Thanksgiving. 2006 edition.

Desert Campsite View
Nancy and I headed out Wednesday for the west. Through Texas, following 180: from weatherford to MINERAL WELLS, Palo Pinto, Breckenridge, etc.... finally our first camp, pulled into Monahan Sandhills after dark, that beach in the desert plains... where we rested weary on the sand. Next day, Thanksgiving, taking back roads, first to Guadeloupe National Park, where the Pine Canyon campsites were full, we headed on to Hueco Tanks, where we finally got a good place to pitch tents.

Leaving Sandhills

Boy did we bring enough stuff!!Crammed into the Honda wagon, tents, backpack, clothes bags, food food food, doggie gear, cooler full, maps, books, lit and science!, enough to spend a month it seemed.

Then back to Guadaloupe, where the kind camp hostess, who had fallen in love with Megan, Nancy's noble poochie, had a camp site for us, on top of the ridge with the view above all around.... so happy, we...

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Nature's beauty all around...This is my Father's world for sure, and mine too!!!....The Guadaloupe Mountains were this massive reef rising out of the off-shore reach of the Permian Sea. This was some 250 million years back. Time spans we cannot image. This was before there were dinosaurs. There were sponges and clams and nautilus and jellies and the like leaving calcious remains stacking up hundreds of feet, just below the waves...just off the land... after many changes... the Permian Sea went away, the continents split up and re grouped and the Dinosaurs came and went..... The flowers and bees and furry mammals the size of mice, stayed on, and became cows and men, and orchids and daisies... with another sea, more erosion, forces pushed up the reef as a long block of mountains, with beautiful El Capitan at the southern head, a ship's prow! The desert came and went and came back!! CHANGE.... the only constant. The Atlantic divided us from Europe, the Pacific floor came under us, and docked island on our west coast, fiery volcanos rose, leaving the Rockies and the Sierras and leaving the Cascades.... 10 million years, something else will be here. The whole thing will become melted down by erosion, one rock, one grain of sand, one river of mud at a time..... The Grand Canyon will disolve, and run down to fill in the Baja gulf, and on and on and on....But. Our little window on time... this beautiful earth we are privileged, yea, lucky to enjoy as it is right now. (wish I could have seen Mt. St Helens before it blew in 1980!!! for example...)

BUT. Can see it now before it blows again!!!) All you have to do! Open your eyes!!! Get on the road!!!! Stretch your mind!!! Open you heart!!! See what it is all about... Life like a Dome of Many Colored Glass, stains the white radience of ETERNITY..... said Shelley..... From our first breath to our last, life is a journey. Each of us is a book. Others can read it. Some can write it all down. But those we share our life with, our soul with, yet, our vision, our understanding, in this great and glorious library called Earth... full of glory and sadness and joy and sorrow in equal measure.... we live, we learn, we enjoy, we cry... life is to be lived!!!!

Walt Whitman spoke and wrote it all..... Meville sailed the seas.... Darwin, too!!!! Galileo saw the Moons of another world (and was arrested) Aristotle and Linneaus who continued to give names to the natural world..... John McFee telling us how California was assembled!!!!

As my pal Bill says, "the unlived life is not worth examinating", an Ambrose Bierce style epigram on Socrates, "An unexamined life is not worth living" or something...

Good Morning Earth: How Are you??????

Megan