I don’t get to New York City much anymore, despite living only 14 miles from it. But today I took a train into the big city to attend the wedding of a former work associate who I have occasionally stayed in touch with over the years. On the way home, I took a look at the streets and blocks in mid-town that I once did frequent — because I once worked there. Back in the mid-to-late 1980s I worked at Penn Plaza near Madison Square Garden and Penn Station. The PP1 complex spanned the ground between 33rd and 34th Streets, and thus I took a few shots there just before scampering down to my train home for sweet New Jersey.

First up is a human-scale shot, New York from street level and people level. Mid-town Manhattan is an incredibly dense amalgamation of humankind on a pleasant Saturday afternoon, and West 33rd Street is doing its part here to host the hordes who find one reason or another to be in the big town. To be honest, it really does make the less crowded suburbs of Jersey seem a bit sweeter!

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It’s just another Saturday night in northern New Jersey, with a middle-aged rock cover band (which includes my middle-aged brother, incidentally) hard at work keeping the patrons of an “ale house” in suburban Maywood entertained.

It’s been a buggy summer here. In late May and early June, we had a huge invasion of 17-year cicadas. My residence just happens to be dead-center in a 4 or 5 block cicada “hot-spot”. The droning noise was really getting creepy after a while, and all the dead cicadas in the driveway from various stages of their development got rather messy. I was glad once they finished their business and were safely underground by early July.

Since then, I’ve had the usual summertime apartment invaders, including various brown beetles and a stray lightning bug here and there. (And those darn fruit flies that I discussed on July 6; then there was that bug in the zendo from June 14). But over the past 2 weeks I’ve seen a small fleet of butterflies tending to the plants out front. Much nicer than cicadas and beetles, but still kind-of . . . buggy.

Oh well, enjoy the shots. I might actually miss some of these critters on a dark-gray 5 degree morning in January.

Just a few shots from a gritty spot that doesn’t attract much photographic attention. I.e., Riverside Avenue in Newark, NJ. But this is as real as it gets.

I was out on a hike in Harriman State Park not long ago, trying out a new camera (a GE X500), looking for scenic overviews and majestic shots along lakes and mountain tops. It was a sunny spring day, and I found enough grand vistas to keep the shutter busy (well . . . as grand as it gets in lower New York State). However, I also decided to grab a shot of this little rock-side patch of moss, grass, leafy plants and a few tiny flowers amidst the decaying leaves from last autumn. In the middle of a verdant forest, scenes like this don’t immediately grab one’s attention. But they are interesting little “cities” in and of themselves, cities of the local ecology, places where certain conditions and random events come together such that an interdependent knot of different life-forms find a spot to flourish together. Not all that unlike our own human cities, such as Boston, Brussels, Buenos Aires or Bangkok. Each of these human cities has its own distinct flavor, just as this little city of flora in the forest does.

So, keep that in mind the next time you are in the great outdoors. You may be walking past a wonderful and interesting little city with its own life and history and reason for being. Another good reason in life to stop and smell the flora.

I took this shot last week, put the file aside, then opened it up today not remembering where the file had come from. My first impression was “what the heck is all this, some kind of blood cells or bacteria?” But no, it’s just spring-time in New Jersey, a detail shot of a tree in bloom. You can notice something about mother nature; when she wants to get something going, she uses crude devices (who knows how many of these blossoms are going to make it into some kind of fruit, and from there, find some fertile soil where a new tree could take root; it’s a very inexact, hit-or-mostly miss process, no environmental scanning and intelligent targeting behind it). But she takes a lot of shots. And somehow, her world keeps on going.

So far, anyway . . .

A few days ago, I posted some thoughts about the dog-mu Zen koan. Here’s a grungy shot of three real dogs, in their little front-yard triangle off of Market Street in Newark. I started noticing these guys a few months ago, as I pass their humble abode every day on my way home from work.

So, does the dog have Buddha nature? I don’t think that these pooches particularly care about that, on this rainy spring afternoon. All the more reason to suspect that they possibly DO have Buddha nature. As much as any of their human (all too human) bosses might.

We’re now past the first week of April, the unofficial end of the snow season around here. It’s going to be warm for the next 8 months or so. It’s finally time to put the snow shovels and driveway salt away. Here are some of those things basking in the sun on a fine spring morning; waiting to be stashed in a dark corner of a garage or shed, to lie in wait until the cold breezes, long nights and dingy gray clouds find their way back to this corner of the world. As they surely will. For now, though, it’s time to ignore such thoughts and enjoy the sun, trees and flowers, once again.