Look Up

By Adam Jeselnick

Poetry inspired by lessons learned from paying close attention to the natural world, featuring landscape photography by the author. The poems were written over the past several years, in particular during the beginning of the global pandemic in 2020, when the shelter-in-place orders led to more time spent outdoors exploring the wild places and natural landscape of California's beautiful central coast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9781667879864

Book preview

The distance, as the pelican flies, between Pescadero Point in the north and Point Lobos in the south, is a little more than two nautical miles. From the street outside of the house where I live in Carmel-by-the-Sea, both rocky promontories are visible on the horizon, marking the extent of Carmel Bay, and framing the view of Pacific Ocean beyond, which stretches from California, the edge of western civilization, to the island of Japan, some 5,000 miles of open sea, without interruption. For several months in the spring of 2020, and throughout the seasons that followed as the pandemic ebbed and flowed, this stretch of coastline, featuring pine and cypress-lined canyons, the enduring white sands of Carmel Beach, and the ever-changing lagoon at the mouth of the Carmel River, were, for lack of a better term, my whole world. Yes, there were quick excursions down to Big Sur and up through Santa Cruz, and, eventually, longer road trips as far south as San Juan Capistrano and north to Sea Ranch in Sonoma County. But all my days, sunrise to sunset, were spent by the ocean, or less than two miles from the mean high tide line.

My explorations of this beautiful landscape that I’ve called home since 2009 were a way to more patiently consider the patterns and textures of the natural world, finding connections and contrast between those steady observations and the more frantic pace of human behavior chronicled by the media and observed in everyday life. I walked and hiked and ran hundreds of miles on foot, paying closer attention to subtle changes in the weather, the colors of flowers and leaves, and the sounds of birds and wild