Snows Over Silicon Valley

It has been a crazy year, weather wise.  Here, in Silicon Valley, it has manifested itself in fairly prolific rains, which can be a good problem to have, for an area that has gone dry a number of years recently.

In a sense, I've been in a dry spell, creatively.  Not that I'm not pursuing creative endeavors, far from it.  However, my endeavors, of late, have been pretty singular.  My cameras have been cooling off, I haven't written poetry lately, and I haven't worked on any short fiction.

The fact is, I have been focused.  I have been so focused on this one project, that I've deprived myself of some of my other creative loves.  A novel I have worked on for many years continues to need TLC to be truly complete.  Finding where it went wrong, which is really a story longer than the novel itself, has been a journey unto itself.  The things I'm learning go deeper than just this one story.  There are elements of my vision for story telling that are wrapped up in this, and in a sense, there are elements of who I am, here and now.

This weekend, I broke away from that novel, and started a short story, and just in the development of a fresh story, I am starting to see the things I'm learning.  Remember the movie The Karate Kid, where Daniel does menial tasks and doesn't understand how they relate to karate?  Miyagi then show him just how much he has learned.

Maybe it's a bit like that.  Maybe not, but it sounds good.

Whatever the point, after finishing the rough draft of this new story, I went for a coffee with my son Daniel (not a karate kid, as far as I know) and then came back to the house.  On the way, the hills near my house peeked from under rich clouds to show a fresh coat of snow.  We do get snow on those hills, but not usually this much.

I grabbed up my camera, and went to Baylands Park, and shot some photos.  Nothing all that special in the narrative of the photos, but a space in time.  I spoke to a few people in the park about the remarkable weather, and the beauty of the day.  I basked in the sun and cool.  I hung out with some geese.

That novel really does need to be finished.  The puzzles within it need to be solved so I can put it to rest, and feel that I did it justice.  It inches ever closer.

But today reminds me that sometimes we need to take a break from the things we use to take a break from our day-to-day lives.

Did that make sense?  It did to me.  I think.

Anyway, I hope you'll enjoy these pictures of a space in time.

Happy Sunday from Silicon Valley.