"For a moment everything was clear, and when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life."
Astronomers have peered through a telescope 13 billion light-years into the past and spied a cluster of five galaxies in the earliest stages of cosmic infancy.
One of my daily rambles with the dog takes me past an old horse stable on the edge of Redwood Regional Park. Some of the horses drowse outside in small paddocks, but most are kept indoors in stalls: small, dark boxes with tiny rectangular windows that let in only a single shaft of dusty sunlight. I hurry past the barn, since it pains me to see horses confined this way. Herd animals are made to move. In the wild their foraging can take them miles each day, in the comforting company of other horses. But these horses, like many domestic urban horses, live the majority of their lives confined indoors, isolated from each other by thin wooden walls.
On Thursday, a young gray wolf wearing a radio collar crossed the border from Oregon into Northern California. He is the first wild wolf to set paw on California soil in 80 years. Long may he howl!
Fabulous, speedy, punctual trains that take you everywhere you want to go. 
The look of clay tiled rooftops against winter skies.
The guardian demons in front of the Ninnaji temple in Kyoto. There is an "Ah" guardian and a "Un" guardian; each is one half of a perfect breath. This is Ah.
The elaborate meals I ate at Buddhist temples. Called shojin-ryori, the ingredients are seasonal and entirely vegetarian. While I have to admit I did not love the flavor of every dish, I did love the beautiful presentation and the care that went into the preparation of the food.
A cup of steaming green tea and a chestnut-paste sweet at a teahouse on a chilly afternoon.
Confections counter at a Tokyo department store. Department store basements are filled with the most wondrous food you can imagine.
Fox guardians, or komainu, at an Inari (Shinto) shrine in Nagano. I never did learn the significance of the red bib.
Japanese schoolboys eager to practice their English homework. 
Bamboo trunks as thick and tall as trees.
Maple tree ablaze at Ritsurin Gardens.
A dozen kinds of apples in Obuse.
Both are singleminded in their pursuit of smells. There can be only one objective: Is this edible?
Both spend a lot of time pondering the troubling matter of the mole in the meadow. Methodologies differ.
And both are decorated in complementary colors and patterns. Perhaps the spots are the glue that binds them together.
A winter's afternoon. Through the kitchen window I see a flock of golden-crowned sparrows darting about in the black sage. Strange to think that a handful of days ago I was thousands of miles away in Japan. On the return trip I slept on the plane as it crossed sunken continents and leagues of darkened ocean. To fly is to enter an altered state, a sort of intermission between lives. The oddest thoughts occur to me on airplanes. I find myself slipping into the past. Now I watch Puck the cat sitting on the wall, washing his paws and surveying his realm. The sparrows chirrup. The dog dreams in a pool of pale sunshine on the deck. My husband peels a tangerine, hands me half with a kiss. It was good to go to Japan. But it's better to come home.
Last night I dreamed of a field of yellow flowers I used to play in when I was a child. I walked into the field, and as the fragrance and the color of the flowers filled my senses I felt intensely happy, and at the same time, intensely sad.
Kurt Vonnegut once said, "Life is no way to treat an animal, not even a mouse."
I fell in love with this painting a few years ago when I saw it at the Oakland Museum. It's called "Autumn Journey," by the California painter Ralph Borge, who died in 2008. An elderly woman, wearing her best cloth coat and her Sunday hat, sits alone in a rowboat, becalmed on the surface of a reflective sky. The autumn leaves have begun to fall; a few have drifted into the boat. Lost in thought, she gazes at something beyond the frame of the painting. What could she be thinking, as she prepares to take the first oar stroke? Or perhaps the journey is over, and she has just arrived.
One summer a long time ago, I worked at a salmon cannery in southeastern Alaska. My job was to stand at a section of conveyer belt called the patch table, holding a large pair of scissors and grabbing can after can off the conveyer belt to trim the bits of bone and salmon flesh that jutted over the lip of the can. Grab and trim, grab and trim, 14 hours a day, seven days a week until the salmon run ended.
This fellow has become a regular in the neighborhood. I admire his craggy good looks and stoic outlook on life. I'm always impressed with how levelheaded he is, considering he could fall apart at any minute.
Western black rhinoceros, last seen in Cameroon in 2000. Declared officially extinct November 2011.
Even in California, where the seasons are subtle, we have reds and golds and russets enough to turn your head. The dog and I were walking along a forested path, drinking in early autumn, when I heard the flapping of great wings above me. In that split-second of wondering -- sounds too big for a raven, could it be an eagle? There are no eagles here -- a tree limb smashed down onto the ground a foot and a half from where I stood. The dog yipped in surprise and darted away. 
My first home in New York City was a rambling seven-room apartment belonging to two professors who had gone to England on sabbatical. This couple’s home was the dirtiest place I had ever seen. They were historians, and the history of the past thirty years--the meals they had eaten, the wine they had drunk, their troubles and their joys--could be divined in the dust and the crumbs, in the cobwebs that whispered across the ceilings, in the stains on the kitchen tiles. Every wall was lined with books, every corner overflowed with newspapers and magazines. 
"There is something in the space between what I know and what I am and what fills this space is what I know there are no words for."
After too many ugly episodes of crowd violence, one of Turkey's soccer teams banned men from the spectator stands. At a recent match, over forty-thousand women and children -- not a single man among them -- packed the stands. Mothers dressed babies in the team colors. Women chanted the team's anthems. Instead of hurling insults, the spectators cheered the players. The visiting team got a round of appreciative applause instead of bottles thrown at their heads. Afterward, the players tossed flowers, instead of curses, at the fans. Said the awed team captain, "This memory will stay with me forever."
"Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions," the appropriately named Mr. Lies tells Harper in Tony Kushner's masterpiece, Angels In America. Mr. Lies is a hallucination that Harper has while she's roaming the Antarctica of her imagination. 
"The secret to happiness is being able to let go of your cows." - Thich Nhat Hanh
I remember when I moved to New York City 22 years ago. I lived there for nearly two years. The entire time, I kept waiting for someone on the street or the subway to point a finger at me and announce, "Hey, you! You're no New Yorker. You're from California!"
When I was growing up, one of my favorite books was the novel, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest. The story takes place in turn-of-the-century Venezuela, and it's narrated by a young adventurer named Abel. 
"First I put in emotion and expression. Then I cover it up. Then I put in silence." ~ Moshe Kupferman, painter and Holocaust survivor (1926-2003)
Making a cup of coffee, lingering by the open window, something in the midsummer morning light reminds of someone I loved a long time ago, and suddenly it dawns on me: The past was a day just like today.
