New Year at Point Lobos

New Year at Point Lobos



"Not Man Apart" is one of the three "Sierra Club Ballantine Books" I had purchased at our local library "Book Sale" many years ago. The other two books are "Gentle Wilderness" and "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World".

This now out-of-print book, "Not Man Apart", from the 1965 Sierra Club's Big Sur/Point Lobos photos by various photographers and poetry by Robinson Jeffers, has been my favorite "green earth book".

Accordingly, "Not Man Apart" means that nature is not a part of man, but that man is a part of nature.

On this New Year's early morning, we drove to the scenic Point Lobos State Natural Reserve from our Palo Alto home. It was an easy, relatively short (an hour and a half) and pleasant drive despite the fact that it was cold and cloudy.

Point Lobos is just south of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, at the north end of the Big Sur coast of the Pacific Ocean.

It has long been called "the greatest meeting of land and sea in the world" and "the crown jewel of the state park system."  It is a magnet for nature lovers the world around.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While strolling under the Cypress Grove, I recalled a poem entitled, “Point Lobos Outlook”, written by Jim Powell, an American modern day poet, who had his poetic description of the Monterey Cypress at Point Lobos on the California Central Coast that is known to be one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world:

 

 Persistent at the brink, the cypresses
  lean away backward to receive the winds
   prevailing on this spot, balancing
   resistance and compensation in the open-weave
   basketwork of their limbs:

 weight braced facing a single way
 against an invisible pressure from ahead
   in veering weather and when the air falls quiet
   steadfast in the same stance, a posture of defense
   by success, then habit,

 decides the limits of a life—but Susan, look,
 we are not rooted in one place,
   we are not stuck
   in the identical configuration
   always:

 we can step across
 our shadows
   we can turn
   and rise—

yes,
 that’s right—

and face the light. 

 

 

 

 Yeh Tze