Good Friday, 2022
April 16, it was a pretty clear day, windy and a little hazy, not much rain in the second half of spring, enough for the roadside flowers and hillside meadows. I was driving up the 1, I was going to the New Camaldoli service later that afternoon. I got up to around Big Creek and idled around the piney brushy ferric-soiled turnouts there. It’s an especially lush and wild section of Big Sur, on that north slope of Cone Peak’s scalloped arm. At one point driving, dark birds up above I glanced and stopped. Two condors move over the slope slowly twisting and turning with the various invisible rivers of air. I was gathering plants for my dear friend Wyatt to send him dried flora samples of California to allure him out for a visit. I drove back down Limekiln-ways, and took the road up on the east end of Lucia to the hermitage. Pulled over around where that road ridges over the west fork of the Limekiln and the bench that overlooks the Pacific Valley. Three condors way up high over Stony Ridge, a name I didn’t know. Mother, father, child. The brethren of monks began their hymns and mantras, a severely grave homily after the reading of Isaiah 53. In Big Sur, sunlight is either bright tan, glowing sherbet, or quicksilver. The brethren of monks were wearing their bright tan garb.