The right link

ah ha, here's the right link to the rice crop art.

http://www.rense.com/general86/stun.htm

This is cool

http://www.rense.com/general86/stun.htm

Yup, this is very neat. Rice Crop Art. Check it out!

Rain Shadow

This is the background image on my card at the moment (the cropped version, that is)

Just had to say something

Like, I'm home!!!

Hooray!

It has been, and is, a long transition back into life here in VT... But it's great to be here, and it's a great place to live!

Some more landscape and some thoughts

So I finally love it here. It took long enough! Took this long for the condos to melt from view, for the retired brits to not annoy me, i knew i felt differently when I had the thought that this must be a nice place to have a vacation home. What?! So anyway. I´ve been feeling really good lately, happy, excited, pleased with my new skills, ready to get home and put them to work. Really excited for my dad to come; we´re traveling together for two weeks at the end of the program. I feel thankful, lucky, blessed. Yeah, things are good.

Praia da Luz (oceanic amazment and bumming about our culture)

Beach of the light. Today is grey, cool, windy. For two days last week (Tuesday and Wednesday I think) there were 30-40 MPH winds from the ESE which was really riling up the waves, and I only just realized how much the surf changed the profile of the beach. I´d been thinking that I was looking out at the beacj just at high tide, when the rocks are the part that´s most exposed and the sand is underwater, but this morning walking out the beach I realized that about half of the area that used to be sandy (maybe a half mile of beach? or less?) is now bare of sand and just rocks! I walked farther than I intended to because I was seeing this reddish color - what is that? seaweed? - and when I got there, it was about 3 or 4 feet of red bedrock newly exposed. The rocks where there used to be sand are boulders, some quite square, fallen from the cliffs above, some rounded and weathered, ranging in all sizes from an armload kind of size to a pebble. Wha-what?! It´s so different! I built two cairns that looked satisfyingly unlikely, on the edge of impossibly tall, in honor of the power of the ocean to change and shift and shape shift and remain the same... So I guess those rocks were there under the sand the whole time, and now I wonder where the sand went... Will it wash up in Maine? Is the whole beach area more shallow than it used to be? Will more sand fill up between the rocks again with the gentle surf washing it in?

Walking back to come to this cafe here, I walked through a pile of trash left in the sand by yesterday´s sunbathers. Why do people leave their discarded junk on the beach?! Are they too lazy to walk the 100 yards to the trash can? Do they not see any difference between leaving it there and putting it in the bin? I walked past it, annoyed at them, and then annoyed at myself for not picking it up, so I went back and collected it all; as long as we´re stupidly throwing our resources into coke cans, ice cream dishes, take out tins and single use ketchup packets, why not at least collect the evidence of our stupidity in one place and put it out of sight? Throw that shit AWAY, where ever that is. Sometimes I get a very visceral feeling of the proximity of the edge of the cliff that our culture is blindly racing towards. Good luck everyone, do the most you can. Isn´t it obvious that we´ve made some choices with negative impacts on the rest of life, and we need to STOP and change direction? Mid-course correction? It can´t be that hard. Anyway, thanks yall, for doing whatever it is that you do, cause I believe you´re all doing your part, and whatever it is that helps bring a little order to the mad chaos of the era we live in is most appreciated. By me and the rest of life.

More pictures

Mini irises that grow out of really hard clay Moonrise
Castle and wildflowers in Aljezur
Stork nest in a parking lot.
View of Luz, where I live, from the cliffs

Castle in Silves, perhaps 1000 years old, obviously rebuilt a bit since then... some misty church on a hill in Monchique,a mountain town inland from Luz
sunrise from my porch
an almond tree stuck in a wall. Which will win ?

Here´s some more pictures from lovely sunny Portugal. I am in class almost all the time, but there´s been time to explore a little bit of the area. And bask in the perfect weather. Learning massage in this program means focusing a lot on being present and being in my body, not particularly easy for one who loves to daydream, space out, read...etc... it´s easier when I´m in the woods, but I don´t think I´ll be setting up a woods massage practice...although maybe that will be my niche! I don´t know. It´s really good to work on. Awareness. All that.