To feel greatly, and understand greatly, and
express greatly, the natural
Beauty, is the sole business of poetry.
The rest’s diversion: those holy or noble sentiments, the intricate ideas,
The love, lust, longing: reasons, but not the reason.

—Robinson Jeffers

What is our relationship with the natural world? Are we capable of admiring greatness and rejoicing in beauty on a daily basis–no matter where we live? Is this admiring and rejoicing the key to everything? Or does it go hand in hand with tragedy? Or hand in hand with a self-fulfilling sort of pereptually crescendo-ing, lovely, addicting sort of bliss?

Do you know where your copy of Cawdor And Other Poems is living?

Tomorrow we head north to Big Sur, Jeffers country (to name one of many writers who loved/lived/visited/understood that particular bit of magic coast). When I stand on the deck of Nepenthe, the Kiva Cafe, the patio at Ventana, or windy Pfeiffer Beach and watch the sun fall—I get it, a feeling of celebrating our big, gorgeous world. I feel tiny, and brimming with hope whenever I gaze at the ocean (instantly mesmerized) from the edge of Big Sur’s California. I feel: the recognition of the transhuman experience providing magnificence for the religious instinct, especially when night swoops in and the stars flicker into reality through the oaks and redwoods—my need (sadly, surfacing when I’m faced with spectacular views and inspiring coastline, yet never when I’m stuck in traffic) to rejoice in nature, because of nature: satisfied.