spate of record-smashing temperatures, I look for the possibility of “beneath” parking every day.)

So, I get a chance — and remember to take the chance — to stop a few seconds and look at the tree’s growth. Ditto in late fall, as I watch how the acorns mature each day, then drop from the tree. (Given the size of bur oak acorns, at this time of year, the parking option is definitely “near” and not “beneath.” I don’t need an oak tree to inflict the equivalent of light hail damage on my car.)

In either case, the slow steady growth of the oak in its leaves, or the slow steady output of its acorns, shows that slow and steady is still an important part of the world around us, if not for our own selves.

This holds true not just with a bur oak, but with spring in general.

I walk my neighborhood in Lancaster almost every day. In early-to-mid-February, I start looking at the trees on the streets, wondering which will be the first to start budding each year and when.
Going by the trees, will it be an early or a late spring?

After the first tree, what’s next?

I do the same thing at Ten Mile Creek Nature Park. Here, I will look at the different species. When will the first bois d’arc start budding? The first pecan?

And likewise in fall. When will the first pecans start forming? How long will it be until the first one falls and hits the ground?

I don’t always practice what I preach on living life in the slower lane, I’ll confess. I sometimes try to cram in too much time web surfing, attempt to cram 25 hours into 24-hour days and otherwise let myself get wound up too tightly.

That’s why this message is for me as well as for you, dear readers. But, sometimes, I do practice what I preach.

While on vacation a month ago, on my next to last day full day out, I was driving through the Mojave Desert of southern California, along a now-decommissioned section of Route 66. I then turned off to go south to Joshua Tree National Park. Just south of the junction, a series of salt flats, backdropped by mountain ranges, stretches to the horizon.

I stopped to take pictures of the geometric structure of the salt flats; another car had already done so. (For me, it was a chance to play with my ultrawide lens, to boot.)

But, after I had my fill of shooting, I realized that, especially with somewhat overcast weather, I was in no hurry to get to Joshua Tree. So, on a warmish 80-degree day, I took an hour on the flats to sit and meditate. I felt years younger after I got done.

The point is, sometimes, we may need to do more than just slow our lives down, we may need to sit and stop, however each of us does that.

Go to the oak tree? At times, it may be go to the desert.
The solitude and vastness of the desert will always put the rest of life in perspective, if we let it. Is it any wonder that religious and spiritual leaders, and some of history’s great artists as well, have found inspiration in the desert places?

Note: I appreciate people who have told me they like hearing about my travels and seeing my pictures. My latest are online in my Yahoo photo albums are here. I have a number of folders titled “2006 spring vacation” then the particular geographic site appended to the folder name. Pictures include a mating pair of American avocets wading in a shallow pool on the salt flats, a desert bighorn in Grand Canyon and several desert and red rock sunset and storm cloud pictures.