Egret

A very strange day today, oddly reminiscent of childhood summers in Southern California, the Oakland Berkeley Hills firestorm of 1991 and maybe even the apocalypse, although realizing that I really didn't know the real meaning of that word and looked it up to discover that it has nothing to do with heat, fire, drought or even the end of the world. Translated literally from the Greek it means, "a lifting of the veil, revelation or disclosure of something hidden. It must be the movies that have convinced me that it means armageddon…hummm, wonder what that actually means?

But I digress. It is hot, and what appears to be overcast is actually smoke giving everything a reddish tinge and the smell of burning. Having lived in  California foothills all my life, I am used to the inevitable summer wildland fires, but the extreme dryness after four years of drought gives waking to the eerie red glow a new sense of urgency and premonitions of disaster.

I don't see how anyone living here could continue to deny the fact of climate change or fail to move with all due haste toward finding solutions, not just on the individual level but as a society. If we don't, our granchildren will be facing armageddon, the final war between human governments and God - Revelation 16:14

The egret stalking through the dry grass was blissfully unaware of such thoughts, being fully occupied with where his next bite was coming from. He lifted his slender black legs one at a time in slow motion, lengthened  his slender elegant neck and snatched something out of the grass in his slender yellow beak. It was poetry in motion.

The extra photo is a shot of the large sign posted next to the dam at Spring Lake Park. If you can read the small print, it speaks for itself…in two languages….