I'd like to die during sunset, a stunning, fiery, red-emblazoned open sky - the kind you get to see in Arizona, Utah, Montana -- big spaces with big skies! We'll see if I am to be that lucky! My ashes - no finer place to disperse them than Big Sur, on the Pacific Coast in Northern California with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture blaring out loud and then one 'big' party to celebrate the departure of my spirit to that 'top secret, classified meeting grounds of kindred spirits'! No, I have never been preoccupied with 'death', just aware of the certainty of it. In fact, as I approach 40 next year, I sense a certain quickening - of the mind, of my heartbeats, of being more courageous and wise about sifting through the unending to-do-lists to focus on the really important stuff - I did that yesterday - took the time to visit with a friend of mine 30 miles away, sat on the porch swing and drank wine - and then the neighbors joined us and there we were 'touching each other's lives' and having a celebration of the ties that bind us, anchor us, together and bring richness to our days. These photographs are my promises to Mother Earth and Father Time - that I have 'not' been speeding through life hurriedly and frantic, but that I 'listen' to the 'voices in my head', or 'to what my rice krispies tell me', or 'the tea leaves at the bottom of my cup' -- that I 'see' in the beyond, and in the within, and hear - well - of course - both the infra-and the ultrasonics - from the low droning of whale sounds while diving in the Pacific to the ear-splitting lightening strikes in the tornado-alley in Kansas - all sounds that rattle me out of any complacency my 9-5 teaching job may manage to beguile me into. These abstracts are therefore - the 'more real' of things in my life, and my wish is that such abstracts always hold their realism for me until that fateful day in the future ... when some ashes will find the wind in the Pacific, with lilting notes of Tchaikovsky's 1812 piece and a bunch of colorfully-dressed people eager to get home and drink some very fine vino!.