Today started off with a pleasant walk. It had rained over night and everything was washed sparkling fresh and clean. The flowers were especially colorful so I took a couple of record shots to commemorate their short but beautiful lives.
Poppies are of course the source of opium, a life-pain soothing drug. And the calla lilies are a standard grave decoration. The flowers above and below illustrate those living and dying characteristics.
They show the wear and tear of their various unseen life struggles.
The sky above the still wintry trees showed strangely troubled clouds and it was time to go home and read some books for a while as they were due at the library today. Then later, before it started raining again, I went down to the Albany Bulb for a walk by the San Francisco Bay. There the clouds were massing over the Golden Gate Bridge and making this gigantic wonder of human construction look very small by comparison.
On the beach to the left there were some dogs and people playing at the water’s edge and everyone was having a great time on this fine but cloudy day.
How can I harbor thoughts of global warming or massive buildups of CO2 when things are obviously so gloriously perfect? My friend Ali was just saying two weeks ago that I worry too much about such things — that I should forget about them and enjoy myself. For him that was good advice because the next day he was in the hospital with a heart attack and has been in intensive care ever since. But, for me, I think I identify with all humanity and with all life, in the abstract, perhaps too much, and I want things to go well for a very long time — a long time after my consciousness has evaporated.
It is time to go to Trader Joe’s and get some groceries. The clouds grow very strange with enormous bulbs hanging down from them.
I don’t remember seeing clouds like this hanging over Berkeley before. In watching TV shows about tornadoes they showed some strange clouds sort of like these but even bigger. But, hey, this isn’t Kansas — we don’t have tornadoes — this is California — we have earthquakes.
This photo shows the bulbs better. Nothing newsworthy came of it, so far as I know. It was a beautiful and ominous cloud embedded in another perfect day.
Filed under: diary, happiness, photography, psychology | Tagged: Berkeley, clouds, dogs, El Cerrito, hiking, nature, photography, photos, rain, tornadoes, walks, weather
