Photocosm

Time Is Just One Thing After Another

It's a long entry today, my first three-part story, but it covers nearly two dozen years. It has a couple of interesting moments, though, such as seeing the future and photographing the past and seeing the invisible present. That's three.

 

Part One: India And Omaha

Around 20 years go, I flew off to India and visited a guru by the name of Sathya Sai Baba. Had never been to India, had never visited a guru, but the books by devotees were persuasive. He was an avatar, the direct descent of God into human form. He materialized objects, he could dematerialize his body and appear elsewhere instantly, he could bring the dead back to life.

My home was Nebraska, but I visited his ashram with a group from the Bay Area. In many ways, he appeared to be what the books had promised. I saw him materialize vibhuti, a gray ash powder, from a few feet away. He also did other materializations, including a crystal about the size of a golf ball or a lemon. When you see somebody do this at close range in a small room, and slowly for everybody to follow, it's impressive.

The voyage to India was a disappointment, though, in a key area. I met people there who meditated, and their experiences were amazing to hear about, but I never had any inner experiences. I sat one day and tried to meditate on the top of a hill above the ashram and the nearby town. Meditators would sit by a tree there and have deep experiences. I got a sunburn.

On the return to the United States from India, I had a couple of dreams that indicated I wasn't a devotee of Sai Baba, not by the Indian standards. His path wasn't mine. When I returned to my home in Omaha, Nebraska, it seemed India was a mistake. I had quit my job the previous year and was unemployed when I visited India, so the price of this pilgrimage was high.

But a few weeks after I returned home to Omaha, I started having meditation experiences. It was like somebody throwing a switch. The energy began flowing and I had months of experiences with bliss and visions and inner sounds. I had tapped into a source of pure energy that magnified my awareness.

It was great, but it made employment impossible. When you're in a state of bliss, it's hard to participate in the marketplace. My savings ran out, but then I started having dreams and visions concerning the Bay Area. I sold the furniture and my books and my large record collection, then left Omaha. I drove to California in 1990, wandered up the coast from L.A., and arrived here on June 24th. It was a huge leap into the void.

 

Part Two: Mill Valley

I lost track of the Sai Baba organization shortly after moving to California, though. Probably for the best. It's a devotional path known as bhakti yoga, and I'm not the devotional type. Nevertheless, whenever he was in the news, I paid attention. The rise of the Internet wasn't kind to Sai Baba. Videos appeared at websites which showed trickery behind the materializations, and former devotees started to level charges of sexual abuse at him.

So it interested me to read a few weeks ago that Sai Baba had been admitted to the hospital. He had organ problems, blood pressure problems, the kind of issues somebody in his 80s might experience. The daily medical bulletins were serious, they used "critical" frequently, but they also mentioned the medical team's competence and the sophistication of his treatment.

 

And then my car died when I was parked near the Richardson Bay Bridge in Mill Valley.

That was a week ago, Saturday the 23rd. I had parked to eat breakfast, but the car never started again. Fuel pump failure. As I waited for some mechanical help and ultimately a tow, I remembered something like this happening back around 1997. My van died at San Francisco International Airport, and I learned a few days later in a letter that my grandmother had died the same day. I forget the timing, but she died maybe in the same hour or even within minutes of the van failure.

So the question came to mind: was this an omen that Sai Baba would die soon?

 

I took some photos as I waited for the mechanic. That's Mt Tam over Mill Valley.

 

That crow almost hit the lamp post! Whew, that was close. You read about crow vertigo all the time.

Back home after the fuel pump failure -April 23rd-  I took a nap unexpectedly in the afternoon, waking around 6:30. And then I phoned my mother to wish her a happy birthday. I did not know it at the time, but Sathya Sai Baba had just died.

 

Part Three: Berkeley

 

Walking home this afternoon from work, I came upon a batch of vinyl records. They had been discarded next to a dumpster, free record albums.  I haven't played records in maybe 25 years, but I had to flip through the selection like a music lover at Tower Records on Sunset Boulevard.

 

There was an album by Rod McKuen, Time Of Desire. I had not heard Rod in decades. Way back in the 1970s, I bought an album of his that he made with Anita Kerr, The Sea. However, his art was an acquired taste. He wrote poetry and read it, and what you bought was a vinyl record which played poetry with music.

There were a couple of dozen records at least in the stack, but Time Of Desire is the one I slipped into the backpack.

 

So, why did I bring Rod McKuen's Time Of Desire home with me? I don't have a record player, but do you see the answer on the list of songs/poems?

April Twenty-Third. Rod McKuen had recorded a poem, April Twenty-Third.

That was strange. April 23rd was my mother's birthday, and Sai Baba died on the 23rd of April, Pacific Coast Time.  Sure is a funny universe, isn't it?

And there's one final funny moment to report. I looked up Rod McKuen online back home. Today is the birthday of Rod McKuen. I found his Time Of Desire album today and he was born today, in 1933 in Oakland. The album had been left two or three blocks from Oakland.

Happy Birthday, Rod McKuen. You picked the right day to be born.

 

 

 

 

 

Latitude 41

The most infamous address on the worldwide ocean just might be 41 degrees north and 49 degrees west, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

There's another well-known navigational coordinate, Latitude 38.  That's roughly the latitude of the San Francisco Bay Area, my home area. 

 

The most historically important part of the 38th parallel is shown here, thousands of miles west of California.

The Korean War in the 1950s ended with a split Korean peninsula. North Korea and South Korea were divided at the 38th. This Wikipedia photo shows us the start of latitude 38 in Korea. The land on the left side of this line is South Korean, and North Korea gets the space on the right, plus a couple of soldier legs.

  Back in the Bay Area, where do we see latitude 38?

I shot this photo of the Golden Gate Bridge around sunrise around 2009. San Francisco isn't at the 38th, it's at 37 degrees north. But you see those hills north of the bridge? They're not at 38 degrees, either.

 

But soon after you cross the Golden Gate Bridge driving north, you don't cross the 38th parallel. Here's the famous Rainbow Tunnel which runs through the Waldo Grade. You enter this tunnel right after you drive north from the Golden Gate Bridge, and when you come out of the tunnel, you're not at the 38th parallel.

So, where the hell is latitude 38 in the Bay Area? Does it even exist?

Here it is, on Novato Boulevard in the city of Novato. It isn't a cow town, by the way, they just have an extremely long street named for the city. Starts in the city and ends way out in the country. These cows are enjoying their lives because of the positive energies which rise through the earth on the 38th. They liked me and enjoyed having their photos taken, and they invited me back anytime.

 

Here's the main building at Skywalker Ranch. It's on the 38th, also. George Lucas doesn't live there, by the way, but the Joseph Campbell-Bill Moyers interviews for The Power Of Myth were conducted there. I have my own photos that I shot at Skywalker Ranch, but this Wikipedia shot is okay.

 

Here's the best address on earth if you're interested in latitude 38 and Jedi knights, and I'm sure you are.  I shot this driving in the fog years ago. Take that right turn coming up, you'll enter the main gate to 3838 Lucas Valley Road. It's part of the Lucasfilm operation, they do animation work there.

 

The hillside view opposite 3838 Lucas Valley Road, the reason I pulled over for a shot in the fog.

 

A helicopter I photographed, and that's a dam next to Stafford Lake in Novato. It's on the 38th.

 

Here's the sign for Paradise Foods, in Novato, shortly before the grocery opened. A bit of symbolism, maybe? Paradise on earth, heaven on earth, etc. And lying literally on Latitude 38.

Finallly, this rainbow is over the 38th, also shot in Novato.

The latest cover of the esteemed sailing magazine, Latitude 38. It's published out of Mill Valley, California, which does not lie on the 38th parallel. But hey, it's still Mill Valley.

Does something, by the way, seem odd about that photo? Is the sailor in striped yellow not wearing his life vest? I'm sure he's got it on, so this is the wrong time to believe my lying eyes.

 

 

When I was young, books about sea voyages excited me. The great novel by Jules Verne, Mysterious Island, had beautiful illustrations of a yacht passing volcanic peaks.

The men who crash-landed on the mysterious island in their balloon had nothing when they arrived, and yet they soon built a boat for their escape. Very impressive, but these guys would soon meet Captain Nemo, and he built his submarine the Nautilus from nothing but spare auto parts.

This map shows Lincoln Island, where the book's characters crashed their balloon. They named it Lincoln after President Abraham Lincoln. Jules Verne gave the coordinates of it as 24 degrees south and 150 west. Nothing actually exists there, but the imaginary lat-long places it in the New Zealand area.

 

The  magazine Latitude 38 was a pleasant discovery when I moved to the Bay Area. Now and then, you could read articles about sea voyagers who had reached Tahiti or other volcanic islands, and their photos would remind me of Jules Verne.

Today, I was driving 101 South through Marin County. There was an attractive lake right off an exit in Novato, so I curved off the freeway to look at the water. 

 

And then I saw it, minutes later, the license plate LAT 38. What a great discovery!

Had never seen this plate before, but I had thought about it when I read issues of Latitude 38. In fact, whenever I picked up one of the free copies of the magazine, I would start looking for the plate that had to exist, LAT 38. I'd scan traffic for LAT 38 in all the great seafaring cities of the Bay Area: San Francisco, Oakland, Sausalito, Berkeley, Tiburon, Stockton.

A fit man in his early 50s or so was on a cell phone, standing next to his Latitude 38 car. His name was Joe, and he was very generous with his time. Joe is an avid sailor, and he showed me photos of his wind-blown adventures. He also had a photo of his racing sailboat.

 

Was Joe connected with the magazine, Latitude 38? Nope, just a coincidence.

He produced a copy of the latest issue, and now we have Lat 38 and Lat 38 on Lat 38.  Could we have any more 38s in the photo?

Yes, the little sticker on his plate, the one in the upper right corner with the 2012 expiration date? The serial number beneath 2012 begins with two numbers: 38. So, without a lot of contrivance, we have 38/38/38/38.

And there's another 38. When I cropped and created this photo, it was saved/created at 38 seconds. Cute, but my Mac gets the credit for that one.

So, with 38/38/38/38/38, could we have any more 38s in this photo?

No.

 

 

Which brings me back to the original subject, Latitude 41.

Joe probably didn't know this, and I didn't, but my chance meeting with the owner of plate LAT 38 came on the most memorable date in maritime history, aside from military engagements. 

Today in 1912 the Titanic sank.

 

Very early in the morning on April 15th, 1912, the RMS Titanic submerged involuntarily a few hundred miles off Newfoundland. It was found decades later by a French-American team, including Robert Ballard. The location at its depth of 12,500 feet was 41 degrees north and 49 degrees west.  While the Titanic was hundreds of miles off the coast of North America, its latitude 41 degrees was the same as -let's say- Cape Cod.

How synchronistic, then, to discover and photograph an important latitude plate on this big latitude-longitude day.

Synchronicity happens all the time, though. Just last month,  I photographed a Honda Civic with its license plate PACIVIC. Obviously a Pacific license plate. Which is related to the great Pacific tectonic plate that connects Japan and California.

And when had I had photographed that mobile Pacific plate? At 9:46 am, twelve hours to the minute before the great Japanese earthquake near Fukushima and its nuclear power plant.

But that's another story.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doggone It...Not

 

I was driving the wicked streets of Albany, California, not to be confused with a town in Georgia where I fell from a tree and broke my wrist. I was kid back then. Years later, after it healed, I'd mention it on the golf course if I hit a bad shot. Bad left wrist, you know, tightens up sometimes when I lead the clubhead through the impact zone. And then my mom informed me I had broken the right wrist. Oh, never mind.

 

Near the Albany Twin theater, what should I spot but a green van with MILO in big letters. I didn't know what Milo meant, but I knew it meant something special today.

 

A woman got out of the van, her faithful dog sat on the driver seat.

She explained that the Milo Foundation rescues animals and finds homes for them. They have a website where visitors can see their latest arrivals and the wish-list of stuff they need to keep the organization running.

 

 

I told the lady from Milo why I visited her van, maybe the first time I've seen it.

Garrison Keillor has a website for his podcast, The Writers Almanac. I listen to it each day. The website lists important dates in literary history, such as the birthday of Charles Dickens or the publication of a great novel. I recently noted that Garrison's website mentioned the birthday of mythologist Joseph Campbell.

 

This is a golden representation of Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama). Yesterday, The Writers Almanac informed us that April 7th was the birthday of Buddha. That seemed odd, but I figured they had checked the calendar. I took a photograph of the web page and the Buddha birthday item. Of all the historical figures, I would most have wanted to meet the Buddha.

The next time I visited the website, they had removed the notice of Buddha's birthday. Premature. Just a mistake, Buddha has to wait till May for his observed birthday. But you never know, what if they got it right? He was born so long ago, there isn't an accurate date of birth. At any rate, I enjoyed reading the story before they took it down, and I'll enjoy reading the item again in May. For writers, Buddha has two birthdays in 2011.

 

Meanwhile, we have this important work of art, which I told the Milo lady about.

As reported at The Writers Almanac today and accurately, the Venus De Milo statue was discovered on April 8th.  The year was 1820, and a farmer discovered it on the Greek island Melos. The statue was already missing its arms, the farmer wasn't an animal.

The statue of Venus De Milo was acquired by the Lourvre in Paris. Each day, thousands of visitors look at this statue, which has influenced innumerable artists in the last couple of centuries. The young visitors used to ask about the statue, "Where are her arms?"  These days, they ask, "Where are her tattoos?"

Anyway, it seemed a nice coincidence, the Milo van and the Venus De Milo discovery.

 

A few minutes later, I drove 4th street in Berkeley and noticed a license plate, DOG GONE. I didn't get the connection at the time, but now the plate is a caution sign.

How wonderful it would be if every dog had a home.  As the bumper sticker says about pets, DON'T BUY - ADOPT.

 

P.S. from April 9th:

An idea came to mind today, the Venus De Milo statue was missing her arms, but the Louvre saw the beauty and "adopted" her.