Near Mora Trail, Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, Santa Clara County, CA, 12/8/2005
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference". As the wonderful poem by Robert Frost might encourage, I love going off the beaten trail in search of rarely seen places and vistas. Here's what I found on one such adventure in the hills near where I live. This is the view west from a hilltop about 600 feet above sea level across Rogue Valley into the Santa Cruz Mountains, part of the Pacific Coast Ranges in central California. While enjoying an autumn afternoon at Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, I discovered this lovely composition of opposites: near and far, clear and indistinct, light and dark, warm and cool, life and death. Having its day in the sun, a most beautiful oak towers in glorious vigor above the fallen crumbled remains of an ancestor, long dead. For me this scene is an allegory of the transient nature of life, the brief presence and everlasting fate common to all living things.
