aesthetics of joy

Well, I’m back after a longish, unscheduled break. Let’s call it a summer (working) holiday. But wow, did I miss it. I don’t plan on taking this much time away from the blog again for a long time. There are just too many interesting and joyful things to write about…

Before I launch into some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and observing in the last few weeks, I want to just say a quick thank you to everyone who has commented, sent me an email, or sent me links recently. This summer has left me breathless, and I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but rest assured that I will, and that I appreciate the kind words, the thoughtful recommendations, and the healthy debate you bring to my inbox. Thanks!

On my mind today are the aesthetics of nature. A big part of my thesis for Aesthetics of Joy is that joy evolved to guide us unconsciously towards things that would have been beneficial for our survival (or more accurately, the survival of our genetic material). It stands to reason that since during the bulk of this evolution humans were nomadic creatures living in an environment with far more trees than skyscrapers, natural environments are going to be replete with stimuli that make us feel joyful. Bright sunlight, ripe fruits, wide open spaces—these primal joys hold clues that give context and meaning to many of the things that delight us in the modern world. And as the research supporting evolutionary theories of psychology continues to accumulate, the evidence suggesting the connection between aesthetics of nature and our wellbeing is beginning to mount.

On his Frontal Cortex blog, now on Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of some findings from the emerging field of ecopsychology, which looks at the relationship between nature and the mind. (I first wrote about this field of research in February, here.) One study, dating back to the mid-1990s, looked at female housing project residents, some of whom were living in apartments facing city streets and basketball courts, and others who had views of a grassy, landscaped courtyard. The women were tested on everything from attention to their ability to cope with life’s challenges, and those with the more natural view tested better on nearly every measure. Similarly, in a 2008 study led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, students who were given time to walk through a park before taking a series of tests performed better on measures of attention and memory than those who had walked through city streets.

According to psychologists, views of nature are restorative. They seem to allow the brain to reset and concentrate again. This reminds me of an insight noted by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: Willpower, they observe, is finite. When you expend a lot of effort trying to control cravings, desires, or emotions in a certain situation, it can be draining, leaving you with little energy to control yourself in others. I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism going on here. Functioning in urban environments takes a lot of mental energy. It requires high alertness, and it’s sensorially complex; there’s a lot to process. I wonder if views of nature provide a reset because they are simply easier on our brains, evolved as they are for processing the stimuli in this environment.

This may be, but it’s not the whole story. Another study, also cited in the article on solastalgia I quoted in my February post, adds another piece to the puzzle. The study, conducted by Peter Kahn, took participants and stressed them out with a series of math tests, and then gave them one of three views to look at: a window facing out onto a tree-filled view, a plasma screen of the same view, and a blank wall. Those looking at the natural scene had the quickest stress reduction (measured by a decrease in heart rate). Those looking at the blank wall had a much slower return to normal heart rate. We could’ve predicted that. Subjects who looked at the nature scene and the plasma screen both looked at their views longer than those looking at the blank wall. Also a no-brainer. But surprisingly, the subjects who looked at the plasma screen showed virtually the same stress-reduction pattern as those looking at the wall. So while we’re drawn towards a views of nature to relieve our stress, it has to be real nature. It’s not something we can trace to one aesthetic element—like the color green or the contours of the leaves—and bottle it. It’s the full multisensory, immersive aesthetics of nature, all together, that foster wellbeing and joy.

Apparently, the kind of nature matters too. Lehrer’s post mentions another study that demonstrated that people who spend time in parks with a greater diversity of plant life score better on tests of psychological wellbeing than those who spend time in less biodiverse parks. A patch of grass may be green, but it’s not nature. A diverse park is more like nature, naturally, and probably a lot more like the environments in which our brains grew up. Variety, as much as greenness or leafiness, is an aesthetic of nature, and it seems it does us a lot of good.

Another fascinating insight about our brain and nature comes from an interview with Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist whose latest book explores new research on human vision, on the Neuronarrative blog. Changizi observes that one of the reasons its so easy for humans to read (those of us who are literate read thousands of words in a day) is that our letterforms mimic natural shapes. He suggests that if our words looked like barcodes or fractal patterns, we would not be able to process them nearly as quickly. He says:

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

I have to pause to marvel at the beauty of this insight, which is nothing short of thrilling for readers, writers, and typographers all. But as the awe subsides, I wonder if this fascinating insight holds a clue to applying aesthetics of nature to design in ways that really do foster our wellbeing. I’m sick of seeing wallpaper that looks like birch trees or tables with grass growing in the middle put forth as design’s  solution to the urban condition. Can’t we do better? As the plasma screen experiment demonstrated, a picture of nature isn’t going to cut it, and while it’s certainly a fine idea to have some plants around, I think we could go about “bringing the outside in” in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps there are visual patterns or spatial arrangements that better mimic a natural environment, design ideas that can be applied to urban planning, architecture, interiors, and products to provide some of the same benefits. It’s encouraging to think that we may be on the cusp of learnings that will help us bring more aesthetics of nature into our citified lives.

Of course, there’s another implication here, not for the design of a home necessarily, but maybe for the design of a lifestyle. Get outdoors. Do it often and especially when you’re stressed. Because no matter how well we’re eventually able to design to mimic nature, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

Artist Pete Dungey says of his Pothole Gardens, “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” Indeed. And a gorgeous, surprising example of urban renewal and joyful activism.

{via for the love of bikes}

Fascinating piece by Daniel B. Smith in Sunday’s NYT magazine about the emerging field of ecopsychology, which studies the relationship between the health of the natural world and that of the mind. The field views mental health more broadly than any preceding branch of psychology, suggesting that our sanity is inextricable from the vitality of our surroundings and the strength of our connection to them.

This makes intuitive sense to me. After all, our physical health is deeply dependent on the health of our immediate environment. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution we could have conceived of our bodies as separate entities, impermeable to pollution. But now we know that chemicals in our waterways end up in our veins and that smog chokes our lungs as much as our visibility. The link between environmental soundness and mind is less apparent, but still plausible. If we evolved for an environment filled with the aesthetics of lush, green life, but we live in an environment that deprives us of these aesthetics, isn’t it possible that this state of being becomes like a nutritional deficit of the mind? That robbing our environment of certain essential stimuli decreases mental performance and makes us not only less happy but also less functional?

There are already disorders recognized to have a relationship to the stimuli we take in from our environment. The appropriately named SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a kind of depression related to the low levels of available light in winter. SAD is worst at higher latitudes where the light difference between seasons is most extreme. Yet some Scandinavian peoples, such as Icelanders, have been found to have an immunity to this condition, perhaps because it was selected as a favorable survival condition by evolution. This is only one data point, but it suggests to me that people may evolve for certain environments, that our brains may be subtly wired through generations of interactions with a place, and that the rapid rate of change (/devastation) of those places could be a latent source of emotional trauma.

Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht terms this trauma solastalgia, which combines the Latin solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, meaning pain. He defines his coinage as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets one when is still at ‘home.’ ” It’s an instantly evocative word to match an evocative concept (though perhaps not so precise — I can think of lots of cases of comfort-pain that have nothing to do with place). Smith notes that the word has spread rapidly, not just in academic or journalistic circles, but as a title for songs and works of art. The idea of defending our land as a people is nothing new, but throughout history usually it is from invasion, and what we are defending is livelihood — the resources for living and the livelihood we have created in a place. This goes much deeper to say that environmental destruction is a slow, creeping invasion, and what we are defending is not just our livelihood, but our sanity.

The most interesting aspect of this discussion, for me, is the recognition of certain kinds of environmental aesthetic stimuli as essential to mental health. We know that the brain is a sensing, processing machine, requiring constant stimuli to make sense of the world. Remove all stimuli, and people quickly go insane; without new data points, the brain stops making sense of itself. Too much stimuli and we become overloaded — equally unhealthy. But beyond variations in quantity, there are also variations in kind to pay attention to. Are there certain qualities of light that better enable us to function? Are there proportions and perspectives that make us feel in balance and emotionally secure? (For example, having evolved in an environment where trees have a certain proportional relationship to the human body, say between 2x and 8x as tall, does living in an environment that is more vertically structured, up to 220x in height maybe, create a sense of insecurity? I wonder this as a devoted city-dweller — I love skyscrapers, but is there another level on which they are making me anxious? Would I be smarter or calmer if I lived in the forest?)

One study, done by Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist and member of the editorial board of a new journal called Ecopsychology, suggests that natural stimuli effect our physiology in basic ways. Kahn tested a group of adults subjected to mild stress while looking at one of three different views: a window looking out over a scene of grass and trees, a 50″ plasma screen of the same scene in real time, and a blank wall. Measuring the heart rates of the subjects showed that they decreased fastest in the group looking at the real nature scene, while those looking at the TV had the same results as those facing the wall. This suggests that not only does environment unconsciously effect our reactions, but also that we can’t fake it. An authentic aesthetic experience is necessary to feel the benefits of the interaction with the natural environment.

What does this have to do with joy? Many of the stimuli we consider to be aesthetics of joy are natural and environmental. Sunlight, lushness, open and expansive spaces. The emotion joy evolved at a time in human history where there was no dichotomy between artificial and natural — before industrialization, before agriculture, when our connection to the environment meant survival. The ideas of ecopsychology — solastalgia and the idea of an ecomental system — resonate so strongly with me because of this history. Joy isn’t a result of what goes on in the mind alone; joy is an ecomental interaction, a constant dialogue between the brain, the senses, and the things we encounter in the world. It’s often said that happiness comes from within, but joy comes from without — from the impressions made by pleasurable things on our retinas, our fingertips, and our tongues, the way they disrupt the flow our thoughts and focus them on beauty and wonder. For me, this piece was an important reminder that those wonderful, natural things may be instrumental not just in joy, but in the whole of mental health — and therefore an important reminder that so much depends on our willingness to defend them.

NYT: Is there an ecological unconscious?
Illustration: Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

Well, I’m back! And I must say, I have really missed my daily posts. On Friday, I presented the masters thesis portion of Aesthetics of Joy — the theory as well as ten furniture concepts and a designer’s toolkit for creating joy. Over the coming weeks I want to share some of these ideas, as well as revel in some of the holiday joy I’ve missed while I’ve been in thesis isolation.

This video shows one of my furniture concepts. It’s a stool based on the idea of a firefly lantern. I could imagine a bunch of these scattered around a garden restaurant or bar, gently lighting up the night. The lights are LEDs driven by an Arduino board, programmed to pulse randomly using a sine wave function. Getting the lights to look like fireflies was no mean feat, and required a lot of fine tuning of the code. Fortunately, my electronics professor Liubo Borissov was extremely generous with his time in helping me get this going.

The inspiration for the stool is the magic aesthetic, which has to do with joy from things that seem uncanny, implausible, or impossible. Magic is about the apparent defiance of ordinary laws of nature, and for me bioluminescence has always been a conduit to that strange and wonderful magic.

Nice mention of AoJ in this post on Brandchannel about Toyota’s creation of two new flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The two flowers, variants of the cherry sage and the gardenia, are planted at Toyota’s headquarters in Japan. Designed to highlight green improvements to Toyota’s manufacturing facilities, the flowers are an interesting marketing move and a great example of a joyful gesture. It may be “joywashing meets greenwashing,” but it’s hard to be skeptical when it just makes you want to smile.

{image: crossmage}

In her own words:

What I am trying to express in my work are moments of everything.

Landscapes, Formations, Light, Smell, Taste…

But they are not just a reflection of a current feeling or a sudden urge.

My paintings are about particles, about the whole or arrangements, they are related, disrupted or intractable, they are left and right, above and below –

they are everything —

For me, Möller’s paintings conflate macro and micro beautifully, reminding us how similar everything looks at extremes of scale. It’s akin to the Eames’s classic film Powers of 10, which transports us through scale shifts of extraordinary proportions. I love how the forms in these paintings could be sea creatures or land masses or sub-cellular structures, but whatever they are they feel vibrant and alive. A wonderful example of how a piece does not need to be riotously colored to invoke joy.

{via but does it float}
quote from here

Indian summer is the gift that keeps on giving in New York this year. Perhaps to make up for the drizzly summer, we keep getting these gorgeous sunny, mild weekend days. This Saturday I walked through the park and met my friend Emily on the steps of the Met. We set out in search of the Vermeers, which are quietly luminous and very worth the trip. But we soon discovered what felt like the real find of the visit: visible storage.

I’ve been going to the Met for a long time, since I was a child, but I was surprised and delighted to find this wonderful set of displays. It feels like you’re getting a behind-the-scenes tour, with all the paintings and artifacts crammed in together in row after row of glass partitions. The closeness of everything forces new connections, new relationships between items. Without the artful arranging, you’re free to see things in a new way. It feels a little like a treasure hunt, and was easily the most exciting part of the visit.

The roof is still open for drinks, and we arrived just in time for the spectacular sunset above. It’s always hard to believe when the blue sky turns pink and purple, and the art took a back seat for a moment as everyone turned towards the city and watched the beautiful spectacle unfold.

Sunset image, mine. Met images, pazzia.

When I moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I discovered something I had missed without realizing it: the sounds of the birds. Now that I live on the top floor of a brownstone with a lush, critter-friendly backyard, I find myself at ear-level with the most amazing array of birds. This morning they were really going nuts, reveling in the warm cloudy day. I captured a few of their calls to share with you.

I’m off the Met to see the Vermeers and the new American wing — I hope you’re having a joyful weekend!

Listen to the birds

Image by the always wonderful John&Fish

Glow-in-the-dark mushrooms — another weird and wonderful innovation from Mother Nature. Seven new species of bioluminescent mushrooms were recently discovered by scientists in places as diverse as Japan, Belize, Brazil, and Jamaica.

{via Wired}

Another great weekend. Yesterday I took a day trip with my mom to see Philip Johnson’s amazing Glass House, in New Canaan, CT, which sparked some new reflection on a topic I’ve been pondering for some time: is there a relationship between joy and modernism?

In theory, that relationship is antithetical. Modernism strives for ideological purity, while joy revels in the odd, absurd, silly, and cute. Joy is obviously emotional, whereas modern design is guided by rationality — by principles of formal organization, visual proportion, and spatial balance. Joy is ebullient, modernism is restrained. Joy is youthful and lighthearted; modernism is serious and mature. The advent of modernism was really like a repression of joy, which burst forth in a haze of silliness in the post-modern era.

Form and color choices reflect modernism’s sober attitude, with a devotion to angles over curves and a limited color palette. It was interesting to see this study of average color calculated from MoMA’s art collection, the result being #A79F94, a dull warm gray. The study’s creator calls it “the color of art,” but I wonder if it’s more accurately “the color of modernism” — austere and serene.

Of course, this is not to say there are no joyful modernists. I think if you had to pick one, Eva Zeisel would be the obvious choice, but the Eames and the Scandinavians also had a more emotional, energetic sensibility. The movement evolved over time and softened. Still, a certain detachment and reserve is inscribed in modernism, and too exuberant a notion of form would be incompatible with the doctrine.

Yet, I felt joy at the Glass House. Standing in that transparent box, immersed in the fantasy of a home without walls — it was an exultant feeling. Glass becomes wondrous in this context, creating a porous connection between home and environment that is profoundly emotional. From the outside, the home almost disappears, lost in the play of reflections across its surfaces. From the inside, it expands outward. With no walls, the space is voluminous, endless, growing. And this airy expansion is a definitive aesthetic of joy.

Most of the time, if modernism achieves an emotional quality, it’s neutral serenity. More often, it’s an emotionally-detached sense of awe and inspiration. But as my weekend experience showed me, there are exceptions. Perhaps in spite of all the efforts towards rational purity, the modernist spirit every now and then rises up and revels in the joy of light, space, and form.

A friend sent me this link to a company selling these strange, multicolored “happy roses.” They’re presumably made by dye absorption, which you may have tried in a lower school science experiment with a couple of carnations and a few drops of blue food dye. (If you’re so inclined, directions are here.) The company says,

The Happy Rose is unique due to its rich and exuberant colour combination and the special colouring technique that lies hidden behind this. One look at this cheerful rose and you will feel happy.

Is it happy? Or just tacky?

On the one hand, bright color is associated with joy, so perhaps it’s as simple as: more color = more joy. And the “coloring process” is certainly magical, illuminating a normally hidden aspect of plant construction. But at the same time there’s something unappealing about the artifice of it.

Aesthetics of joy has an odd tension here. The brightest colors are rare in nature, so when we find them, they’re often in synthetic materials like paints and plastics. But joy also embraces the aesthetics of unfettered nature: the exuberant wildness and wonderful mystery of nature’s accidental creative process. Sometimes our interventions in nature produce great joy. I’m thinking of Samuel Francois’s charming tree art or Carol Hummel’s whimsical knits. You could also look at earthwork, like Jim Denevan’s sand paintings or Maya Lin’s Wave Field, as this type of joyful intervention.

I wonder if it has something to do with proportion. All of the artists I just mentioned seem to work with a great reverence for nature. Nature is their canvas and regardless of the scale of their efforts, it is the dominant element in their compositions. If anything, their work serves to call our attention to nature’s beauty, not to mask it. These “happy roses” walk the line for me. Some of those colors are deliciously intense, but I think their frenetic application obscures the natural form of the flower too much. I lose the beauty of the circular gesture and the bouquet becomes a collection of random ruffles.

All of this is an attempt to parse rationally what is a reflexive, visceral response for me. I vote eyesore. What do you think?

Thank you @_MattMorris for the link and inspiration for this post

When I was a kid I used to spend hours in the branches of an old beech tree. I knew every path to the sky through those gnarled branches, and used to sit up there just listening to the wind in the copper leaves, daydreaming of things to make and places to go. So if anyone could build me a studio of my dreams, it would be like this nest in a Hamptons backyard.

NYT: A Bird’s Eye View of Long Island

Outdoor art by Samuel Francois plays with contexts urban and rural using color and pattern. He considers himself “a joyful manipulator of symbols,” stating “his goal is above all to preach a transitory art of which spontaneity and decasualization of the images are the bases of the work.”

via Oh Joy!

Today I’m mesmerized by these photographs by the Taiwanese brother and sister photographers John&Fish. More on their photostream.

I guess moss isn’t the most obviously joyful plant. It doesn’t have brightly colored, showy flowers. It doesn’t have alluring scents. You can climb it, swing from its branches or play hide-and-seek behind its trunk.

But what moss lacks in all these ways, it makes up for in the pure delight of abundant texture. Moss is one of my fingertips’ absolute favorite things to touch. Like the scene in Amélie where she plunges her hands into a sack of dried beans just to revel in the sensation, my senses derive pure joy from the soft, cushiony texture of healthy moss.

This moss appeared on the last day of the trip. It’s the dry season, and most of the Galapagos landscape is desertlike, with spindly trees, spiky cacti, and a ground cover of greyish succulents. But on the last day we headed to the highlands to seek out some tortoises, and the lush, jungle-like environment was a delight after so much dryness. Rich, tactile mosses were everywhere, but of course when traveling in a foreign place the rule is look but don’t touch, and I had to be content with just a photo.

This is the 6th of my 14-photo series reliving joyful moments from my recent trip to the Galapagos. It’s part of an attempt to keep the vacation spirit alive a little longer, and I hope you enjoy them.

Lava lizards are underfoot on many Galapagos islands, perfectly camouflaged except for the bright spot of color under their necks. I love that peek of color.  If you look closely, you can see rust red, mint green, sunny yellow and a kind of apricot color too, all overlaid with chocolate chip-like spots. It reminds me of the joy I first felt in drawing, when I was forced to look at things really closely, and I realized how much there is at small scale in the world. If yesterday’s post was about big experiences that cause us to zoom out on the world, this one is about zooming in.

The lava lizard is among the smallest of the attractions in the Galapagos islands, and therefore often overlooked. But it’s a reminder to me that nature has way of cramming extraordinary beauty and wonder into incredibly tiny spaces.

One of the things that has struck me in all the interviews I’ve done on the subject of joy over the past 6 months or so is that many people have talked about moments of joy as moments where they felt “small.” At first I found this perplexing — it doesn’t fit with the expansive, larger-than-life, abundant nature of joy — so I dug deeper.

When talking about joy, people often talk about time spent with families, vacations, successes, and simple pleasures. They also talk a lot about experiences with nature, and often these are experiences with nature’s enormity. People talk about wrapping their arms around a giant redwood and realizing that tree has seen a world their grandparents didn’t even see, and may outlive even their grandchildren. They talk about sitting on a beach and contemplating the far horizon. They talk about stargazing and wondering at the contrast between the marvelous stillness they feel and the knowledge that they are actually hurtling through space at great speed. They talk about witnessing migrations of birds or vast schools of fish or seeing a world under a microscope.

I realized that small is about feeling in context. It’s about a realignment of perspective, an understanding that your worries about the noise your car’s muffler is making or the extra cookie you had at lunch are inconsequential. It’s a scale shift — what were big problems are now small ones. They don’t go away, they just reassume proper proportion, and in their place is a joy that comes from the freedom from all that pressure. It’s the ultimate kind of transcendence — transcendence of the self, where we can step outside the identity we continually build and inhabit and be free for a moment.

The Galapagos made me feel this way, the enormity of the sea and sky all around. Driftwood is like an artifact of this enormity, its gnarled surfaces a text of the ocean’s power written in a language we all understand. Perhaps this is why driftwood is so often collected and brought home as a souvenir. Not just because it is beautiful, but because it makes us feel joyfully small.

Eggs are a very joyful form. They represent possibility, new life, things full of energy waiting to burst out into the world and get moving. The form itself is symmetrical, balanced, and whole, suggesting comfort and stasis. But in reality an egg is just a moment in time, a moment representing potentiality rather than completion.

Can you remember back to when you first learned that birds hatched from eggs? Can you remember when you first saw it on a nature program or, if you were lucky, on a farm? Or even luckier, in the wild? It was magical. In one second, there was this hard, smooth, perfect surface, and then in another, there was a beak poking out, and then shortly after there was a real, whole birdlet cradled in a jagged egg-cup. In cooking we break an egg from the outside-in, but when you see it the way it was designed to be opened, it is startling and wonderful.

I wish I could say I saw this egg hatch, but sadly, this egg will never hatch. It was abandoned. But knowing that fact was still hard to reconcile with my visceral reaction to the sight of an egg, and all the joyful potential it represents.

You know when you come back from a vacation so good you just wish you could relive it over and over again? Well, over the next 14 days I’m going to be reliving my most joyful encounters with wildlife in the Galapagos, one photo each day.

The waved albatross of the Galapagos mates for life. As adults, they spend most of their lives alone at sea, but each year they meet on the same island to mate and nest. Their period of reacquaintance includes a complex dance where male and female bow to each other and click their beaks together.

I know birds have famously small brains, and perhaps it’s an anthropomorphic fallacy to attribute emotion to a behavior that is so clearly coded as instinct. But, I can’t help but see joy and love in the eyes of these birds as they perform these rituals.

The full set of my Galapagos photos (about 60 or so) appears in my Flickr photostream, in case you want to check them out.