Back from Big Sur and suffering some kind of miserable urban shock as I move from breathing the earthy air of Redwood trees and sea breeze from the big blue Pacific (swelling out from the sharp teeth of the coast like a vast blue bowl upended) to the streets of San Francisco grimy and littered with debris commercial, literal and, most oppressively, spiritual. San Francisco is a great city, as cities go; but it suffers none the less from the sickness that lies at the heart of most urban developments these days. What is that sickness precisely? Ask me another day. . .

A not inconsiderable portion of fun during our retreats to Deetjen's (Big Sur Inn) over the years has been provided by the guest journals in each of the Inn's unique rooms. The books, filled with the mad scrawlings, poetry difficult and sublime, tender words, strange confessions, fantasies, aspirations and general wisdom and stupidity of decades of guests at the Inn (yours truly included), are a joy to peruse. Here's what I wrote this trip (annotations and photos may or may not follow shortly):

11/4/03

Big Sur - Top Antique @ Deetjen's

Note to self:
You don't exist.

A few things that are real:

- These Redwoods dipping their roots in Castro Creek, reaching for the sun and not far short. . .

- Crows punctuating the wide blue sky above Cafe Kevah @ Nepenthe, sudden black dashes alighting to loiter near tables in search of food. . .

- Ladybugs thick upon the Tanbark Trail, so many uncountable millions that soon as the eye perceives their numbers covering the Redwood Sorrel, the fallen trunks of trees, stalks and leaves of all the flora, it seems a single shiny set of red carapace wings is moving there among the Wood. . .

- The jade pool swirling in sea foam @ Partington Cove. . .

- The gentle Green Faerie of Big Sur, even now growing up and under the eaves of Top Antique. . .

- The westering sun, touching a wind shaped Oak with fleeting gold. . .

- The light in my Sarah's eyes and Love above all.

But you knew that already!