We are officially in spring now, though two nights ago I drove home from a gathering around 11 at night, an hour’s ride, in some of the stormiest weather I’ve driven in in years. Huge gusts of wind threatened to hurl me from the bridge into the bay, thick curtains of sideways rain pummelled the car, water pooled and then rippled in deep black sheets across the freeway, and time and again I went to turn my wipers up higher only to find they were already on high, though I could barely see in front of me. By the time I got home, I could barely breathe for being tied up in knots the whole way.

Still, I love a good storm. Especially if I can sit home safe and secure, maybe in front of a fire, hot cup of tea in my hand. Which makes me think of all the people in the world who are anything but safe, anything but secure. Japan. Libya. Haiti. The man I watched bed down in a very small alcove in SF the other night, me sitting warm and dry in my car waiting for my daughter to get out of an appointment, him wedged between the wall and his shopping cart. I can’t even imagine what it must be like to not have a soft and warm and dry bed to come home to each night; what it must be like to search the rubble day after day, calling my child’s name; quaking to the drone of the jet fighter planes as they move closer and closer.

Today I wanted to write a little ditty about spring and then post some of my latest pictures. I wanted to get up early, take a shower, get dressed, get moving. Take some photos when the sun comes out. Instead, I sit nearly paralyzed on the sofa, thinking about depression; thinking about the inequities, injustices, down right unfairnesses of this thing we call life. And the juxtapositions that exist side by side day in and day out: Beauty and ugliness. Chaos and order. Light and dark. Sorrow and joy. Sun and rain. Feast and famine. Love and hate. Gratitude and bitterness, forgiveness and anger.

Spring arrives and with it day after day of stormy weather. Still trees and flowers blossom, the hills turn their rich, forest green, the days stretch longer as each one goes by. I watch the thick gray clouds move in one minute, the sun peak through another, birds circle, trees sway. I wait for the impetus to move, for the internal overcast to lift. I tell myself to stop fighting it, to relax, to let go into it. That this current inertia will pass when it passes, just like this series of storms; I reassure myself that spring will come, it will come because it always comes, year after year after year. It will because it has; because it must.

The last time I drove up to Sonora, a couple of weeks ago, the almond orchards along highway 120 were in full bloom, row after beautiful row. Since then I've started my second and my third Photoshop eCourses. Here's some results. I am falling more and more in love with textures... and each time I work a photo, it's like the clouds part and the sun shines, even for just a moment, and with it, at least for that moment, the beauty shines, and with it, all kinds of possiblity.