this washed out of the woods last week:
roots of a redwood
Category: ocean (Page 2 of 2)
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the news makes me want to curl up in a shell.
top dollar or bargain basement?
and this little ad seems so wrong. cheaper than a candy bar. cheaper than a cup of coffee. cheaper than a pair of sox, three first class stamps, or a pack of gum.
I’m working on a new piece about tide pools, or about whatever it is that tide pools are about. In any case, I need lots of footage of tide pools and of tides, coming and going. Yesterday, the shoot was mainly just dealing with technical issues. I walked along a good stretch of shore at Salt Point, looking for suitable locations and after two hours of being knee deep in the icy Pacific, I was ready to leave. I packed up my gear and stood up to leave… and looked over my shoulder at the next rocky pool behind me. There was an anemone, larger than my head, easily the biggest anemone I’d ever seen. Thinking back to the post about the captive anemone, this must have been an ancient individual. I returned today to spend some time with it. Beautiful.
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four of the Collisions
This small stretch of coastal Pacific is part of the Greater Farallones National Marine Sanctuary, and according to the NOAA (National Oceanic & Atmospheric Association), this part of the Pacific experiences three seasons, rather than the four seasons of nearby terrestrial life. They are, with short descriptions: Continue reading
I’ve been working on this piece since late summer, in short bursts in between other things. The pieces were small, at first. They kept curling in on themselves, the curve of the shell quickly resolving into abalone-sized abalone. And the Japanese enamels traditionally used in kintsugi kept giving me crazy rashes identical to poison oak. I kept pushing against the natural inclination of the shell to curl into a finished form. I wasn’t sure how big I wanted the final piece to me, but I knew I wanted it to grow monstrous. Continue reading
weather beaten in Kulmer Gulch
Yesterday, on my drive back to Berkeley, I caught a radio show called “Says You!” It was about language, in the guise of a game show, and it was hilarious. An example:
Q: What is the difference between an obsession and a compulsion?
A: About ten years in federal prison.
The contestants eventually gave a legitimate answer, but the best part was the associative ad lib path to getting there. As with art. A listener had written in asking them to revive a topic from a previous episode based on nautical terms. As part of this, they mentioned that we all gain and lose a tiny bit of weight each day, in the form of salt water, due to the gravitational effects of the moon. This made me feel much better, driving away from the coast, realizing that there was an echo of the ocean inside of me, pulsing in sync with the Pacific.
Growing up on the east coast, high tide was for swimming, and low tide was for searching for animals under the mud and in tiny crevices and trapped pools. In between tides was for all of the above. This is what life is: swimming at high, searching at low.