Looking at Lem's pictures of the Joshua Tree trip make me want to go back there again. The sky's so blue, it just looks pleasant. I love California, it's so beautiful.

I love the desert, especially in Joshua Tree's exotic high desert vallies and rocky outcroppings. The sun kisses it intensely under the clear blue dome towering above you.

I also like the spaciousness, the wide open freedom. I noticed today how each house of the city is a person-space. There is so little non-peopled space around me right now. But if I drove to Joshua Tree there would be easily accessible, non-peopled wilderness. It is awesome.

The ocean is pretty much self-explanatorily awesome. In session it struck me that standing on the beach and gazing out over the ocean is like our perception of God sometimes. We can see the ocean, and recognize that it is the ocean. We can even describe some positive things about it. We can also describe it by remarking on what it is not, it's limitless, it's depthless, etc. Same with God. We can see Him sometimes, and we can know some things about Him, but He extends far far far out of our range of sight. And that's just the surface. There are inexhaustible depths below His relations to us.

And of course, California's mountains are some of the most beautiful in America. The dizzying sheer plunges in the Sierra Nevada provide ample food for a beauty starved soul. Crystal lakes forested thickly by arrow-straight pines, marching in rows up into the granite wilderness make me home sick. I realized that I only got to go to Mammoth once this summer. That's really sad. I miss the sun drenched alpine meadows nestled amongst solid granite towers so much. Shoot, it makes me homesick imagining it.

Must read more Wordsworth, must mature imaginative faculty, to be able to connect in my parlor to the most sublime natural things. There's a transition from loving California: the Romantics. I don't know if Wordsworth's ideas are the best, but the man loved nature, and the man connected to it in a unique way from which we can learn at least a route of pleasure.

I'm going to bed now, because it's very late. I'm staying up mostly to listen to a Smashing Pumpkin's CD of Phil's. I enjoy early 90s rock a lot more than most things that are being made today, and a heck of a lot more than all the 80s junk that's being shoved in our face recently.