today was a good day
Today was a good day: I slept in, woke to perfect weather, had a fantastic lunch, bought some coffee beans, and kicked back and thought about art. But a year ago today, that was among the Best Days of My Life.
July 21, 2005, was way, way up there.
A trip deep into a secret world, nesting grounds, alternately lush and desolate landscape dotted with dessicated corpses, yet somehow teeming with life too.
Scaled things, feathered things, things with flippers, things with no backbones, things with fins. Frigatebirds stealing food from blue-footed booby chicks. Herons fishing. Brown noddies stealing food from pelicans. Tropicbirds wheeling overhead.
North Seymour Island, and South Plaza. My last day on Las Islas Encantadas, the Galapagos Islands.
Everybody finding a mate, building a nest, or feeding their young. Skyline of Daphne major and Daphne minor. Exquisite. At least 15 of my all-time best and favorite photographs are from that day.
Life, death, rebirth. Millions of years worth of it. Everything they tell you about nature, all the stuff Darwin wrote about. So much more than you could ever hope to understand, but you can see it. All of it, in just one day. Just a day there changes you forever - we got to spend an entire week.
No matter what else I accomplish, or experience, that day in July will remain one of the Best Days of My Life. It was the kind of day that blows the scale. The kind of day that helps molds you into the kind of person that you’d always hoped you would one day be lucky enough to be.
