Photo Friday - PhotoTrice

Ocean

Once I felt warm moist wind from across the South China Sea on my face. It was a thick substance with the smell of salt. I lived beneath a volcano in a place that no longer exists. It is Strange when a part of your past, a place where you walked can exist only in memory.

Now I navigate an inland sea long evaporated but still visible by what it left behind. The air that blows against my face is a desiccant with the delicate aroma of desert flowers sage and mesquite. My ocean is vast with turbulent waves but only memory of moisture.

Vacation Snaps

We get away from our day to day lives for a few days or a week. In a short time we relax and our inhibitions fade. What a wonderful feeling of freedom. We can enjoy what the world has to offer in our own good time. Our young selves emerge into the warm summer light. We capture moments to recall when the sun fades to winter.

Wilderness

Leaning Rock, Grapevine Hills, Big Bend National Park

People sometimes seek out wilderness for the demands it makes upon them. For the exercise of personal responsibility it requires. Wild undeveloped places allow us to use our evolutionary gifts.

Most of us live in cities where the natural environment is controlled as much as possible. About the only things uncontrolled are weather and geological processes. Wilderness is out of our control. We encounter wild places at our peril.

Quite large areas of the planet remain as wilderness. That does not mean that any part of the world is truly unknown. Satellites measure and catalog the earth in great detail. Still, in spite of our technologies wilderness exists unmodified by humans.

Being in the wild gives me with a feeling of exhilaration. Some of my earliest memories are of times spent in the mountains with my grandfather. He gave me a great gift of respect for the wild world.

Under Leaning Rock, Grapevine Hills, Big Bend National Park