Study in brown

My son was excited about the elephant seals too. He followed one as it wriggled up the beach, as I nervously reminded him not to get within 25 feet. The seal appeared to me to be about my son's age, an early adolescent. He squirmed his way along the sand towards a larger one sleeping in the corner of the beach. When he got about 15 feet away from the bigger one that one raised his head, turned, and gave a howl, clearly stating " no way are you encroaching on my territory". The little one retreated a bit, the big one gave another signal to back off. The little one headed into the waves as though it had just occurred to him that a swim might be nice. Jasper and I watched this drama together. In his brown hoodie, picked out for the first time for looks and not because of a sports team, he seemed at just the same stage as this young seal.

the artist and her model

We went to Ano Nuevo this weekend to see the elephant seals. Due to a variety of factors we didn't make it onto the official tour but down on the beach we saw three elephant seals. Ava instantly started drawing them in the sand. She has just started drawing people and animals in the last few months and this artist/mama felt so awed by her instant desire to translate her experience into art.

my favorite news story

This is my favorite news story I've read recently It's all about how hummingbirds make sounds with their tails instead of their vocal chords. Wow, amazing tiny musicians!

welcome to a new era

I read yesterday that scientists now believe we have entered a new geologic era, ladies and gents welcome to the Anthropocene Era! That means that the earth has been so altered by one species, humans, that one must consider it to be different place than it was in the Holocene. More that half the dirt on the planet is being used, cultivated, altered by us bipeds.

Reminds me of the middle part of this poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

God’s Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.


I love this poem and I do believe that nature is never truly spent, though alas, the warm breast of the Holy Ghost brooding over us is not something I frequently feel in this new era.