Burberry

New York City, New York

We arrived in New York, by rail, the day before Christmas. Everything looked bright and gay in our streets. It seemed to me that the sky was clearer, the air more refreshing, and the sunlight more brilliant than in any other land!
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), U.S. suffragist, author, and social reformer. Eighty Years and More (1815-1897), ch. 6 (1898).

5th Avenue

New York City, New York

A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
John Ashbery

Santa Barbara Mission

Santa Barbara, California

Each flower is a soul opening out to nature.
Gerald De Nerval

Santa Barbara Mission Tomb

Santa Barbara, California

released from rock
a stone lotus
seated and still

for centuries
a candle
silent circle

legs folded
head still
arms cradling

emptiness

Alan Altany

East 56th and Lexington

New York City, New York

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

Park Avenue

New York City, New York

Santa Barbara Paseo

Santa Barbara, California

Golden Gate Casino

Las Vegas, Nevada

Home of the best $5.99 prime rib dinner.
Kevin Sporleder

Kodak Theatre

Hollywood, California

Santa Barbara Mission

Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara Mission Roses

Santa Barbara, California

Fremont Street Xmas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Santa Barbara Mission

Santa Barbara, California

With the help of Spain's soldiers, the Indians were herded to the sites of the missions. Once there, they became slaves, directed by the friars to build the missions. Once within the mission boundaries, they were forever forbidden to leave.
Elias Castillo
"The dark, terrible secret of California's missions"
San Francisco Chronicle
Monday, November 8, 2004

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

Beauty is everlasting
and dust is for a time.
Marianne Moore

Venetian Gondolas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Getty Center

Los Angeles, California

Getty Center Flowers

Los Angeles, California

Fremont Street

Las Vegas, Nevada

El Capitan Theatre

Hollywood, California

Bellagio Xmas Tree

Las Vegas, Nevada

Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard

Las Vegas, Nevada


Night is a curious child, wandering
Between earth and sky, creeping
In windows and doors, daubing
The entire neighborhood
With purple paint.
Frank Marshall Davis

Bellagio Cranberries

Las Vegas, Nevada

Bellagio Xmas Tree Ornaments

Las Vegas, Nevada

Fountain

Santa Barbara, California

When you hear the splash
Of the water drops that fall
Into the stone bowl
You will feel that all the dust
Of your mind is washed away.
Sen-No-Rikyu

Floating Cranberries at the Bellagio

Las Vegas, Nevada

The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking
new landscapes but in having new eyes.
Marcel Proust

Bellagio Skater

Las Vegas, Nevada

Silver bells, silver bells,
It’s Christmas time in the city.
Ray Evans

Vortex

Santa Barbara Paseo

Santa Barbara, California

Bellagio Xmas

Las Vegas, Nevada


I heard the bells, on Christmas Day,
Their old, familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet
The words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Santa Barbara Botanic Garden

Santa Barbara, California

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The ghosts of her
Departed leaves.

The ground is hard,
As hard as stone.
The year is old,
The birds are flown.

And yet the world,
In its distress,
Displays a certain
Loveliness----
John Updike

Paris Lamp

Las Vegas, Nevada

Santa Barbara Paseo

Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine, and more complicated that we can conceive.
Goethe

Santa Barbara Mission Gate

Santa Barbara, California

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity,
a silence that is a fount of action and joy. It rises up in wordless
gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all
created being, welcoming me tenderly, saluting me with
indescribable humility.
Thomas Merton

Las Vegas Xmas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Las Vegas is Everyman’s cut-rate Babylon.
Alistair Cooke

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

With a few flowers in my garden, half a dozen pictures
and some books, I live without envy.
Lope de Vega

Santa Barbara Paseo

Santa Barbara, California

And Joy is Everywhere;
It is in the Earth's green covering of grass;
In the blue serenity of the Sky;
In the reckless exuberance of Spring;
In the severe abstinence of gray Winter;
In the Living flesh that animates our bodily frame;
In the perfect poise of the Human figure, noble and upright;
In Living;
In the exercise of all our powers;
In the acquisition of Knowledge;
In fighting evils...
Joy is there Everywhere.
Rabindranath Tagore

Bellagio Xmas Flowers

Las Vegas, Nevada

Bellagio Xmas

Las Vegas, Nevada

Paris and Aladdin

Las Vegas, Nevada

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.
Lucille Clifton

Eiffel Tower

Las Vegas, Nevada

...we were at last in Monte Cristo’s country, fairly into the country of the fabulous, where extravagance ceases to exist because everything is extravagant, and where the wildest dreams come true.
Willa Cather

Pier

Santa Barbara, California

Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment - a little makes the way of the best happiness.
Frederich Nietzsche

Santa Barbara Mission

Santa Barbara, California

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.
Simone Weil

Getty Center Garden

Los Angeles, California

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,to put a hand on the brow
of the flower,
and retell it in words and in touch,
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing.
Galway Kinnell

Paris

Las Vegas, Nevada

Manzanita

Santa Barbara, California

Santa Barbara Mission Rose

Santa Barbara, California

What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.
Virginia Woolf

Bellagio Xmas Ornament

Las Vegas, Nevada