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The Palos Verdes peninsula is a solid chunk of land that juts out into the mighty Pacific Ocean like a rudder to the city of Los Angeles. I parked the car on top of a bluff there and Susan and I took a trail down to Abalone Cove. The hike is short but steep and there are places along the trail where the chaparral is quite tall and forms a cool archway beneath the noon-time sun. At high tide the beach is covered with cantaloupe sized rocks that make the hike slow and deliberate but we walked south towards Portugese Point . There the sandy beach opens up a bit and we put down a blanket and had a picnic lunch.

There was one family already there, a father and two young teen-aged boys were scrambling about the base of the Point with fishing poles. The mother and young daughter were looking at things along the surf line. Seagulls had found a sandwich bag with cookies in it at the edge of the beach and were taking turns trying to get the contents out. Offshore, small fishing boats were plying the waters around the peninsula and a biplane appeared briefly, making a low pass over the water.

While Susan sunned herself I took my camera over to the base of the Point. Just beneath the surface of the water, large flat sheets of gold-colored rock with mosaic like features seemed magnified by the churning water. A solitary tree affixed to a shelf on the Point seemed like a trophy, a verdant award to survival in this rocky place. Indeed, here at this particular edge of the Pacific Ocean it feels as if this is where the Earth itself ends and the unimaginably immense ocean begins. Here, the surf on the rocks creates an incredible sound as the waves pull down on the piles of rocks. A small child walking by with her parents said "It sounds like popcorn!" It sounds like a creek flowing over stones, but deeper and more resonant, and intermittent as the waves ebb and flow. It is the sound of the world breathing.

Later, we pack up our things and leisurely do our walk/balancing act along the stony shore, back to the bluff trail and back to our car. In ten minutes we are back among our own kind on the crowded streets of San Pedro. A few minutes more and we are on the bridges crossing the port flying over oceans of ocean-going containers. In 30 minutes we are on our own street but a whole world away from the end of the Earth.

The work shown here is called the Girl at Abalone Cove.

They close off a chunk of downtown for New Year's Eve. Bands play, people dance in the streets with all the hopes that come with the night. A young man with the leather jacket had a shy smile. He was in his late twenties, short-cropped hair, neat, lean. I glanced over at him as we were waiting in line for the "restrooms." The restrooms were just a line of last resort port-o-potties for people who couldn't hold it one minute longer. I caught the young man's eye and said "Happy New Year!" He reciprocated and his drawn out response made me think that he had been drinking some.

"How has your night been?" I asked him. He said it had been disappointing but didn't elaborate. I sensed that he was lonely, that maybe he had hoped to meet someone and hadn't.

"The music is still playin' man, it's not too late."

"How was yours?" he asked painfully.

"It's been alright, I danced a little, drank a little, listened to music."

He leaned towards me, "If I can ask, whatdya do for a living?"

I was surprised by the question but didn't see the harm in answering so I told him.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"I'm a farmer."

"Where do you farm?"

"In Fresno, I tear up land to plant things," he said. I'm not sure he liked being a farmer. I'm not sure he liked being himself.

"Yeah, but you GROW FOOD, right? That's important."

He shook his head in agreement as a port-o-pottie suddenly became available I waved him on and that was the end of our brief conversation.

I was that painful young man for a time in my life, when the world didn't seem to fit my expectations. I felt like everything I had learned about how life should be was a lie, and in the betrayal, the world became a hostile and ugly place. But I made it through that phase somehow. In part, I realized that I built the hostile world from my own thoughts and reactions. It wasn't the world that needed to change, it was me. I found things (and people) I could trust and believe in. I found that I was part of and not separate from all things. And then the world changed.

I've been thinking about the young farmer from Fresno. I hope that he finds his way to a better world. I hope that he has a Happy NEW Year.

Half way down Bayshore Avenue my mp3 player quit. Batteries. The sky was brightening in the east. I stopped at 1st Street and stood on the corner looking out at the bay. The water had the slightest stippling to it and it was starting to reflect the changing sky. Across the bay, the houses on Naples Island were dark, save for the strands of Christmas lights still on. And beyond the island homes, a layer of fog seemed to cover the marina like a soft white comforter. The Q-tip tops of palm trees and the peaks of the Santa Ana mountains jutted up behind this, the ramparts hiding the newborn sun.

It was quiet. There were no cars moving at this hour, save those few up on 2nd Street crossing the bridge to the Island. Their tires making a clickety-clack sound crossing the center of the bridge. A nearly indetectable breeze rustled the palm fronds and the first few gulls, headed inland from their roosts on the beach, were black against the fading indigo sky. A lonely jet plane, miles higher, made a silent wide arc in the same sky.

A solitary man walking along the shore with a walking stick approaches. "Merry Christmas" we say to each other and remark on the calm and peaceful beauty of the morning before us. Then we each go our separate ways. I go towards my home where the people I love so much are still asleep. There are gifts beneath our tree but I know what real gifts are, to have a home and a family, to love and be loved, and to share this life in this world for a time. That's all I could ever ask for, that's all I could ever really want.

Although my mother's father worked in the Cleveland steel mills, there was very little money and as the children got older they got jobs and turned their paychecks over to their parents. Though she never said so, I believe my mom grew up with very few possessions that were her own, everything was hand-me-down. It was not until she married my father and moved away from her family that she came to own things that were hers and no one else's.

I'm not sure how old I was when she bought a pretty ceramic teapot. My parents drank coffee, but I think, for her, this teapot represented something of refinement. It was delicate and finely painted and sitting down to enjoy a cup of tea meant that there was some leisure to life, that it was not all toil from sun up to sun down, there was time for conversation or contemplation.

I do not remember the circumstances but I recollect that it was an accident that sent my mother's delicate teapot to its untimely end, smashed on the floor, so many broken pieces it was beyond any hope of repair. I do not remember her crying about it but I suspect she did. I do remember a prevalent sense of loss. I see now that she, having grown up with so little, may have felt unworthy of fine things.

I do not know if it was that same year or some subsequent year that I came across a teapot that was identical to the beloved one in every way. It was close to Christmas and I bought the teapot and wrapped it and put it under the tree for her on Christmas Eve. The next morning was the usual Christmas morning madness with the rush to open presents. I felt a psychic tug, knowing that her opening that gift would mean something. When she picked it up and began unwrapping it I nearly felt ill. When she saw what it was, I saw the wave of emotion on her face and I knew I had done the right thing. I saw on her face that she knew that someone thought she deserved something nice.

There are very few moments in a boy's life when he has done something he can be truly proud of, my life was full of the ordinary busyness of school and church and chores and just trying to get along. There are not many gifts we can give each other that don't fade, or break, with time. I gave my mother a teapot that Christmas but I think she got something else entirely.

The teapot may be long gone for all I know. What is left is the only gift we really have to offer each other.

To walk around the streets of Old Sacramento, the historic portion of town next to the river, is to go back in time more than one hundred years. The buildings are much as they were a century ago but modernized in all the right ways to keep from being fiery death traps. Most weekends the wooden sidewalks are filled with tourists but as an avid photographer, the early mornings belonged mostly to me, a few homeless folks and some of the restaurant prep people getting to work. I like the feel of Old Sac (as I like to call it). Here was the wharf where people came to to start their own gold rush in 1849. Here merchants became wealthy in banking and railroads, their names carrying forward to this century as names of corporations or universities. You might get lost in the past here quite easily save for the modern skyscrapers just above the roof tops of these old brick buildings and the sounds of traffic from Interstate 5 which both hides and protects Old Sac from the rest of the constantly changing city.

I used two of the buildings as backdrop for this image. The cowboy pictured here was garnered from the Farm Security Administration's color photo repository. He seemed the most likely candidate for this image. I liked his hardened look, his clothes tell me that he works hard for little money, his hat chewed up, his shirt soiled. A trip to town would be for business more than pleasure. He seems to me to be more comfortable on the range than in the city. He might come home with a souvenir, a few silver dollars in his pocket until next time and maybe a small bottle of the good stuff to ward of the chill at night. Who knows how many just like him wandered these very streets?

You'll find this image in the Nostalgia Gallery.

I am sitting on a bench with my sisters-in-law in front of a touristy restaurant in Old Sacramento. We are waiting for our party to be called, a family dinner before we all go our separate ways. A man with a hospital wristband still on sits a few seats down from us. He asks the many tourists passing by for spare change. Some shake their heads no, others seem not to notice him. In the time we have been waiting he hasn't received anything.

Got any spare change?

In the time we have been waiting small clouds, pink on their bellies and gray on their backs, move away from the setting sun like sheep grazing towards open pasture. Tiny steps, nibbling as they go.

Got any spare change?

In the time we have been waiting a thousand ravens create a floating black ribbon in the sky heading somewhere to roost. The endless ribbon, thick in some spots and thin in others seems to move with a fluid and undulating motion, driven by some force unseen from this bench.

Got any spare change?

The young father on the walkway before us asks his two young children, a boy and a girl, "Do we have any spare change?" They each dig deep into their pockets, one even pulling his pocket linings out, holding them wide with his fingers. The answer shows on their faces as they look at the poor man asking for change. They do not and they feel bad. And they walk away.

Got any spare change?

In the time we have been waiting the man continues to ask as others parade by. Then, counter to the flow, the young boy emerges whose pockets had been empty. He shyly holds out coins for the man and the man takes them.

In one small moment, in the time we have been waiting, the boy is redeemed, the man is redeemed, the world is redeemed.

I don't see my friend Olivia very often, but when I do see her the first thing she asks is "Do you still have it?" as she turns my head to see if I still have a ponytail. I do. My hair has been "long" for longer than I can remember. I say "long" because the front of my head is nicely landscaped now, cropped close to my head most of the time but I can't seem to let the ponytail go. Maybe it's an homage to my younger days or maybe it's because I know Susan likes it or maybe, based on the oft repeated Samson and Delilah bible story from my youth, I secretly worry I will become weak and powerless without it. It could be any of these but it's probably all of them.

In the 1970s (as seen here) I was at my shaggiest. I remember visiting my little Italian grandmother once after having been to the barber for a trim. I had no sooner put my foot in the door when she said "Timmy!" (She's the only one I didn't mind calling me Timmy) "When are you going to get your hair cut?!?" At one point back then, my brothers and I operated a small manufacturing business together in a small shop. We all three looked like rejects from the Symbionese Liberation Army. "If I didn't know you guys,"Susan told me once when she came to visit me at work, "I wouldn't even go in there!" To her we looked scary...Manson family scary.

Looking back I see that, in part, we just wanted to thumb our nose at "the man." It was definitely counter to the 1950s-crew-cut-church-on-Sundays culture we grew up in. I think we would have said that we wouldn't have wanted to be friends with anybody who would judge us about our looks but in reality I think it may have been more of a coping mechanism, keeping people at a distance. We definitely thought of ourselves as nonconformists back then,everybody wanted to be one!

I love this image of myself not necessarily for the unruly mop I sport, but for the smile too. Migrating through the late teens and early twenties is a perilous and adventuresome time for anyone and when I see this image of myself, I like to think I managed somehow. My ponytail may just be a legacy trait but, like the Bible story, it really does hold power for me.

There were few stars in the sky of my childhood home, hidden by the glut of city lights only the brightest ever made it through. Still, in the long summer nights when we stayed outside until quite late, I could pick out the big dipper. I remember spending some summer nights visiting my uncle in Colorado where, at the time, there were fewer city lights. I visited once at the height of the Perseid meteor showers, what a grand night that was, laying in the tall grass and watching the 'stars' fall one after another. Awakening the next morning, covered in a sleeping bag, I realized I had fallen asleep and never dragged myself back inside.

Visiting and later moving to the desert was the best for seeing the stars and planets. No city lights. The milky way splashed across the zodiac. The sky dripping with stars. We had an old telescope in a wooden box and set it up from time to time, gazing at star clusters, seeing the red of Mars and the brightness of Jupiter and mindful of the scar-like craters of the moon and being able to eyeball that dirty snowball, Halley's comet, without the aid of a telescope. The sky is chock full of wonders that have stirred me and grounded me at the same time. What a royal painting is the night sky on a moonless night in the middle of wilderness. My young mind was full of questions about the night sky back then, today I accept it as a gift, this view of fiery worlds spinning farther away than I can even imagine, their light reaching us over inordinate amounts of time, but their absolute beauty absolutely timeless.

I miss my old friends nowadays. I long to go to the desert for a visit and take them in again, one by one as the sun begins to set until the sky is overflowing once again.

The image here is of one of my acrylic pieces not yet ready for sale. I call it Skylights

I feel the cool breeze, barely perceptible, on my skin where it is exposed to the air...on the small triangle of my chest below my beard, on the back of my hands, across my cheek and forehead.

The room is crowded with business people in suits, I have worn a jacket but no tie, we hear a state official telling us the worst and best news of his department.

More shorebirds than I have ever seen, a moving mass scouring the sand at low tide. Periodically, one species takes flight and settles farther down the beach.

S is wearing a new gauzy skirt, she is standing in the open doorway, backlit by the kitchen light. I cannot NOT look at her lovely shape in silhouette. My pulse quickens.

I throw the car in park, grab my keys and the letters, throw a quarter at the meter and squeeze into the post office with minutes to spare. I chuck handfuls of letters into the bin.

We sit in complete silence while she tells us she watched the small plane get bigger and bigger and then crash into the World Trade Center. Her office on the 35th floor faced the WTC. When the buildings collapsed, people in her office were crying. They ALL knew someone who worked in the buildings.

A small fire in a little outdoor fireplace paints the courtyard walls a bouncy orange yellow. We sit with our feet out to the fire while R plays a complicated rythmn on the djembe drum.

We have been in a perpetual drought for so long here in California that rain becomes news. TV news weather people fall all over themselves describing this low-pressure system moving south that will bring significant levels of moisture. Our badly needed moisturizing had been forecast for Halloween night and long after the first trick-or-treaters had gone the first telltale drops began to fall. During the night as we slept it rained lightly and by morning it was mostly done. Walking the dog, I stopped to marvel at the armada of clouds sailing away, their tall white sails bright in the early morning light. Everything looks brighter after a good rain, the streets and trees, the yards and flowers, even the air seems brighter.

I have learned recently the many ways plants here have adapted to these dry conditions. Some totally go dormant and appear to be dead, springing back to life at the first sign of rain. Some develop smaller and smaller leaves to decrease surface area (avoiding heat and decreasing evaporation). Some develop elaborate root systems to take advantage of every last drop of moisture while others develop tougher-skinned leaves to hold water in and keep it from evaporating away. Life finds a way to keep going, even under adverse conditions.

I captured this image of a juniper last week in the high desert, a place of little moisture. I have seen plants like this come back to life after a rainfall, new growth sprouting from its former greatness, refusing to lie down and die even with the tiniest glimmer of hope. Hope delivered by the raindropfull.