This Great Love

Here's a poem I treasure, from Persian poet Hafez. These days we may not  "leave each morning" but, surely none of us does not  "lift a great pack."

This Great Love

I want both of us
to start talking about this Great Love
As if You, I, and the Sun were all married
and living in a tiny room.
Helping each other to cook,
do the wash, 
weave and sew, 
care for our beautiful 
Animals.

We all leave each morning
to labor on the Earth's field.
No one does not lift a great pack.
I want both of us to start singing like two
traveling minstrels
about this Extraordinary Existence
We share, 

As if,
You, I, and God were all married
and living in 
a Tiny
Room
                                                             -from Hafez, The Gift

Black Swan

A Black Swan event is nearly impossible to predict and has profound and universal impact, changing the world forever. Now, this rare bird, this crisis, has crash-landed into our lives, threatening millions of humans. We are told to “flatten the curve” and stay home indefinitely, while hospitals amplify their care ability and a vaccine eventually arrives.

Before, in my workplace, I shook hands with guests. I hugged, and received hugs, abundantly, from co-workers and friends, old and new. Last week I watched happy visitors touch, inhale, try on and breathe all over beautiful, seductive things in the now temporarily closed Phoenix Shop. This nasty virus apparently survives on surfaces, and well, you already know what we all came to understand. 

A day after swearing off embracing at work, I found myself standing a few feet from my lovely co-worker Caitlin, with whom I hug often. Suddenly I said, "Aw, forget it!" and we turned to each other for a quick, big hug. As we briefly clung together we laughed, and the world snapped back to normal again, for just a moment. 

My personal prescription for sanity (other than hugs!) is to indulge yourself with Mother Nature.

Drink in the rays of the sun each day. Whether you sit beside a window in a comfy chair or lay down in the grass and dirt outside, just absorb the amazing strength of our planet while enjoying the warmth of our star.

Feast your eyes on a flower, admire trees, listen to birds, take deep breaths of the breeze. Marvel at the miracle of your body as you walk, hike, dance, and sing in the shower.  If you can, stare at the sea, or the mountains, or watch waves on the beach. (You can listen and watch nature on screens too, though that’s a little too Soylent Green for my taste.) 

Wherever you are, you can usually gaze at the stars or the moon at night. Remember that while everything changes, some things do not. I don’t think the constellation of Orion is going to rearrange itself, or that the dog-star Sirius will go walkabout off to a different galaxy.

Take comfort in what doesn’t change, or what won’t change as much. Thick blankets, soft skin, warm pet fur, chocolate. Write letters the old fashioned way, on paper, with pretty colored pens.

Read that daunting book you’ve had on your shelf for years. For me, it's Old Path, White Clouds, by the beloved Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh. Relax a little - eat pasta and ice cream. After that, take a bellydance class via Zoom! Have a kissing marathon with your shelter-in-place companion. Find solace in prayer and meditation.

For those who enjoy the company of their families and their partners, there is a special kind of bliss in being together, and being safe. One hopes that our communication skills will improve, by sheer density of opportunity to practice them, combined with the powerful need to understand and help each other during this global emergency.

A friend gently explained to me that the well known saying “May you live in interesting times” (considered a curse) was popularized by President Kennedy to remind us that great challenges generate great progress. The Chinese saying was actually “Heroes come from turbulent times.” 
When we face our fears with as much grace as we can, we become heroes.

How will we progress? Perhaps we’ll learn that we really are just earthlings, all of us astronauts, and that we need to wake up to this reality more than ever before. Perhaps we will find more ways to love and care for each other, and for our magnificent, one-of-a-kind planet. Perhaps all of this will, ultimately, be healing.

The cover of our early edition of Thich Naht Hanh’s book A Guide to Walking Meditation, shows him as a young man, standing beside a country road with a big smile on his face, a tall sunflower as his walking staff.

He says, “I put my palms together, like a lotus bud, and pray that we all find peace.” May it be so.

Black Phoebe

Winter is the time of platinum light here on the coast, and this is most clear on gray, cold mornings at dawn. We had several mornings like this at the start of the new year last week. I love the turning of the year, in this case, the decade, using this time for reflection and seeking a sense of renewal and peace.

There's a sweet little bird I watch daily here, a Black Phoebe, whose plaintive call, tee-hee, tee-hoo, is punctuated by her action of flying out from her perch, then back to it. She flies out, tee-hee, then flies back, tee-hoo. Pretty goofy, really. Apparently she swoops out to catch insects, then, conserving energy, flies back. It's kind of like what we do each day: we wake up, sit down for coffee, sing out, then go out into the work world to gather necessary insects, um, resources. Then we fly back home. At any rate, I feel like this is what I do, tweet the old-fashioned way, go out into the world, tweet, return home to my perch.

Call it reverse anthropomorphism, seeing our similarities with the world's fragile and precious creatures. I just finished reading The Bees, by Laline Paull. This is some of the most imaginative writing I've read, a complex page-turner told from the point of view of  Flora 717, a most daring and inspiring worker bee. The bees' hunger for community and devotion is as great as their lust for nectar; they live in an elaborate hierarchy but each, from the priestess to the sanitation worker, feels the unconditional love of the Holy Mother.

Winter time brings a level of quiet that is unsurpassed. Strong winds blow away the clouds and the afternoon light falls at an oblique angle on the land.  A few days ago, in the early morning, I spotted a devilishly large bobcat strolling up to the woodpile behind my house. Bobcats are the gangsters of the neighborhood, with body-builder shoulders, wide, sly faces, dramatic black fur tips on their ears, and undignified, stubby tails. We both did a double-take, and I said, "You're not my kitty..." She trotted away towards the meadow, and when I followed her I felt her watching me from the edge of the oak forest.

Now the leaves from the maples, sycamores and elms have all fallen, the shoes of the past year have all dropped, the verdict is in on 2019. As the days lengthen slightly, we make resolutions, the jonquils bloom, and it's bar closing time for the Great Horned Owls as they stop hooting and start nesting.

Sensing ineffable impermanence in the stillness of winter on the coast is a gift; it distills into daily life when we interrupt the frantic pace that can consume us.  Someday, each of us will "fall off our perch" as they say, and may it be in a fulfilled state, a blissful surrender to the light.

Liberty Seeds

 

Nothing in the world
is as soft and yielding as water.

Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible,

nothing can surpass it.

Lao-Tzu, Tao te Ching

Liberty seeds

The propane tank is at 25%, tribes of earthworms are emerging everywhere, and the cat had a seizure. I've stopped bothering to check the rain gauge. While we still have plenty of coffee, rice and beans, I’m afraid that we may run out of that vital supplement: chocolate. 

It’s been a rough month on top of a crazy year. Sixty inches (that's my height) of precipitation in two short months. In early January I made a trip  to my mother’s house and on my drive home a mud / rock / tree slide happened in the Big Sur Valley, closing down that stretch of highway for days. I spent a week with dear friends in Carmel and longed for home despite ongoing punishing storms.

I was willing to climb with a backpack over the rock slide at the bottom of the ridge to hide under the covers with my beloved, but decided to be prudent instead.

A month later I was about to head north again, and wisely re-thought the  trip after looking at the forecast. I also caught a nasty cold that kept me in bed on Sunday, February 12. That day the Pfeiffer Canyon bridge was designated as a serious hazard, thanks to the lucky observations of the man who spent considerable time under the span. 

So these past two weeks I have reveled in being here on the ridge and not on the “other side” despite hardships and anxiety. One morning we awoke to snow on the mountains and a bright rainbow over the ocean. We’ve enjoyed candlelight dinners and then gone early to bed, to sleep like little animals in a burrow. Again and again we listened in the darkness to pounding rain and howling winds, wondering what the morning would bring.

It’s felt like we were living at the bottom of an aquarium. Enormous trees tossed their branches like kelp fronds and even the air burbled and hissed with endless wetness. Meanwhile, the frogs were delirious, croaking epic operas all night long.

Last night we dined on sardines with wasabi sauce, served with a flair as “poor man’s sushi”. We’ve found the time to read, do yoga in the intermittent sunshine, to breathe and to think. I’ve finally opened Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces, and am finding inspiration in every well-crafted phrase.

We’re looking at several months to a year of difficult crossings out of Big Sur to the North. The exit South is un-traversable until a nail-soil wall is in place, the Old Coast Road is a river, and Nacimiento-Ferguson road over the Santa Lucia Mountains is crumbling.

It’s as if Momma Big Sur stomped her foot, took down her hair and did a full-body shimmy for weeks, saying “Enough is enough!” She has reclaimed her craving for chaos, her destructive power.

Perhaps she got tired of staying in shape for the whole wide world, constantly at her door, and decided instead to give us a taste of her sloppy, scary, gorgeous self. Now, as the storm cycle subdues, we feel her calm out-breath, and it’s delicious.

While repairs are forthcoming and the powers that be are strategizing, those of us on the ground here are also discreetly celebrating the solitude, the reduction in distractions, and the re-awakening of all the nature around us. When the rains stop, the birds sing.

Systems are falling into place, too. My poor gray kitty had a bizarre seizure. This taught me that trying to subdue an animal that is frothing at the mouth with my bare hands is not a good idea. After sustaining kitty stigmata in my right palm, I called our community’s Big Sur Health Center.

To my astonished delight the center's resourceful doctor put antibiotics on a helicopter headed down the coast that afternoon. I picked it from the pilot, who smiled at me and waved the brown paper bag holding the drugs when he landed on the heli-pad. It was a movie-worthy moment. (Note to self, next job – helicopter pilot?)

Due in part to the lack of affordable housing in the area, many of those who do important work in the kitchens of the affected businesses live outside of Big Sur. Instead of the grand tradition of restaurants opening their walk-ins to feed hungry, trapped employees and locals, they are simply closing down. On Valentine’s Day, we had one of the last ambrosia burgers Nepenthe will be serving for a while.

Anticipating this, many of us blessed enough to live between mile marker 29 and 45.5 have stocked our pantries in preparation for this kind of event. A bit of a doomsday perspective has helped, as do vegetable gardens, of course.

We slid under the wire on this one, as we acquired 20 cubic feet of dirt a week ago, filling our little truck. Just before we crossed Pfeiffer Canyon bridge, already beginning to look like a roller-coaster, we were informed that there would be no more traffic on it of any kind, ever. We felt like trapeze artists as we drove delicately across the middle of the sinking span in a lane marked by orange cones.

Driving down the rocky coast in the sunshine that day, we saw a painter friend at her easel on the wrong side of the stone wall, 500’ above a cove filled with barking sea lions. While some have hiked and ridden horses on the highway these past weeks, our friend informed us that earlier that day a young woman had sailed past her on a skateboard, completely naked. Brrrrr!

Today is blessed sunshine; the lights go on when you flip the switches, the washer and dryer are doing their holy work. Outside I pull up large swaths of tenacious scotch broom, freeing invasive roots from rocky soil that has become soft clay, almost butter.

Some time ago we bought several cans of “Liberty Seeds” from survivalseeds4patriots.com. We have beets, cucumbers, corn, lettuce, kale, spinach, carrots, onions, peppers, and more - all in super-compact, not-yet-germinated, form. 

As soon as the rain stops for a few days and it gets a little warmer, we’re going to put dirt into two large circular canvas pots and sow these mysterious seeds. It’s a miracle that something so tiny will create a plant that we can eat in the months to come, and we are hopeful.

We're on a kind of frontier now, where communication, patience and self-reliance are all crucial. Simple seeds can provide freedom in the midst of chaos. We're looking forward to a sumptuous Victory garden, more appropriate now than ever. 

Rain Drum

Our Round House

encircles us in the storm.

The ceiling flutters, then snaps taut

under thrumming raindrops 

that bombard us like endless thoughts -

pummeling us into sleep,
into dreams...

our canoe springs free as

poisons wash away 
downstream

we plunge into
possibility -

into

stillness.

How much stronger we are

in this Rain Drum,

this

quiet.


--for Torrey, on his birthday!

Alchemical Fire

And so it begins, I thought this past Monday as I woke to the chop-chop-chop of helicopters flying low in the early morning sky.

Then, at 9am someone flipped a switch somewhere and the power went dead. Good thing we'd checked with bloggers bigsurkate.wordpress.com and xasauantoday.com to know the first back burn in our corner of the Soberanes fire was officially in progress.

The magical marine layer just off the ridge was the view downhill from the flames behind me, a comforting contrast.
                                 
"We breathe smoke and eat dirt" report the firefighters. We learned this from the fireman who drew sentry duty on the ridge one night, a welcome break from the Coast Ridge fire line. To keep him company he met a very special dog, who loves men in yellow uniforms, especially when they don't mind tossing the ball.


It's part of living on the coast, this crazy hopefully just once-a- decade ballet of fire, fire-fighters, equipment and community. Everything fuses in the crucible of adventure.

Forget about sleeping well, or pursuing any normal activities with single-mindedness. We are sensing each breeze, analyzing each column of smoke, studying topo maps and Google earth until we're bleary-eyed. We assertively inform each new batch of firefighters about our water tanks and hydrants, our clearance concerns and exit plans, if we have them.

But, because this is Big Sur, we count our blessings to be on this roller-coaster ride in a war zone.

On the southwest flank of the fire, we are lucky. Emoticons of four leaf clovers everywhere. We've had time to prepare in all kinds of ways. What we've waited for almost a month is now here, the  dreaded and welcomed back-burns. If all goes well, fire will meet fire in the canyon behind us and move far, far away...

The valiant fire crews, mostly rural people, are even greater heroes now as some have family near the Cedar Fire and other blazes across the state. Can you say "climate change"? I have it firsthand from the elder firemen, leading their young crews like gentle bull-elks, that yes, we have always had fire and yes, these monster fires are happening more frequently. Now unfortunately firefighting (along with yoga and cannabis) is a growth industry in California.

In times of stress, our usual distractions do not work to keep us out of the difficult present. Even the habits that we most enjoy fall by the wayside as we are given the opportunity to practice alchemy. We can make what is painful powerful, through a kind of active surrender. As the old song says, Que será, será, baby. The golden glow of the present moment is always with us, even as we wait for what will come.

Watching God

As I write this on Sunday afternoon here on the lawn, tendrils of fog float out over the sea. A spotter plane soars above, moving northwest, looking for sparks from the Soberanes fire, blazing about five miles away from us. Hooray spotter plane! It soars up and down the coast non-stop now, a comforting part of the enormous effort to control the wildfire which blasted into our world last week, changing lives forever.

White, with a bright orange stripe below its wings, the plane reminds me of the mango colored koi in my pond. What will happen to the koi should a fire come? Last time the firefighters took the time to refill the pond and saved them. The fishes’ element is water, so they are presumably safe beneath its cool, glassy surface. Our elements are earth and air, elements we pray will cooperate in keeping our homes safe.

Topography, wind, heat and water are all concerns as we move forward into the projected next few weeks of the 37,000 acre (and growing) inferno, so far burning slowly south and east into the Ventana Wilderness. Hooray also for the bulldozer drivers building a fire-break on the Coast Ridge Road! As oblivious tourists slip by in a steady stream on the  highway, dozer drivers move up nearby Torre Canyon to burrow great lanes of dirt that will keep the flames away.

Two days ago I wore a carpenters’ mask to clear my lungs of smoke. Unable to breathe, my impulse instead was to worry, throw away useless stuff (so much of it!) and take naps between gasps. Yesterday we weed-whacked the expansive meadow beside the house and moved underbrush out of the canopy of the forest. We've also hooked up hoses to fire hydrants, drawn maps, and stored valuables in town. The house has a Zen look, missing many works by local artists I’ve acquired over the past two decades.

How we love our firefighters and those who follow them! They are Earth-wise heroes who do the opposite of what normal humans do in fires. While we may hold the line as long as possible and then run to relative safety, they move towards danger, feel the heat, and outwit the flames. 

We've stocked the fridge with beer and bottled water should firefighters appear, but today I surrender and drink a pale ale as I make calls to see how my neighbors are faring. The talk is all of bulldozer lines, back burns (one scheduled for tomorrow 3 miles north of us, please cross your fingers) water tanks, hoses, who’s staying stoic (or not) and that ideal constellation of variables known as defensible space. 

It’s a “praise the lord and pass the ammo” moment. We pray to our many gods, pagan and otherwise, as the sound of weed-whackers and chainsaws fill the air. I water prodigiously, soak flowerbeds and lawns, mulch piles of leaves, then place flowers on the statue of Naga, Hindu Goddess of the Spring.  In the universal tradition, I light a candle each night before Blessed Mother Mary, and each morning I chant Sat Nam, visualizing protection from cold, flowing, sacred rivers.

Last night I read aloud a passage from a favorite novel to my husband. Facing a disaster (this one a hurricane in Florida in the 1930’s) the characters, trapped by circumstances and unable to flee, wait in their shacks in the Everglades as the massive storm approaches. “They seemed to be staring at the dark, but their eyes were watching God.”

We watch God here in Big Sur too, imprinting singular moments onto our souls.  When fire comes, and loss looms nearby, this spiritual practice is indescribably poignant.

Today the air is cool, yet each suspicious blast of wind brings dread. A momentary sirocco makes the neighborhood hawks circle and swoop, upsetting a family of woodpeckers wearing flashy red berets. They nod their heads and cackle thanks as I inadvertently spook the perched raptor out of the oak tree. A red-shouldered hawk, swift and sturdy, harlequin checkerboard of wings and pivoting tail.

This afternoon, shadows of the spreading elm tree's graceful branches dance across the carpet of springy grass. My dog pants beside me, begging me to throw his ever-present pine cone. My Siamese cat comes by meowing and demands a cuddle. All these living beings seem blissfully unaware of the danger possibly headed our way.

The sea, our ancient mother, is calm today. Gentle, rippling swells move south along the land’s edge. Hundreds of annoying insects, typical of the season, buzz by. Wind chimes ring peacefully from a corner of the garden as my bare feet relax, tickled by the warm grass, a moment of peace...

Cal Fire's plane flies overhead once more, engines whining as it heads southeast. The leaves of the trees sigh in the wind. Just now, a large flame-colored monarch butterfly swirls up and down, back and forth, against a backdrop of indigo sea, surfing invisible currents before my eyes.