Every winter mustard plants sprout up in the vineyards in Napa Valley.
Category Archives: California
Another image created on my new year’s day excursion to the coast. For me, this image captures the feel the winter on the coast: cloudy, cold and shrouded in veil of mystery.
Laguna Creek Beach, Part II
One of my new year’s resolutions was to spend more time on my photography so I figured I should start on New Year’s Day with an excursion out to the coast. The scene struck me as very much a January day: overcast, cold and with just hints of sunset color. January is when the lights and cheer of the holidays are forgotten and what’s left is the realization that it’s a long haul till spring.
Laguna Creek Beach
Unlike the cold and foggy evenings of the summer, this September Sunday evening was warm, pleasant and shows the best San Francisco has to offer.
Pier 7 – San Francisco
Grey Whale Cove State Beach is located a few miles south of Pacifica, just beyond Devil’s Slide. I’d driven this section of Highway 1 many times but never noticed the beach. There’s a well-marked parking lot right off the highway but one can not see the beach from the road. There’s a trail and stairs that lead down to beach. Getting down is pretty easy but the stairs and be bit taxing on the way back up.
Gray Whale Cove State Beach at Sunset
Brilliant colors as the sun sets on Pomponio State Beach.
Brilliant Colors
The sun descends, marking the beginning of a long winter night at Pomponio State Beach, just south of Half Moon Bay
Fading Winter Light
As I drove up the beach in Half Moon Bay, I was enthralled by the dramatic light from the approaching storm. Just a minute or two after I created this image, the sky went grey and it started to rain fairly hard
Moments Before the Storm
The Start of the Longest Night
For most people the winter solstice, as known as the official start of winter, is just a curiosity and that often gets overlooked being just 4 days before Christmas. However, Christmas is in late December because of the solstice. The early Christian church placed in Christmas in late December to co-opt pagan solstice festivals.
Almost every human society has marked the solstice in some way. The longest night creates a need for a festival or observance with lights to ward off the darkness. Armed with modern science, we know that the days will get longer again. Empirically, our ancestors knew this as well but I always suspect that they also feared that there was the possibility that days would continue to get shorter and they would be stuck in a perpetual darkness. I suspect many early societies had rituals or offerings to the Gods to make sure the days started getting longer again.
Every year on the solstice, I think about the generations came before us and for 1000s of years marked the solstice. The longest night is a connection humanity’s past. We feel the darkness less in the modern world due to electric lighting. But I think it’s worth it to take a minute and imagine how the longest night would have felt to our ancestors a 1000, 2000 or even 5000 years ago with only fire to ward off the darkness and the cold.