care.
March 15, 2024 § Leave a comment
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where –”
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
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Anza Borrego (CA) Ocotillos
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“Letting go doesn’t mean that you don’t care about someone anymore. It’s just realizing that the only person you really have control over is yourself.”
― Deborah Reber
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Anza Borrego State Park Spring flowers
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“The beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair. The beauty of a woman is seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart, the place where love resides. True beauty in a woman is reflected in her soul. It’s the caring that she lovingly gives, the passion that she shows & the beauty of a woman only grows with passing years.”
― Audrey Hepburn
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Anza Borrego State Park
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“Once you have read a book you care about, some part of it is always with you.”
― Louis L’Amour
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Anza Borrego State Park Spring flowers
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“Being a nerd, which is to say going too far and caring too much about a subject, is the best way to make friends I know.”
― Sarah Vowell
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California.
June 27, 2022 § Leave a comment
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature’s peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you, and the storms their energy, while cares will drop away from you like the leaves of Autumn.”
― John Muir, The Mountains of California
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“This entire time I’ve been thinking about where my home was. At first it was California, then Wisconsin. But in truth, home isn’t necessarily where you sleep at night. It’s where you feel like yourself. Where you’re most comfortable. Where you don’t have to pretend, where you can just be you.”
― Elizabeth Eulberg
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“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”
― Jack Kerouac
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within.
March 12, 2022 § Leave a comment
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” ― Franz Kafka
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Hunting for Anza Borrego Wildflowers – 2012
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“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King
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https://www.laaudubon.org/events/2020/3/21/anza-borrego-state-park-weekend-field-trip
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“The best fantasy is written in the language of dreams. It is alive as dreams are alive, more real than real … for a moment at least … that long magic moment before we wake.
Fantasy is silver and scarlet, indigo and azure, obsidian veined with gold and lapis lazuli. Reality is plywood and plastic, done up in mud brown and olive drab. Fantasy tastes of habaneros and honey, cinnamon and cloves, rare red meat and wines as sweet as summer. Reality is beans and tofu, and ashes at the end. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true?
We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La.
They can keep their heaven. When I die, I’d sooner go to middle Earth.”
― George R.R. Martin
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“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
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“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupery
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essence.
August 27, 2018 § Leave a comment
“Age has no reality except in the physical world. The essence of a human being is resistant to the passage of time. Our inner lives are eternal, which is to say that our spirits remain as youthful and vigorous as when we were in full bloom. Think of love as a state of grace, not the means to anything, but the alpha and omega. An end in itself.”
― Gabriel García Márquez
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Anza-Borrego Desert State Park
http://darksky.org/anza-borrego-desert-state-park-recognized-as-an-international-dark-sky-park/
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“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
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Anza Borrego
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“The very essence of romance is uncertainty.” ― Oscar Wilde
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Anza Borrego State Park
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“Is it possible, in the final analysis, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another?
We can invest enormous time and energy in serious efforts to know another person, but in the end, how close can we come to that person’s essence? We convince ourselves that we know the other person well, but do we really know anything important about anyone?” ― Haruki Murakami
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“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.” ― Pico Iyer
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Anza Borrego
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2017/mar/02/super-bloom-wildflowers-days-away-anza-borrego-des/
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“There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.” ― May Sarton
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Anza Borrego
https://www.sandiego.org/articles/hiking/anza-borrego-wildflowers-hikes.aspx
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“I’m apt to get drunk on words…Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.” ― Madeleine L’Engle
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Analog scent.
July 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” – Ursula K. Le Guin
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Anza Borrego Sunset by Dave Bullock
http://eecue.com/a/1589/Anza-Borrego.html
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“Being rich is not about how much money you have or how many homes you own; it’s the freedom to buy any book you want without looking at the price and wondering if you can afford it.” – John Waters
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Borrego Badlands
In California’s Anza Borrego State Park you’ll find the Borrego Badlands where four million years of geologic and paleontologic history are exhibited across a stark desert landscape. The Badlands has an arid terrain with clay-rich soil, making it hard for plant life to exist. The area is unique because years ago when water was carving the Grand Canyon its sediments washed down into Borrego. The result is the sediments from the Grand Canyon in reverse chronological order, the youngest rock is on the bottom and the oldest at the top. (Tracey D. Marx )
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/WeekendWindow/popup?id=4545338
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“Now, 75 years (after To Kill a Mockingbird), in an abundant society where people have laptops, cell phones, iPods, and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.” – Harper Lee
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flowering Ocotillo in Anza Borrego
http://beersandbeans.com/2010/06/16/palm-canyon-hiking-anza-borrego-desert/
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“A computer does not smell … if a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better… And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.” – Ray Bradbury
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Sunrise Anza Borrego Trailscape and Landscape Photography by Rich Brock
http://www.trailscapephotography.com/rich_brock_anza_1.html
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“Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!” – Horace Mann
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Sand verbena and dune evening primrose wildflowers at Anza-Borrego
http://www.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25723
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“The taste for books was an early one. As a child he was sometimes found at midnight by a page still reading. They took his taper away, and he bred glow-worms to serve his purpose. They took the glow-worms away and he almost burnt the house down with a tinder.” – Virginia Woolf
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Art.
April 24, 2012 § Leave a comment
“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way… things I had no words for.” – Georgia O’Keefe
Desert Dance Spring Cactus Flowers, Anza-Borrego State Park, California
Spring showers in the desert bring wildflowers and magnificent cactus blooms, such as this Hedgehog Cactus (Echinocereus). In the distance an Ocotillo (Fouguieria splendens) dances under the rare desert clouds.
http://www.artinnaturephotography.com/photo/desert-dance-spring-cactus-flowers/
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“A writer – and, I believe, generally all persons – must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” – Jorge Luis Borges
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Wildflowers In Colorado Near Aspen
http://www.ultimatetaxi.com/pictures_of/wildflowers_in_colorado.htm
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“You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” – C. S. Lewis
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Anza-Borrego-Desert-State-Park-Wildflowers
http://www.san-diego-beaches-and-adventures.com/anza-borrego-state-park.html
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“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.” – Ansel Adams
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Anza Borrego Flowers CloseUp
http://www.anzaborrego.net/Travel/AnzaBorrego/post/Rainy-Day-Trek.aspx
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“Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” – Pablo Picasso
Stories.
April 8, 2012 § Leave a comment
“Many people seem to feel that change in one’s self concept can come about smoothly. This is not true in any person….When we learn something significant about ourselves and act on that new learning, that starts a wave of consequences we can never fully anticipate.” – Carl Rogers
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Anza-Boreggo Wildflowers
http://blog.sandiego.org/2012/03/spring-fun-in-san-diego/
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Desert Ironwood
http://fireflyforest.net/firefly/2005/06/21/desert-ironwood/
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Desert Flowers Purple
http://onestonedcrow.blogspot.com/2009/09/desert-in-flower.html
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“The only thing that keeps us from floating off with the wind is our stories. They give us a name and put us in a place, allow us to keep on touching.” – Tom Spanbauer
Night sky
December 31, 2011 § Leave a comment
Night Sky, Arches National Park BY aaronthompsonphoto Aaron Thompson Photography
http://www.etsy.com/listing/89326438/night-sky-arches-national-park
“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss it you will land among the stars.” – Les Brown
The stars are the jewels of the night, and perchance surpass anything which day has to show. A companion with whom I was sailing one very windy but bright moonlight night, when the stars were few and faint, thought that a man could get along with them,—though he was considerably reduced in his circumstances,—that they were a kind of bread and cheese that never failed.” — Henry David Thoreau, ‘Night and Moonlight,’ published in Excursions, 1913
SouthwestDesertLover 