Vanishing Landscapes...

Old Mojave Homestead - March 11, 2010

Click on photo to enlarge - © 2010 jim otterstrom

Peggy watches the sun set from a crumbling Mojave Desert homestead along the Palmdale Road near Victorville, California during one of our rare road trips.

The picturesque old stone houses and wide open vistas in this part of the Mojave are disappearing quickly now as huge shopping centers and sprawling residential subdivisions creep across the landscape, burying the living desert, and it's history, beneath an unsightly scourge of human excess.

However, even the profound ugliness of rapacious growth and the grotesque spectacle of modern commerce are only temporary aberrations along the timeless course of life's evolution.

The light of the sun warms us with optimism at each dawn, and provides the opportunity for thoughtful introspection at the end of every rare and precious day, when the fireball of our solar system rolls beyond the horizon, often spreading a blazing display of color across this most beautiful of planets.

Death & destruction are cyclical and constant, yet life is a self-renewing resource, and time is on its side...

...as long as billions of stars continue shining their warm magic into the far corners of the universe.

Brief moments out of the vastness of time and space are all I have to share with you, miniscule observations from a tiny speck of the cosmos, but what a wondrous little speck it is.

No wonder it's currently overpopulated with almost seven billion consumers...

...this too shall pass.