Guess Who's Back

Right. So it's been about a year since the last post, and before that another year, and before that about four years. I've decided to cave in to the overwhelming popular demand and resurrect this little corner of Cyberia. I'm going to shift focus in A Little Light Writing away from exclusively language and photography, and make it more of a place I provide updates to the one or two people I know want them.

Why?

I quit Facebook over a year ago, for a number of reasons -- not least of which was the sour feeling FaceBookLife had begun generating.

I'm also currently on an Instagram cleanse. I had started an account to showcase my photography (go see it! @yash.holbrook). Which was fine, but two things happened: 1) I began taking more photos with my phone than with my real camera, and 2) I wasted a lot of time scrolling through my feed and those of others. I'll eventually go back once I've broken the habit, but for now I'm just trying to be bored -- i.e., not tickle my eyes with little squares, and not thinking of things I see in terms of whether it would look good as a little square.

But I'm still taking pictures I would ordinarily share on FB or IG, outlets I've now cut off. So I will start using this blog as that outlet. So let's start with my morning's ride to work through my Stuttgart forests. In particular, a misty sunny October morning at Bärensee.

(A favorite picture spot)

I'll take this opportunity to highlight these are not iPhone pictures.

Sunday Morning in Hawaii (Feb 2018)

As an east-coast November kicks off, I find myself sometimes drifting in my mind to the Pacific. Here's where I tend to go:

One February Sunday, a gray and forbidding morning, I got out the door even before my first coffee. My aim was to grab a cup at the Island Brew Cafe on the marina, and go watch the waves rolling into Sunrise Beach. This being a Sunday, formal “sunrise” was already in the past, but the overcast made the point moot. I packed a camp chair into the car, put on some water shoes, and headed out.

When I got to the water, I grabbed the chair and planted it in the sand. There were only a few shore fisherman on one side of a berm, and just me and the waves on the other.

The surf was wild. The evening before, I had noticed the most energetic wave action crashing at China Walls, and apparently the churn was still on. The air was thick with sea mist. I looked west and saw the looming hulk of Koko Crater, a greenish gloom against the pewter sky. The top of the crater seemed almost disconnected from the earth, cut off by the whitish salt mist.

It wasn’t windy, but the waves were piling in and piling on, crashing into each other before beating onto the rocks. The air was visible up and down the beach, but not if I looked straight out. I could taste salt on my lips. I sat and sipped, watching the turmoil as the waves broke and pushed into the rocky tidal pools a dozen yards from me, then sluiced back out through the ragged crannies.

My coffee was finished, but I sat and watched. I’ve found that, despite telling myself it’s time to move on, I can't tear myself away from the water. My daughter once called the rolling surf mesmerizing, and that’s exactly what it is. It casts a spell that you don’t want to break. Turning your back on the surf is hard.

After 45 minutes, I walked barefoot into the tidal pool directly in front of me. I egg-shelled over the slippery, eroded volcanic rock into the clear pool. The cold shock of the first contact phased quickly to inviting, and my feet sank into in the sand. Up to my knees in clear water, I waited while more pushed into and out of the pool where I was standing.

It took me another half hour to slowly pull back, imagining weirdly that part of me was sluicing out with the water as it rushed away from the shore.