Escape to the moon

Sea and clouds

Call me crazy, but I love beaches in winter.  This is Centerport Harbor, in Centerport, New York, where a friend and I took a long walk yesterday and watched some fascinating clouds roll in.

(If any of my geeky followers know the name of this specific cloud formation, I’d be interested; Google Image yielded no clear matches.)

Fall wanderings

Grand Ferry Park in Brooklyn, near the studio where I was working the last week of October.  The smokestack is all that remains of a 19th-century molasses processing plant.

View of the southern tip of Manhattan, from my first ever ride on the Staten Island Ferry.

Reflections of sky and trees.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all…

Yes, that is a tomato plant growing out of an elm tree.

I love you, Central Park.

Winter sunset

It’s always hard for me to be back in the Kansas City area, because every time I’m back, yet another piece of prairie or woodland has become a strip mall or zombie clone subdivision.  It’s part of the reason I only tend to visit once a year for the holidays, and don’t think I could ever bear living here again.

A few mornings ago, we saw a family of five deer go bounding over the fence and through the backyard of my childhood home; that would never have happened when I was growing up, but they’ve lost so much of their habitat, they have nowhere to be.

This is the view westward from my mother’s front yard, though, and it hasn’t changed much since I was about 12.

Today it’s back on the Greyhound bus for New York, and I’m trying not to think about the fact that I won’t see a bed again for more than 36 hours.

Nerd fun at the NYPL

I just got home from the New York Public Library, where I went to hear to Josh Ritter, Wesley Stace, and Steve Earle discuss the relationship between music and writing.  All three were lovely and marvelously intelligent, and though I went to hear Josh (of course), I think it was Steve Earle who said the most intriguing thing of the evening:

“What separates us from animals is not opposable thumbs; it’s that only humans make and consume art.  That’s what separates us from the beasts.”

And while I don’t want to denigrate the quality or value of animals’ emotional lives…I suspect he may be right.  I don’t tend to believe that humans are vastly superior to the rest of the animal kingdom in morals or capacity for empathy or emotional complexity…but I cannot think of another species that produces and consumes art for art’s sake.

Discuss?

Sights that make me feel like a lucky human being

Sunset over the far west side of Manhattan, from our rehearsal studio last night.

Tenacity

This is what it looks like.

Morning fog

From my last morning at our rehearsal retreat in Tivoli, NY before heading home.

After the storm

The storm seemed to be over by late afternoon on Sunday, but power still hadn’t returned.  We’d had rehearsal as planned the day of Hurricane Irene despite the lack of a music source or coffee.  That evening, the company members were creatively assembling an elegant dinner for eight out of cold leftovers, in a dark farmhouse kitchen by candlelight, and I was out on the back porch snapping pictures of the sky after the hurricane.

A couple of us were chatting when I spotted the rainbow through the trees and we all dashed for our shoes and cameras to run out to the neighboring field for a better view.

The morning after the storm….

Believe it or not, this place is real.