We are strewn among the rocks, each of us surveying a swath of sky on the lookout for Lyrid meteors eager for their milliseconds of fame. It is a moonless night, and the desert stillness is a perfect reflection of the soundless fireworks in the skies above. The sodium glow of the horizon is a gentle reminder that most the inhabitants of our planet will never witness the Milky Way stretching across the sky, will never feel the oneness with the Universe that we feel here. Photographed April 2017.
Oh to be grounded by the simple act of moonrise... But for the fact that we walked beneath an ocean of air on a balmy autumn afternoon, the rocks around us could have easily been born of the magmas of Tharsis on Mars, or shaped by the subtle volcanism of the Moon. But then, like clockwork, the Moon rose, and there was no doubt. The textured crags, neatly stacked like cookies in a giant’s pantry, were formed not by the long lost fires of distant worlds, but in the cauldron of the living planet we call home. Photographed October 2007. Nominee (finalist), 5th Annual Black and White Spider Awards (2010).
May 2019, somewhere north of Big Sur, where the incoming tide was washing over giant sheets of rock stretching from the cliffs far into the ocean. Each crashing wave formed fleeting waterfalls as it retreated, and the very last wave managed to drench my clothes thoroughly, but didn't ebb my enthusiasm for the sunset we'd witnessed.
