The Valley of Camoronel

I've been up since 1:AM this morning, after only 3 hours of sleep, reading and waiting for the dawn. Morning has always been my favorite time and the sunrises here in Playa Camoronal are exquisite. I feel no fatigue. It is almost as if the awakening valley floor seeps all the nourishment into ones body and soul needed to chase away the tired post mid night impatience.
So I spent the pre dawn hours designing a multi unit complex site plan on a hillside way above the beach town of Samara. It was good to stretch my sensibilities in the quietness. All I had was a sheet of tracing paper, a 50cent plastic ruler and a fistfull of #2 Faber Castell pencils. I think I enjoy site design most of all. Must be from my years working in Bill Talley's Landscape Architecture firm. It's the complete inseparability of potential structure with landform, movement, rest, the ecology of biology and botany.

After a few hours of design I took a break to watch the sun rise from behind the mounded hills to the east. As the light suffused into all the shadows the valley floor molded itself into a dense savannah like tableaux. One end of the bay sticks out a forested headland bluff, two maybe three miles away, 400 feet high shaped like a Dorado's head pointed back out to sea anchoring one end of the distant beach with its three advancing white surf fronts to die into the sands. I can watch and listen to this for hours and not feel any loss of time. It is a glorious yet soothing window of infinity.

My restfull platform rolls down and away to the valley floor. On the distance, no larger than specks in my eyes moves a line of cattle beneath the palm and dried acacia like trees. The stock is too far away to discern any form or even legs. They are just white micro spots gracefully moving about the tan colored fields.

The cicadas are slowly and in the sonic distance beginning to warm up. The ocean's hiss rolls up toward me in rhythmic doppler. Unknown birds with small and large voices call out. Howler monkees tentatively clear their throats. Palm fronds rustle and clack like soft castanets. The warm breezes up from the valley are more noticeable now, unscented but strangely clean and washing.

Today we will practice the acceptance of doing nothing.