Gallery Above (Click Through)
When I need to get away, the California Coast is always there for me.
Big Sur is the crown jewel of California. A rugged stretch of land touched only by a two lane highway and the burly Pacific. The loneliness, isolation, and power of standing on the edge of the continent humbles me. Gives me calmness. And through that, strength.
Robinson Jeffers, the foremost poet attached to the area, said Big Sur aids in the “rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence,” admiring Big Sur’s ability to make human hubris obsolete in the face of imposing beauty. The burgeoning revival of the eco-poet and our return to nature will mirror the opinion of Jeffers.
“It is time for us to kiss the earth again,
It is time to let the leaves rain from the skies,
Let the rich life run to the roots again.”
“But for my children. I would have them keep their dis-
tance from the thickening center; corruption.
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster’s feet there are left the mountains.”
In today’s American climate, I desire to move away and reconnect with what has been here much longer than we have. The earth. The rocks. The sea. The animals who have adapted to their environment, as opposed to making their environment adapt to them. Anything forced is never forceful (Swami Parthasarathy).
“Here was life purged of its ephemeral accretions….Here was contemporary life that was also permanent life….”
Carmel Point
The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses—
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rock-heads—
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.—As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.
—Robinson Jeffers
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