City Escapes-- Lands End & Redwood Regional Park (April & May 2014)

Spring in California: South to North (2014)

Ojai Meadow Preserve: 

The Road to El Lagartillo, Nicaragua (2013)

Hello, all! I'm a little behind on posting lately, but below are photos of a short backpacking trip from Estelí to the small community of El Lagartillo (near Achuapa), in Nicaragua. Although El Lagartillo is accessibly by a dirt road, the photos below are places you can only see by foot. This area feels pretty magical with the afternoon mist and rain and chantrelle mushrooms growing wild.

One of the places we passed through is Finca Calamina, where a man named Esteban collects and harvest wild coffee with his wife (originally from France, which explains his fondness for wearing a beret). He is an incredible chef, and made us pizzas from his home-built wood burning oven.

During the 1980's U.S. funded Contra War, Sandinistas fled from Estelí into these mountains and fighting often ensued despite the rural isolation. Esteban's brother was killed by contras, yet he is an extremely kind and welcoming man to U.S. foreigners. The area remains very unpopulated, and the main form of transport is by foot or by horse.

Estelí, Nicaragua (2013)

Bay Explorations (2014)

“I saw in their eyes something I was to see over and over in every part of the nation- a burning desire to go, to move, to get under way, anyplace, away from any Here. They spoke quietly of how they wanted to go someday, to move about, free and unanchored, not toward something but away from something. I saw this look and heard this yearning everywhere in every states I visited. 

Nearly every American hungers to move.” 

― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

View towards San Francisco from Berkeley

The Ojai Valley, California (2013)

“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” -Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community: Eight Essays

THE OJAI VALLEY FROM ABOVE

The Streets of La Habana, Cuba (2012)

Most of these photos were taken in Habana Vieja, the older part of Havana, on a graduate student delegation to Cuba in 2012 with Columbia University School of Social Work. Cuba is a country where time often stands on its own and Havana in particular has a spirit that speaks through the walls and dances in the streets. Despite the on-going embargo that has had a devastating impact on the economy, the Cubans I met were incredibly friendly, welcoming, and above all: full of life.

TURNING A CORNER