Mental health break – on hold with Delta.

by Mike

Who drew these lines across southern France, the lonely stone fences that melt in the woods, miles from homes, centuries from birth? This web holding trees to the floor of the forest, it twists and it crumbles, it picks itself up. Bordering paths that I’m sure are forgotten, they frame ruined houses which years ago burned. (more words and pictures)

by Mike

My job was to prune every grape vine on the farm in Coaraze. Having all this time doing a task I understood pretty well, I decided to try something I called a “working meditation,” an effort at intense awareness while still doing my job.

I discovered that words are the vessels that allow my mind to wander. I kept having to remind myself, “No words,” and I’d be brought back to the vineyard from wherever I’d been thinking about.

These are pictures of grapes that didn’t get harvested last October. They were scattered at the feet of some vines.

(more photos)

by Mike

I went for a frosty walk one frosty morning. Here are the frosty pictures. This is from the olive farm (the same one we worked on last year) above Nice.

These cold mornings tended to precede gorgeous days.

(more photos)

by Mike

In the town of Pino we came across an abandoned church monastery thing. Azure found a door whose lock was unlocked and she pulled hard and it opened and inside was an old iron cross.

by Mike

Philippe said, “This is a dream, realized.” He was referring to his life. There were five things: “Hunting, guns, motorcycles, cheese, goats.” That was his dream, and he achieved it without the help of The Secret.

I asked if he used dogs for boar hunting and he said he doesn’t – he prefers to hunt quietly at night.

“That’s intense,” I said.

In a random little town on Cap Corse there was a random little street whose trees had blue & white Christmas lights. Under the trees were a few old cars and every night we drove by we thought, “we’ve got to take pictures of this.” We finally did last night, here are the results:

That last one was a new technique – I took a long exposure and at the same time zoomed out. Voila.

Today’s Route

by Mike

I saw on the map that there are some dolmens around here. Dolmens are ancient rocks carved or constructed or something. When I asked the guy at our hotel about them he said that the site was still being processed (the media is intense for a small island, so every subject is well-covered) so there’s no signs and no roads to get there.

At the place closest to where we thought the dolmens were Azure saw a dirt road that went under the highway, so we pulled off the road and parked by an empty beach and walked it. There’s this shrubbery all over the island called “Maquis.” It’s a combination of 7 or 8 different plants that kinda go wherever nothing else is. It’s fragrant, very distinct and subtle. It’s the scent Napoleon talked about on his death bed. We walked the road up a ridge through the Maquis, trying to get a bearing on where the dolmen might be. No luck up the first ridge.

There was another road that lead around another side of the mountain. We hiked high on this one, up until the road ended and the Maquis closed in and the only tracks on the ground were sheep tracks. And even those started disappearing until we weren’t on a trail anymore.

Even if we didn’t find a dolmen, we satisfied my curiosity about walking through the Maquis. From the top it looks like a very even green carpet on the mountains. One of the bushes is rosemary, which is in bloom right now. The flowers are violet, so in the pictures above you can see Azure walking through a whole acre of blooming rosemary.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOLAbaxItqY&hl=en&fs=1]

We had a portrait day, so we’re going to each post some of our favorite pictures of the other person.

I think it’s easy to find pictures of Azure because she’s often doing something like this:

But it’s not always like that. Here are some of my favorites from the little sunset photoshoot today.

I know it seems like we didn’t do a lot today, but we did. We drove all the way from our gite in Ota up to the north coast. We stopped in Calvi for lunch and found a place in Ile Rousse that we really like. We walked through the city and climbed up to the old tower. But in between, we took hundreds of photos of each other. Mike had more opportunities because I fell asleep on his lap on the boardwalk (Susan and Arnie, I almost have enough material for the calendar next year)(everyone else, Mike’s parents made a calendar of family members sleeping–Arnie and I made up the majority of the calendar).

Mike is hard to capture on film. When I try to take pictures of him, he gets really tense and either looks extremely militant or makes a really fake smile (see below)

or will have his eyes closed or something else equally unflattering…

I have taken some good ones of him throughout the trip though. I have learned that he sometimes looks normal if he is doing something else, or I can catch him off guard, or if he does his fake smile and I tease him (tub shot).

The side view has typically been the best for him, since he doesn’t have to look at the camera, but today I figured out a new trick. Get him talking about the things he likes best — scooters, riding scooters, Katie (the beagle next door to us in Seattle).

And of course, his all time favorite topic of the trip. You can’t tame it, but you can capture him saying it.

the H-A-W-K!