Ten years from now

Being my father's daughter, i'm not much for celebrating an "arbitrary calendar event", but i do like reflecting and looking ahead on New Year's Eve. Last New Year's was different from any other. It was fun but not terribly reflective. I can't remember the one before that (except that there was no alcohol involved, so i'm not sure why i can't remember anything!). The one before that was spent singing, catching up, and doing dishes with long-ago friends and per former-life tradition, having pancakes, strong coffee, and fresh juice for breakfast. This New Year's Eve i'll stay up reflecting and playing games with friends, and then i'm heading to a soulcare/solitude retreat (paradoxically, with a friend! Ha ha. We're carpooling.) I'm looking forward to beginning the new calendar year this way.

Someone asked me today what i dreamed: where would they find me in ten years. I didn't know i knew until i answered. This dream is one i'm writing down, and i may even put it somewhere to remind me on distracting days. It will be interesting to see if it changes or if it sticks around for ten years.

Favorite places

I went to the Wild Animal Park with two of my former students this week. One of the baby elephants is only a month old! I think we watched it and the other baby elephants for almost half an hour.

Isn't it adorable? She can completely walk under the adult elephants in the enclosure without even grazing their tummies.

Tradition

Since moving to California, my family's Christmas day traditions include going to the beach Christmas afternoon. After stockings, breakfast, story, and presents, we pack up cold cut sandwiches, marinated artichoke hearts, Christmas cookies, a flask of coffee, and picnic plates, and off we go. The first years we went to Huntington Beach just north of the pier, where there is lots of secondary seating (landscape-speak for things you can sit on that aren't specifically chairs). The past several years we've gone to Corona del Mar. The weather is lovely (i even wore shorts one year) and the sunset is always beautiful. Many other people have the same idea and stroll around enjoying the weather and the view. Over half of the people there have dogs with them, and i usually end up half-wishing i'd received a puppy for Christmas. (Half wishing. Someday, but not yet!)

We stayed, as always, until the sun slipped behind Santa Catalina island.

here is where i am for now

Who says we have no fall color in southern California?

This is the white-blossom crape myrtle in my parents' backyard.

And a close-up of the same tree, with a vine weaving itself in.

Merry Christmas

This entry is a excerpt which i love, because it restores my hope on bad days and reminds me of the source of my hope on good days.

"Jesus bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God 'by whom all things were made.' His body and brain were those of a common man; His personality was the personality of God, so far as that personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a kind of demon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man so good as to be 'like God'--He was God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not commonplace at all. For what this means is this, among other things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death--He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it worthwhile....

....So that is the outline of the official story--the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull--this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and the hero.

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to be called exciting?"

Sayers, Dorothy L. "The Greatest Drama Ever Staged is the official Creed of Christendom". In Creed or Chaos?, 6-9. Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1999.

Califonia Scenario

Our last field trip for the quarter blitzed all over south Orange County. We started at Roger's Gardens, a lovely nursery in Corona Del Mar. It's one of my mom's favorites: a bit spendy, but everything is beautiful there. They have interesting specimen trees (i want a Harry Lauder Walking Stick) and the plants aren't laid out in boring flats; they are arranged tastefully. Being near Christmas, all the colors were silver-sage, pink, red, white and green, not my favorites, but our prof took us there to see micro-design and planting arrangements--a very nice idea.

The next stop was the Irvine Water Management District and the Sea & Sage Audubon duck area. That was a quick stop and parking was amusing. We followed the visitor signs, honest, but somehow all eight cars were parked somewhere we should not have been, and we got locked in, and probably heads rolled. (Not ours--security's). (The construction guys didn't do a good job directing us past rumbling lorries, either. Yikes!) I want to go back with my bird book over Christmas break, although it seemed to be mostly coots.

The final stop was in Santa Ana near South Coast Plaza. This is a square in-between several large office buildings, and the designer is Isamu Noguchi. It was a cold day, and dreary. One of my classmates said that in summer, it's quite hot--the walls are white, the ground is stone, there is little shade, and the albedo of the surrounding buildings is high. There are concerts there during lunch time sometimes too...a mini Pershing Square, albeit more successful? I want to return and observe more here too. I got lost looking for this California Scenario: there are no signs, and parking is limited and expensive. No one knows it as "California Scenario" either--but a man from whom i asked directions did know of it as "the Noguchi place".

I thought this tree looked like a dear, but what's with the picket fence? That made it a bit kitschy.

This is the mountains, whence our water comes. It trickles down the groove in this sculpture and meanders through the plaza. There are foot bridges but, if you aren't wearing heels and are feeling bold, you can leap over the stream in most places.

This is Los Angeles, which sucks up all the water. The stream disappears under Los Angeles to the right. Notice the grid line? That's supposedly a reference to city streets. Bad Los Angeles (whatever). The scale is hard to detect: the sculpture is about ten feet high at the peak.