John & Anne Wiley

Sometimes I rode the big bike like a rocket, even though it was heavy for my young age and lacked any gears to ease the climb. Other times it was a glider, riding invisible slopes high in the air as I whirled and soared. Life has been like that it seems, with periods of full-blast effort and times of coasting quietly along with a serene smile.

Today I’m thinking about flying slowly and quietly along our delicious SB coastline as another form of “coasting.” Scenes like this one from UCSB to the mountains just glide before the eye on such flights.

7530 UCSB to Mountains

Among a delightfully endless parade of very different but equally soul healing scenes, a form of time travel sometimes emerges. Like this view of a place where family and friends gathered years ago to help us launch a new phase of life.

7537 Gathering Place

There’s a magic in seeing such gathering places and focal points in life while coasting. A surreal quality as if time is but an illusion, and in fact everything is right now in this timeless moment.

Connection seems to be very important in this phase of my life. Closeness with friends and family, a marriage founded on Commitment to Connection, and predictably: Internet. It seems that when we’re without full internet access for a time, life is quite different. We do have decent internet on our “large” screen Droid X phones, but that’s still a pretty limited form of connection in the net sense. Blog posts don’t tend to happen, and even less likely would be anything added to my Photo Page. But it’s not just output, because many of the connections we have are via Internet so with limited or no net access we lose track of some friends and family. Paradoxically, a few friends and family prefer txt messages so with any cell service we still have connection with them. I’m working on setting one of our phones up as a wifi net hotspot, so we’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, here’s a completely different kind of connection.

7738 Connection With Beauty

As we flew over Santa Barbara at sunset tonight, we felt a deep and colorful connection with beauty, each other, our home town, and ourselves. Looking at this representation of Connection just now, I breathed a deep and nourishing sigh. 🙂

Both pix I chose for today’s post seem to have immigrants on top. First the church in the upper Montecito Village that looks like it has walls three feet thick. In this pic you can see they’re pretty much standard walls, but the recessed windows give the effect of a centuries old adobe with massive walls.

7367 Walls & Roof

If you click to see the larger version you can make out the worker on the roof who’s wearing a hat of the sort favored by local migrant workers. Today’s other pic strikes me like an impression of Disneyland. Maybe the “colonial” look, or the tidy and symmetrical landscaping, or the color scheme.

7373 Fantasyland

If you click this one to see the larger version, you can make out another migrant worker at the top doing something with his pickup truck. After presumably working in or around this manse, he’s turned attention to the aging vehicle that takes him to a very different part of town.

There’s something about flying over scenes like these, noticing something, snapping a pic, and then looking at the full-size version days later. Often there’s something I hadn’t noticed, or couldn’t even see from the air, that explains what caught my eye or moved me to snap. Sometimes there’s some detail more interesting than the overall scene, that was invisible from the air (like the two people in these pix). Now and then there will be a combination of overview and detail that adds greatly to my enjoyment, and an example is this second pic. I love the impression and feel evoked by the mansion and estate, and the contrast provided by imagining a guy who helped create and maintain that opulence but can’t afford a reliable work truck. Guess I’m officially a Liberal, whatever that means. 🙂

I’m going to toss in one more pic I like from that flight, of a shirtless guy in a boat looking at the seals on the buoy just outside the Santa Barbara harbor. Does this (or the other two) evoke anything for you?

7385 Buoy Toy