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Urban Wildland: Spring Romance

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/06/spring-romance.html

Now also at Urbanwildland.org. There's a place where bleached grasses form a ridge when viewed from Koenigstein Road looking south over the valley in which Highway 150 is enfolded. Nowhere, from this viewpoint, is the road visible but instead, the top third of the north face of Sulphur mountain rises up beyond the grass like a dark scenic flat so that the foreshortened view is of blonde on black. Wild Brodiaea (sp. jolonensis. To suggest that England is a palimpsest maybe a truism but the image of the mu...

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Urban Wildland: Sci-Fi Metaphysics

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/07/sci-fi-metaphysics.html

Now also at www.Urbanwildland.org. We are children of the Big Bang. In a helplessly atavistic recapitulation of the Universe's creation story, Humankind has now developed an algorithm by which the little world that we know on Planet Earth, trapped within its fragile atmospheric skin, is exploding. In other Philip K. Dick related news, we ask the question,. Does the Elfin Forest Dream of Crystal Rain Drops? Although the author's prescience in his classic novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Failure...

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Urban Wildland: Enchanted Islands

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/07/enchanted-islands.html

Now also at Urbanwildland.org. A long, thin, dove grey cloud hung over the Nordhoff ridge, floating like an island in the sky. Enraptured by its color, morphology and juxtaposition I stood and watched as the water vapor slowly changed shape: a shoreline receding here, a mountain swelling there and an islet calving from the mother island's northern promontory. In those last days of June, it was preternaturally still, unusually humid and very warm. Many have written of our relationship with the natural wor...

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Urban Wildland: Sex and the City

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/06/sex-and-city.html

Sex and the City. Now also at Urbanwildland.org. In the scrublands between Sisar Road and the braided, currently dry creek bottoms that cross the Ojai Oil Company leases that back up to Koenigstein, there's a spot where nothing grows. Until now. Now, it is transformed by an efflorescence. Stands, in spring, at the very edge of species transgression. Paris began as an Iron-age fishing village founded on the banks of the Seine by Pictish bands of Celts. It was a significant outpost of the Roman Empire ...

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Urban Wildland: Pyramid Power

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/06/pyramid-power.html

Now also at Urbanwildland.org. A field of flowers is a powerful thing. Heading up the hill, my vision was filled with the miniature pointillism of the alpine meadow that rose up before me. For a moment, I was lost in the celestial matrix that the tiny flowers described. Asters, phlox, and stonecrop, it seemed, reflected some heavenly order, as though in floral reification of the ancient cabalist's dictum of as above so below. And sage ( Artemesia tridentata. A few short centuries ago, the high prairies w...

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Urban Wildland: Wild America

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/08/wild-america.html

Now also at www.urbanwildland.org. Having gotten these two declarative paragraphs out of the way (but to the theme of which I will return) I turn now to the existential matter at hand. The condition of my Life. Right. Now. I am entirely clad in polyester: perhaps for the very first time. I have long been a fabric snob - certainly since I was dressed as a child in sample clothes that my aunt liberated from Harrods'. Where she was the buyer for their children's department. Petit Bateau. Shot from Apollo 8&...

urbanwildland.blogspot.com

Urban Wildland: Memorial Day

http://urbanwildland.blogspot.com/2015/06/memorial-day.html

Now also at Urbanwildland.org. Patrick Leigh Fermor observes in the first volume of his pre-WWII walk-across-Europe trilogy, A Time of Gifts. 1977, the old gods of Germany were driven out by an Englishman, St. Boniface, just a century after St. Augustine had arrived in Kent and performed a similar purge of the ancient Druidic deities. The France that I have experienced over the past week, speeding through the vastness of its depopulated countryside now devoted to large scale arable farms, remains studded...