Beauty

We went to Orinda, near the Oakland and Berkeley (East Bay, baby!), and we got a whole slough of pictures from our friends the Bensusens. Rea Bensusen went with us to New Zealand on our last trip and now we have the pictures to prove it!

Anyhow, right now I am living in Carmel, CA. It is one of the most beautiful places in the world, although the more I live in different places, the more I realize that beauty is so relative. If one keeps an open mind, there is intense beauty to be found everywhere. Cities like New York mingle the strange beauty of urban landscaping with pockets of exposed nature. In NYC, this can be seen in the jagged rock formations of St. Nicholas Park and Central Park, or in the Bronx, near City Island. And of course, New York has urban sanctuaries of culture, pockets of thriving subculture and its incomparable diversity on display in every corner of the city. Meanwhile, Carmel, which has very few of the urban charms of New York, does have the cypress groves of point lobos, the moody Pacific with its constantly rolling fog and churning waves, the gulls, cormorants, herons and other birds crowding the water - a cornucopia of sea life; Then there are the ingenious twists and turns of highway 1 and the magnificent homes and concourses that make this area a hotspot for the rich and famous. And that's just coastal Carmel.

Bottom line: There is a lot of incredible beauty in this country, and I could talk endlessly about all of it, but I wont, because you would get annoyed with me.