http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080713.html

Hi - last spring I spend a week in death valley with a group - we explored dying and death traditions. Yesterday one of our group sent this photo of death valley. I think it is awesome and conveys an unworldliness, a living unliving! Does it touch you?

(Excuse me for saying, but I have a really sick apple 30 inch screen and when I enlarge it by clicking on the image, twice, I can scroll the landscape past my eyes. Lights off. Gzeesh.)

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Ambo Suno

I love this mind-blowing, mind-bending image.  It's very late at night where I am, about time for me to go to sleep, and this image parodoxically shouts at me to WAKE UP, from behind the computer monitor, from behind my own face.  Brings to mind the film The Fountain.  Thanks for pointing it out, Ambo.  Another waypoint on the map of open reality.

What a beautiful shot. I see some of my favorite constellations (Sagitarius, Orion, Delphinus, Scorpius, Cygnus, etc.). I love astrophotography. I just moved to Sacramento a couple of months ago and I haven't seen a star since. Thanks for the pic! 

Speaking of photos, the photo of the vehicle you have as your avatar, Ambo, reminds me of the Dharma van from LOST, a television show which presents us with another window to contemplate the universe, must like this photo here.

Yeah, Fangsz - this picture is a trip. I'm glad you have gotten into it so. Yes, the van is pretty neat - I'm glad you can appreciate it, too. Was that the series where people were stranded on an island, and some woowoo stuff seemed to be going on - I rented the DVDs if it was and yes, though I think that van was a VW, it had the same carefree, hippie throw-back feel.

Yesterday, I was going to a big corporate picnic/BBQ at a Rancho Calamigos in the Santa Monica Mountains above Malibu. I drove down and hung out at a Leo Carrillo State Beach at the foot of Mulholland Highway to see the waves, a new place for me. Then at dark I drove Big Sky Panoply aka surfmobile to a gas station and parked and camped the night behind it. I arrived back at the beach just after it opened and before 6:00AM. In the graylight, through the coastal fog, I joined a few other surfers in the kelpbeds, along the side of the rock island off which some waves seem to concentrate their swelling. Though still a flounderer, I enjoyed the curling-breaking propulsion with occasional fin catches in the kelp on my knees - weewhoo. Then back to old blue for a campstove heated green tea, and up the very winding road to the BBQ.

If I can get the photo attaching option to work here at some point, I have a beautifully bleak photo of the greylight waves along the rock mound, a few surfers awaiting the surges to carry them joyfully nowhere. Thanks, ambo

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Ambo Suno

Yes. Where did you move from - clear night-sky country? A some miles east and there must be some relative mountain darkness some where, eh? Have you gotten a chance to escape, yet? I don't know the constellations, but this is a strange haunting-like photo. Thanks, ambo

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Ambo Suno

Yeah, LOST is the series you're talking about.  What did you think of the DVDs?  It's my favorite show on television right now, with Heroes coming in at a close second.  Also, have you seen The Fountain?  It was the main character watching vast open space with all its stars from his little moving bubble that the picture you pointed out reminded me of.

Fangsz, I was surprised by how much I was grabbed by the series. They have something very effective and affective going on there. So many characters with histories and mysteries. I think it touches those primal, survival and other evolutionary threads that run so deeply through us. And of course, pretty women and handsome men, competition, conflict, 'love', and many plots show up at influential intervals. Cool for me.

I had heard some positive reports on IN about fountain and so I wanted to like it. Apparently I didn't really resonate with some things, probably style being one of the things, and I didn't watch it all of the way through. If it were important to know what happened with me and The Fountain it would be interesting to watch it again and maybe see more of what was going on in me. But as you mention the vast open space, stars, and the watching, I get that it may have been an important movie. Thanks, ambo

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Ambo Suno

One of the things that strikes me in LOST is its portrayal of spirituality as experiential, rather than implying a specific set of doctrinal beleifs within the mythic form of spirityality that seems to be the only way most primetime television shows seem to be able to deal with spirituality.  All concepts of faith in the show are based on what one experiences to be real: what the mystical properties of the Island mean to each character, what the various spiritual traditions have offered in each of the characters lives, and how that is reconciled with the various scientific hypotheses flying around about all the strange phenomena, which can be just as varied.

There's an interesting LOST-related site that just popped up where one can take an interesting psychological test to see if one is eligible for volunteering for the organization called "The Dharma Initiative" within the show's fiction.  It's called:

www.dharmawantsyou.com