October 2009: Everybody needs a friend. The little park around Chollas Reservoir in Oak Park, San Diego is a neighborhood gem and a haven of diversity. A place, where a variety of families is out for a few hours of play and relaxation with their kids on weekends, where kids can learn to fish, or get close to a wide range of birds, where people can be out for a run or exercise on a number of simple equipment, or where friends can just go for a stroll through the park, around the lake, or meet for a rendezvous in the reed (which, of course, is only for the birds, not the humans :-) ). Unlike in the upscale Balboa Park closer to Downtown San Diego, where tourists and locals are visiting museums and occasionally listening to concerts and opera performances, where San Diegans come for a volleyball match or other games or a visit to the dog-park, and where homeless people find some sleep after a harsh night on downtown pedestrian walks, life around Chollas Reservoir is simple, slow, full of contemplation, joy and piece. If you don't have a friend, you might find one there ...

July 2009: Layers of time. The two buildings and the street light appear to be set on a time axis coming from the depth of space and continuing to the future behind the viewer. Each object represents a societal layer in time. As time progresses, the objects exhibit more sophistication, more opportunities. As society is layered in time, with earlier societies often having limited opportunities for prosperity, and often with expanding options for development as time progresses, so is society layered at each moment of time. Those at the top of the social layers have often able opportunities and sophistication, while those at the bottom, and particularly those in the "basement" as I put it earlier, always have to fight a hard fight for survival.

June 2009: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. How true. Those of us, who are successful and well embedded in society like to look forward to an even brighter future. However, sitting in our modern, comfortable cars, a glance into the mirror may remind us of an important truth. The object in the center of the mirror is a so-called homeless person. I have known him to dwell in this particular spot in a street in San Diego for at least nine months. He, like all the other homeless people, seems to be far away from us. Looking back on our lives, we don't think that being like him is among the plausible futures that we can imaging for us. But no, we are warned: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear - no matter how far they seem to be. In the American society failure is one of the plausible futures for each of us, and failure in this society often means falling through the holes in the perforated floor of society and ending up in the basement of society with no easy road for return - like the object in the picture.

May 2009: Last month's Picture of the Month showed first a water bottle which then was crossed out by a big red X. The message was to stop drinking bottled water. This week, Marv Lyons sent me a sequence of slides on the same topic: the devastating impact of the rapidly increasing consumption of bottled water and the stupidity of it. The picture of the months is taken from this presentation, which was produced by PM Architecture. Showing the stupidity in the decision to buy bottled water instead of using tap water, the picture is also related to the Thought of the Month, which was triggered by the film The Age of Stupid." If we continue to display the same degree of stupidity involved in buying and drinking bottled water in many of our decision, can there be any hope for humanity?

For the full sequence of slides, see here ...

April 2009: April is the month in which many Earth Day events take place all over the U.S. At some of these events, the organizers please participants with free bottled water that sponsors have provided. Other organizers have already realized that bottled water is not a contribution to sustainability and a worthy Earth Day celebration. Some organizers even turn a bottled-water free event into a message about a small step towards more sustainability we all can easily make: bring tap water in a reusable water bottle instead of emptying plastic bottles that add to the trash mountain of a Earth Day event or other events. They also show that tap water in many place has a quality better than what you get in the plastic bottles. So why are we spending money on a unsustainable habit when a sustainable habit comes for almost free?

February 2009: Two hundred years ago this months, Charles Darwin was born: a good reason to celebrate Darwin Day. Darwin addressed the question where all the different species came from, or, in modern language, where the broad variety of DNA originated. But where do species, where does DNA go, when species become extinct? We changed the biosphere significantly over the last 300 years, and we are creating one of the greatest extinction crisis in Earth's history: an estimated 34,000 plants and 5,200 animal species face extinction. Where do they go? In his series Endangered Species and their DNA return to Space, Marv Lyons has given a hypothetical and artistically beautiful answer. Our picture of the month symbolically depicts the inversion of Darwin's Origin of the Species and returns many of them to space.

Picture courtesy Marv Lyons.

January 2009: Not as well kept as last month's pair of shoes, not kept well at all, this pair of snickers obviously has been discarded respectlessly by the owner. Run down and worn out, things become easily useless and end up as garbage in the street. Like some of us: Not taken care of very well by ourselves and the societal envelop, worn out by the duties and pitfalls of life, too many of us end up in the streets: homeless, second to none on the societal ladder, unlikely to be restored as a useful and respected member of a community.

Photo by Hans-Peter Plag; taken on December 28, 2008 at Robinson and 7th Ave., San Diego.

December 2008: What coincidences brought these shoes to their rest in the shadow of a pine tree on the small border between pedestrin walk and parking area on Bankers Hill in San Diego? Well kept, almost shining, neatly placed next to each other, they might belong, among their like, in the closet of a well established actor, banker, business man. But they ended up in a very different place with an uncertain future. Like some of us: misplaced.

Photo by Hans-Peter Plag; taken on November 23, 2008 at 4th Ave. and Upas Street, San Diego.