What do these two have in common?

What the great blue heron (Ardea herodias) has in common with the variegated stone and its shadow is that I photographed them both at Muir Beach in California four years ago today. You might also find that the forms and colors of the heron’s feathers resemble those on the stone.

And here’s a relevant poem for today:

“The Peace of Wild Things”
by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Long and slender shadows

In mid-June of 2017 the last stop on our return from South Dakota was at Monahans Sandhills State Park in west Texas. Look at the long and slender grass shadows cast by a morning sun that was at an angle of elevation close to that of the sand slope shown here.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: mountains of sand

To meld last month’s Monday mountain meme with the moment’s New Zealand retrospective (and Lincoln’s birthday, for that matter), here from February 14, 2017 (which adds Valentine’s Day), are two mountains of sand we saw at the Te Paki dunes way up north near the tip of New Zealand’s North Island. The first of the two photographs, while a more-conventional landscape view, might make you doubt the location and think you’re at an oasis in the Middle East or North Africa. You may also be surprised to hear that a stream runs from right to left between the vegetation and the tall dune. This is New Zealand, after all, a land of lots of rain.

The other picture is a closer and more-abstract view that emphasizes the rippled patterns in the sand elsewhere in the dunes. If you’d like, you can contrast it with the scalloped sand on the level dune that represented Te Paki here last year.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Elliot Bay

A year ago today we spent some time at Elliot Bay, 30 km east of Russell in the Bay of Islands. Look at the happy abstractions I found in the beach sand there: flowing water had created patterns that may strike you as more plant-like than the actual plants that ended up on top of them.

The picture below brings you in closer to a portion of what’s above.

Similar patterns recently appeared in the header of a post about a beach in Cornwall, England.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman

Monahans after the rain

When we drove into the town of Monahans in west Texas on June 14th it was too late in the afternoon for us to continue the short distance to the attraction that had brought us there: Monahans Sandhills State Park. We could see that it had rained in the area that afternoon, and what effect that had had on the dunes became clear only the next morning. How differently textured the sand was then from the way we’d seen it in 2014 when we’d visited on the afternoon of April 12th and the morning of April 13th.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Great Sand Dunes

Great Sand Dunes was the third of the four national parks we visited on our recent trip. At 720 feet, these are the tallest sand dunes in North America. In addition to that, they sit at an altitude of about a mile and a half, so when we were there on June 8th we took pity on our poor lungs and decided not to trudge up these mountains of sand (unlike the Te Paki Dunes that are just above sea level and that we’d climbed in February).

The dunes are so high that when you’re close you can’t see the mountains beyond them. The picture below gives you a broader view, made more dramatic through the use of a polarizer to add extra definition to the clouds and greater contrast in the sky.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Te Paki

On February 12th we saw but couldn’t get to some large sand dunes on the opposite side of an estuary from the highway we were on. Two days later on our way to the northern end of the North Island we made a point of visiting the Te Paki Dunes, which with some effort we climbed. Shown here is the most interestingly wind-sculpted section of sand I saw.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: arenaceous* pareidolia**

I don’t want to influence you so I won’t say what I see in this downward view of the sand on the beach at Moeraki. I didn’t see it on February 27th when I took the picture, but only weeks later on my computer screeen back in Austin. Let’s compare visions: voice yours.

– – – – – – – – –

* arenaceous

** pareidolia

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Pale orange sand dunes in El Paso

Speaking of dunes, as I have the last couple of times, I hadn’t known there are pale orange sand dunes on the east side of El Paso (Texas). There are. They made for a pleasant surprise along US 62 on the morning of November 9th last year, when dramatic clouds added to my appreciation.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park landscape with clouds

Southern Utah; October 23, 2016.

© 2017 Steven Schwartzman