Filoli gardens

A beautiful California Saturday was spent exploring this national historic estate: The Filoli Gardens. Snuggled away in the Woodside hills, the 600-acre estate has a sprawling 43-room mansion, surrounded by a series of wonderfully designed and painstakingly manicured gardens. Walking through the rose garden, with a myriad different varieties of sweet smelling roses, all in full bloom was indeed a most delightful experience. As if this treat of nature were not enough, there was an art exhibition too, and I am told a Jazz festival is coming in summer! I highly recommend a visit to this estate, which offers nature hikes as well...I shall stop here with my advertising efforts for the gardens and conclude with what struck me the most from the visit.
The original owner of the estate had chosen the name Filoli as an acronym of sorts from these three guiding principle he'd lived his life by.
'Fight for a just cause, love your fellowmen and live a good life.'

Wonderful, eh? :)

Patience Taught by Nature

'O dreary life!,' we cry, ' O dreary life!'

And still the generations of the birds

Sing through our sighing, and the flocks and herds

Serenely live while we are keeping strife

With Heaven's true purpose in us, as a knife

Against which we may struggle. Ocean girds

Unslackened the dry land, savannah-swards

Unweary sweep, hills watch unworn;and rife

Meek leaves drop yeary from the forest-trees

To show, above, the unwasted stars that pass

In their old glory. O thou God of old!

Grant me some smaller grace than comes to these;-

-But so much patience as a blade of grass

Grows by, contented through the heat and cold.

-Elizabeth Barret Browning

Riding into the rainbow...

Somehow I never understood the gloom that Monday mornings are popularly credited with. At any rate, I cannot imagine a morning, be it any morning, beginning with anything but an utter astonishment for a world created anew; for the beauty that lies ahead in the day, waiting to be unraveled. Oh! For mornings! Everything sparkling under the radiant sunshine, the gift of another day to be lived and learnt from, the pure joy of being! And oh! Indeed what joy it was to reach the Palo Alto Caltrain station this Monday to find the full arch of a rainbow over the train tracks. I could only marvel at it in utter glee. It was truly a wonderful sight, and my phone camera did no justice to it. Yet here it is.

I've never been one to like cold rainy days or grey skies. But I must admit, yesterday evening as I waited for the evening shuttle, I was stunned by how beautiful the sky looked as the heavens prepared to pour down upon us....the silvery grey of a dozen clouds gathered together, the evening sunlight gleaming just beneath, slowly receding from the horizon...the trees bereft of their leaves, bare, like ivory against this backdrop...
So stark and yet so arresting in its beauty...ah! creation! what a marvel it is!

Last Friday when I left work, the sprinklers were just starting up, to lavish its showers upon the manicured lawns outside the mini-Biotech park at Seaport; the grass green as ever, the sun beating down fiercely, the leaves still sitting pretty atop the trees. Well, see you Tuesday, I thought to myself.
The new week stole upon us during the long weekend and has also nearly ended. And what do I see this evening as I rush to catch the shuttle? The little green mound on which we wait for our bus, is hidden under a carpet of brilliant golden yellow leaves, maple-like, small and large, crisp and dry. For a moment I was startled. They were just beautiful! Like someone had burst open and sprinkled a bag of crepe stars over the green turf for it to dazzle and play in the sunlight.
Fall is here!

The great grandpa tree has been felled... In it's place now lies earth that has been dug out and mounds of wet mud scattered around. Scraps of wood clutter the path where the grass had been. The whole park seems to be in mourning; the squirrels must sorely miss their giant wooded play ground with it's sculpted trunk and serpentine branches, thick and strong, and the foliage dense and inviting; the dogs haven't come out to play, the birds haven't chirped as much. Perhaps it is all in my imagination? It must not be. The emptiness cries out aloud as I turn the corners of the library on my evening walk, I have to force myself to look away and content myself with the other trees, some younger, just beginning to establish themselves into the ground around the periphery of the park, and others a little older, their leaves downcast and sorrowful; the torchbearers for future generations of children to shade themselves under, birds to teasingly chase scampering squirrels down from and for wisdom to provide to the tender little grass-lings swaying gently in the wind.
No, there shan't be that waft of eucalyptus to tingle my senses with the breeze. There will no longer be the live mural behind the windows of the library in the children's corner. The sunlight streaming in now, unobstructed, seems a harsh reminder of what we've lost. A monument that endured for a century despite what killed it from within, an atrocity we wreaked on it. Yet forgiving and ever gracious, it stood by and smiled upon us gently. Just like a grandparent does a mischievous grandchild...
Dear, dear great grandpa tree, we miss you!

Cavernous wonders

The weekend of the 4th my friends and I visited Lake Shasta and the Lassen National Park. A most vivacious group, crackling with wit and curiosity, warmth and good humor, made the weekend all the more memorable.
Day 1: Friday, the 4th
The cool morning air gave way to a toasty mid-morning by the time we reached the lake campgrounds. Parched expanses with sparse vegetation tinged yellow and brown stretched for miles around. Rings of variegated earthen colors baked out from where the water had evaporated encircled the lake. I thought to myself, what an unremarkable scenery...
We went about setting up our tents. One in particular proved our undoing. An irregular hexagon, if you will, was hoisted trying every combination of A-A and B-B, mostly getting A-C and B-A for the first 20 minutes. Finally, we got our geometry in order. Hurrah!
As I patted the dust off my hands and stood back to admire our handiwork, it struck me that here I was, a grown adult, about to 'live' in my tent-house! Okay, let me back up a bit. As a 5-year old my greatest desire was to own a tent-house. The kind my cousin had, and invited me over to have tea in every weekend, painted to look like a red brick structure, with yellow window panes and a little gray chimney. A make-believe world of our own, complete with a house, front and back yard; miniature cutlery, imagined friends, a battery-operated 'real' dog and time that stood still for us. Perfect. Almost. I would still go home and wish I had one of my own. Petty, I say. Yet.
And now, 20 years later, I stood outside yet another tent-'house', real friends, wilderness all round and a starry night that was sure to come and sighed with contentment.
At any rate, we made quick time to get on board the boat ride at the lake, to be followed by a quick bus ride to the Shasta caves. A full five minutes after we had entered the cool, dark interiors of the cavern, hundreds of thousand years in the making, I realized, that it was not the patchwork scenery or the lake itself that was to be the highlight of this day, but these mysterious caves.
A narrow path had been made for tourists, slippery in some places from the drops of water that fell intermittently. Stalactites in various stages of formation hung low. From thin and hollow-like, wafer thin 'straws' to waxy cones, to entire columns where stalactites and stalagmites met could be seen. As we made our way further interior and upwards, careful not to touch anything, lest the oils from our skin interrupted the calcite crystal formation, every turn of the corner brought an amazing new display; ceilings of broccoli, shallow craters or 'peanut brittle', clay icicles, ragged jaws and stony daggers.
Very low wattage lights, placed in nooks and crevices, let the light bounce off the surfaces and play with our imagination, lit the way up. The tour culminated in a grand finale: a discovery 'room' with a balcony with the the most stunning formation of 'drapes'. A continuous arrangement of sheet-like stalactites, starting off wavy at the top ending sharp and straight when viewed from the side. They hung like curtains of some ancient alphabet engraved into the rock, curling into intricate designs and patterns.
A truly magnificent display of what nature had quietly designed while we went about our business in the hub of civilization. There was stunned silence as we marched out of the caves and back into a shock of sunlight, and onto the bus. Truly marvelous, and utterly awe-inspiring.
The short trek up from the lake, where the boat ride had ended back up to the main recreational area was sufficient to tire us, especially with the sun beating down fiercely. What was supposed to be a short break turned into an extended halt, with some taking naps, a few going nearly delirious over a delicious trail mix made all the more so with molten chocolate, and a few others restless to get a short hike out of the way. Eventually, the heat just got the better of us and we decided to drive instead towards Mt. Shasta, secretly harboring hopes of catching the fireworks somewhere along the way back.
An hour into the drive and the sun had mellowed considerably, and bright flowers dotting the way inspired us to pull up at the earliest suggestion of a trail head and get on our feet. The trail we chose was a short one, with only a modest gain in elevation but gave us glimpses of the beautiful Mt. Shasta off in the distance. The snow- capped peak would play hide and seek with us, sometimes hidden by a cloud, sometimes smothered by smoke, at others glistening white and glorious.
The hike back down was spent debating whether or not Qabuli channa would be made for dinner. Quite hilarious in retrospect, considering we were all utterly exhausted and happy to chew on anything edible, that we ended up eating Maggi. (Yes, much to the disappointment of the food crew, who'd planned a semi-barbecue over camp fire.)The food, plentiful and almost excessive as it was, was only incidental, as yet another bright new day awaited us, to be begun at the crack of dawn.
We had picked a tidy little spot, off the road on a slight incline, with a lake-view close by. So, in the morning, just before we left the campgrounds for our next destination we took off on an ever-so-mini 'hike'. From where we were parked, at a short walk down the road where it bent further into the camping area, was a grove of Manzanita trees and some wild bushes. Walking down through the mesh, we could see a clearing, offering a view of the lake. The last look at the lake was indeed more remarkable than my first one had been. The muddy shore was lined with trees, some lying prostrate with jagged branches, jutting out over the waters. A stark scene it was, with a raw appeal nonetheless.
A beautiful stop by all means.
Onward ho!