Restoration In Progress

I honestly have no idea how to catch up here and relay to you the glorious things I saw and did while up at Mammoth over the weekend through Tuesday.  I guess I'll just have to post some of my favorite photos -- these are a few of the ones I took on my iPhone, and none have any sort of editing or filter on them. I also used a Canon, but I have hundreds and hundreds of shots that I need to go through, so I'll leave you with these.

For all of you who say that "you'd miss the seasons" if you lived in California -- well -- we have the seasons.

Here's fall:

The shot below was taken just off the highway where we pulled over when we saw an enormous herd of sheep. Within moments, a real shepherd (I'm SERIOUS!) came whistling down a path with a real border collie who literally shepherded the sheep away from the fence and the highway and back into the field.

My favorite place was the aptly named "Convict Lake." I think the story goes that a group of convicts escaped from a Carson City prison and ran here. The lake is at well over 7,000 feet elevation and achingly beautiful. I hung out for a while while my photographer friends wandered about taking their spectacular pictures. I took off my socks and hiking boots at one point and waded into the icy water. I lay under the tallest trees and looked up to the end where the branches hit the sky. I have always loved to feel very, very small.

It rained hard and the winds howled one night and all the next day. That was exhilarating -- to feel the rain on my face, to feel chilled and wet and no longer parched.

I saw six rainbows, too.

I have a thing for trees that stand alone in vast empty spaces or along ridges. They speak of accommodation and a fierce loneliness.

It snowed, too, and while I'm not a fan of the white stuff, there was something exhilarating about moving from yellow to white in the space of an hour. The eastern Sierras are really just spectacular.

I could just post pictures all day, but really what I want to say is that I am so grateful to have the opportunity to travel in the great state of California, to be outside wandering around so many spectacular vistas and to be restored by friendship, love and the earth.

photographer: Carl Jackson

O, would Carlos Danger be John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

I took down my snarky post of Anthony Weiner the other day, despite the intelligent discussion it fostered. It made me want to take too many showers, squirm too much in the proverbial seat. We doth protest too much. I put it back up this morning, though, because -- what the hell?

This morning, I found the following poem on my poetry calendar, written by an English poet, satirist and courtier of King Charles II's Restoration court. The Restoration was a period in the seventeenth century where the king and his court reacted to the constrictions of the Puritans (and Oliver Cromwell) with hedonism and -- well -- merriment. Charles II had no legitimate heirs, but he did have more than a dozen illegitimate children by scores of mistresses. John Wilmot, on the other hand, died of venereal disease when he was 33.

The poem is startling rich, hilarious in language -- at least to me -- and not a little shocking. It made me wonder whether the lurid texts and photos of today might be the "poetry" one reads in the future.

Reader, what say you?

The Mock Song

I swive as well as others do,
I'm young, not yet deformed,
My tender heart, sincere, and true,
Deserves not to be scorned.

Why Phyliss then, why will you swive,
With forty lovers more?
Can I (said she) with Nature strive
Alas I am, alas I am a whore.

Were all my body larded o'er,
With darts of love, so thick,
That you might find in ev'ry pore,
A well stuck standing prick;
Whilst yet my eyes alone were free,
My heart would never doubt,
In am'rous rage, and ecstasy,
To wish those eyes, to wish those eyes fucked out.

John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester
(1647-1680)