Connections - Three Moments

We've had forest fires up and down California, and the air quality of the Bay Area has dropped. There are no fires in sight around the San Francisco Bay, but it doesn't matter. Air quality has been declared unhealthy today, and that is unusual. Here's the sunrise recently in a few locations.

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The view from Corte Madera across US 101.

Here's how polluted the sky is, the sun is still red well after sunrise. It doesn't come through well because of camera limitations, but the Sun looks like something from a Coleridge poem as it hangs above the San Rafael Bridge.

The sun is placed behind a set of lamps, and it reveals the hazy orange quality of the sky.

And now for 3 moments.

1. I was driving around dawn in metropolitan Larkspur. The radio was tuned to KCBS in San Francisco, which reported the status of the Big Sur fires as I drove past that black Prius. Big Sur is far south of the San Francisco Bay Area along the coast, but it isn't considered part of Los Angeles.

I instantly pulled the car to the curb. Why?

2. This car has a license plate BIGGSUR. How strange, to see a Big Sur license plate around 6am as the radio reported on the firefighting at Big Sur.

So, why is this more than a simple coincidence?

3.  In a strange way, you are looking at Big Sur. This thick gray air contains smoke which drifted up from the wild fires around Big Sur.

In other words, we have Big Sur on a plate, Big Sur on the airwaves, and Big Sur in the air. And that is an example of how everything is connected.

 

Comments

[Teresa H. S.]

I really love your thoughts here. I came upon your website quite by accident...or was it really an accident?

[Max Clarke]

Thanks for noticing the connections.

It would be glib for me to write that nothing happens by accident, but its also true that many events do seem to operate according to their own invisible script.

Makes one wonder about how much free will we have. To paraphrase Spinoza or one of the European heavyweights of philosophy, we must act as if we have free will.