This week Kloncke is gonna be pretty foto heavy. Because I’ve been spending time in pretty places. Thinking a lot about land, too, and my connection to it (or estrangement from it).
Here, some shots from an amazing afternoon at Panther Beach, on the outskirts of Santa Cruz. Some of the best of Northern California, in its own way, I think. One of the things I love most about spots like this is the visible age and marks of motion in the stone. The oldness of the cliffs, and the patterns of waterwear and erosion. Makes me feel patient and slow and humbled. Kind of like being among elder redwoods.
Kloncke 
These photographs are stunning. And the people in them, too!
*You* are stunning! Let’s have an adventure soon. <3 Hope you're feeling less sick, dear sickling.
katie! you and ryan deserve big ups for being such peaceful people – peaceful in that you assert positivity against negativity through erosion rather than explosion. i have been walking and “sitting” with each of you individually and as a couple. each time i do, i know that i am walking with giants of wisdom, sitting with oceans of serenity. every time, i feel more aware of my roots in a philosophy that flows from nature’s processes.
the whole coast of northern california teaches by example: the ocean’s depth summoning great power generated by steady winds across immense distances, delivered in waves of energy that reverberate through coarse sands that sigh echoes massaging the walls of stoic cliffs. i dont like to personify nature, but drawing analogies can help us observe it and learn from it. might the depth of the pacific ocean be like our mysterious minds? the constant winds that generate waves be like the events of our everyday lives? the waves themselves like our emotions which build and crest and crash? the raspy sands these crashing waves move to sound, be like our verbal expression? the walls of cliffs like the world outside our thoughts that we ought not expect to change just because we feel, just because we speak, any certain way? (are there analogies for the sky and the sparkle it imparts upon the water’s surface?)
i enjoy the swirling activity of the coast. its crucial to be reminded that all this goes on without an overarching purpose, or perhaps, despite the purposes social life demands of us. we are drawn to nature like maroons – running from an abusive civilization, as proletarians robbed of everything but our ability to work and think. the very adventure is tinged with the sadness that this beautiful scenario is still this world – a world of slaves of the wage and cannibal capital that excretes pollution upon the ecosystems of social and natural life.
doesn’t this life of slavery that the wise strive to escape (slaves may have the freest minds; minds ever focused upon freedom) place upon us the demand to revolutionize the social order, and to aim toward the end of achieving human equilibrium within itself (classlessness) and with nature, toward a reintegration of humanity with nature. i think this blog and those who participate in it yearn to build a society that allows human activity to – like the ocean’s relationship to the coast – be guided not by productive imperatives (as it is in capitalism), but by harmless interaction. such interaction still would flow, change, evolve (like the coast), but at a rythmn checked by every action’s reaction, in balance, timelessly.
key in this duty of ours is a commitment to our own sanity, building inch by inch the relationships and experiences that bond us in holistic appreciation, so that we humbly may show what the fruits of our political convictions might be. security amidst chaos, clarity through motion, evolution and revolution.
every natural excursion is a broader type of recreation – the recreation of ourselves as agents of recreating the world. the ride there is, like the ride back, taking us in one direction…
toward nirvana, buddhist communism.
zeno that reflection is hella beautiful.
i love this part especially:
(just amending that one word because i feel like folks who live with various types of ‘insanity’ can also nourish their well-being.)
wishing well-being to others, while not in itself a political act, is certainly the foundation for the best sort, i think.
i really appreciate and admire the way that your political work is bound up with your love of people, and of nature. thank you for introducing us to panther beach! and for always sharing so much knowledge with me, about the earth and your experiences of it.