In the Land of Point and Click

Once upon a time, many years ago now, I decided I wanted a more peaceful life. So I put my stuff in storage and spent a year in the goldfish bowl at Esalen Institute, learning to cry, build healthy boundaries, and look people in the eye when I talked about my feelings.

Next stop was re-entering the world of work, again, but in a kinder, gentler way. I learned to make cappuccinos as a barista, and to curl ribbon as a shop girl. Stepping out of the corporate hustle that had been my professional life to date was a blessed relief.

Then, I found I was buying groceries on my charge card. Milking goats and making cheese wasn't ideal for retirement planning. So I dusted off my resume and jumped back in: front-desk jobs, librarian gigs, executive assistant, factotum. At one point, I worked three jobs for over a year.

When I joined the management team at a local historic Inn, I was thrilled to go back to school, earning a professional certification in Human Resources. Made sense, I thought, as so many of us spend our lives working for The Man (whether we know it or not). Why not make it a little easier and more respectful?

I loved understanding and implementing fundamental and compassionate workplace ethics. A community where work could really be "Love made visible" as Rilke says. I breathed easier every time I entered the door, smelled the hearth fire and heard guests laughing over their breakfasts.

Today, I embrace again the path that recalls my original dream: a life that, with continued good luck, hard work and prayer, will grant me peace and success in this beautiful land. Nuestra hermosa tierra.

Big Sur is the Land of Point and Click, where simply holding a camera to your eye and pushing a button yields beauty. And beauty, to paraphrase Tolle, makes the mind stop. Which is also what gives this coastal community its endless appeal, to millions of visitors each year. When the mind stops, no matter how briefly, we find peace.

So here is another of my recent offerings to the tide of beauty that ebbs and flows in Big Sur, depending upon your openness to her gifts...


With love,
Linda

Romancing the Sur

Like a mighty ship of the high seas from centuries ago, those of us who live here refer to Big Sur as a "she". The curves of the landscape are her curves: mountains sloping down to the sea become thighs gently opening to incoming tides. Ridge top valleys rest in the afternoon sun like concave tummies, swelling hills are really high round hips, breasts and dimpled bums.

Loving this rough and tumble, wildly beautiful Big Sur isn't easy. She's tough, and she's worth it, but sometimes you wonder...

She's fickle, and when she does treat you right, there are no guarantees that her love will last. She demands real-world sacrifices, which you often make for years before clearly seeing your choices. She's touchy, and sometimes harsh, as anyone will say who's felt the sting of local gossip, or paid the price for a wrong move, especially on the road.

You're cold and out of firewood, and she doesn't care. You're lonely and far from friends, she laughs. You struggle in your daily life and party to forget your troubles, while she just goes on dishing out her own dramas, oblivious to yours. You watch yourself grow older in the comfort of her company, but you are always waiting for the other shoe to drop, too.

Devastating fires, treacherous rock slides and torrential storms contrast with gentle days that you wish could last forever, sunsets you'll remember on your deathbed and an existential solitude that heals your soul.

When she reveals herself, it's only in those moments when you are authentically open to her charms. She'll surprise you as you drive around a bend in the road: There she is, veils of mist swirling up to her sturdy knees, those classic cliffs plunging down to the ocean and receding down the coast, so beautiful that you just want to cry.

She'll seduce you with the lightest touch: moments of profound, eloquent stillness in the mornings. She takes your breath away with her baby pink dawns and scarlet sunset skies. Always changing, she teases with her great majesty, plays hard to get with her astonishing beauty. Now you see her, now, as you focus on your own puny life, you don't.

She is Queen of the sounds of silence: serenading frogs, whispering owls, rumbling surf, moaning trees, wing-beats. Most of all, she is a great teacher, probably more teacher than lover, really. When she gives of herself it is when we are ready, when we have done our work, when we have shared our joys, and pursued our passions.

The lunar Goddess must make her home in Big Sur, too. She rises full above the ridge-top, a redwood tree silhouetted against her bone white orb. She spills her bright light down canyons onto the expansive ocean, and we are transformed.

photo by Toby Rowland-Jones

Retreat

The pump

and snap of modern life

charges us up

with relentless dreams,

infinite distractions. We strike

poses projecting purpose.

Escape: Tranquil ennui

on spur of mountain range reaching

down to the sea.

Hummingbirds dance to hurdy-gurdy music.

Rattlesnakes buzz a slow warning from

hidden places.

All night

Orchestral crickets sing a sleigh-bell song.

At daybreak

Endless flies whirl by.

Grasshopper days of summer draw to a close.

House filled with laughter now still in the heavy heat.

The dirt pants in thirst.

Scent of warm earth baking rises up in greeting.

Retreat

Retreat to the land of sunsets

and flying saucers.

There’s nothing better, and yet

Every flight has its price.

Sharp Shinned

                                                

Sharp Shinned

I fly

      Wind lifts me

            Up warm spur of earth

I seek

   Light, water

      Small furry, feathered

           pulsing energies that flee –

To soothe my morning hunger

Thriving lush

           scent of water

Fluttering leaves scatter

     Sun

          into bright dancing prisms

I fly

Strong steady beats 

      to rosy nimbus of flesh

            that stands near shiny upright pool

Green-gold

        shimmering 

                Flash of light

Wait! Not right!

Strange aura deflects my flight

     Sharp unknown scent of human breath

                     I bank right

Settle in cool leaves

Watch her

 with my golden eyes.

 

Samsara in a Bottle

Big Sur serves up Fire like no place else on Earth. There's the epic grandeur of the destruction, framed against ocean and sky. Giant flames that dance like demons through the forest, racing towards your home. You already feel you're a tiny part of the cosmos here, and that sense is amplified by the terror of fire. 

Of all the possible rock-bottom, soul-twisting life events, fire comes near the top of the list. As several of my dear friends learned this past month, great loss and radical shifts of perspective go hand in hand.

Sometimes those shifts are subtle, like a whisper, other times stark and in-your-face, but the gifts fire brings are always profound.

Life turns on a dime, as my Dad used to say, and the fast-moving Pfeiffer Fire which began just before midnight on December 15 was a shattering example of this fact. A few key individuals who happened to be awake, who saw flames and smelled smoke, sounded the alarm that saved several lives. People fled with the clothes on their backs and nothing else. 30' flames in driveways and gardens led to emergency convoys over back roads and down the mountain to safety.

So many acres, so many homes, so many people displaced, disasters are always reported with numbers, as if the numbers can help us to digest the event and somehow convey the power of the story. Those who are living the reality of losing, almost losing, or fighting to save their homes, know that integrating this particular fire into their personal experience is going to take the tincture of time.

And then, the soul gifts, just in time for Christmas: 

We are connected, none of us is really alone. The Pfeiffer Fire produced an outpouring of love and support, donations and concern, bringing all of us closer into the circle of community. Also, we are stronger than we know. Especially I think of my friend who fought the fire for hours in her flip-flops (and probably could have done it in her heels.)

You are not your stuff. What an amazing feeling it is to walk away from a lifetime of collecting belongings and know that you really only deeply miss one or two, or well, maybe, 3 or 4, things. And what you miss takes on a special significance. Your favorite painting. The silk robe, the teapot. Grief over these losses is offset by the simple fact that you and your loved ones are alive.

Renewal and rebirth really happen. As hard as it may be to believe at first, bit by bit we come back to our selves, transformed by fire into something stronger and more brilliant than before. We know our depths - everything is more precious to us - and so we can re-create our lives from that place. Spring is coming, and with a little blessed rain, it will be magnificent.

Shortly after my 30th birthday my home burned down in the Oakland Hills, part of an urban firestorm that took thousands of homes and 25 lives. For a time I lived in a state of grace, where every person and object seemed to glow from the inside, reverberating with light. I had just begun to learn about Buddhism, and the concepts of nirvana and samsara were fresh in my mind. 

One afternoon I found myself fascinated by the contents of the medicine cabinet in my friend's 1940's era apartment. Everything I looked at during those days I saw simultaneously whole and exploded into ash. Peering behind the mirrored door of the cabinet one item jumped out at me from the middle shelf, a small perfume bottle, labeled in red: Samsara. Samsara, the turning wheel of existence, the world of suffering and desire. 

Days before the fire, I recall stopping and really looking, almost absorbing, the fresh blooms of the Lily of the Nile in my garden. I treasured that moment for years, and still see it as a way to step off the merry-go-round of suffering, and into the richness Life offers us every day. 

Now for another gift that fire brings: a deeply felt conviction that we have only this moment, and that living fully in each moment brings us peace. May this peace be our New Year's wish for our neighbors recovering from the Pfeiffer Fire, and for all of us in the years to come.

Pfeiffer Fire photo by Linda Sonrisa

Playing with Time

All my watches are broken. They sit in a bag in my closet, waiting to come back to life.  This past Sunday as Daylight Saving Time concluded for the year, I found myself pondering Time.

As a chronically tardy person, arriving on time would be a breakthrough, while arriving early would be revolutionary.

It's a comfort to know that I share this condition with others. The moral superiority of punctual people is lost on us. We dash off to each date with the high drama of the White Rabbit.

As the pendulum swings from the to-the-nanosecond accuracy I vow to follow with each time change, my clocks creep forward. The timer on the microwave is 20 minutes fast to keep me moving out the door and into the world, while the car clock is a quarter of an hour ahead, to keep me from driving like the proverbial bat out of hell down Highway One.

Playing with time, I hope, eternally, to arrive on time. (Only my wall clock is stopped at 4:20, in honor of the dear friend who bequeathed it to me, his time having run out.)

Unless I am at work, where I confess to being a bit of a clock watcher, I guess-timate time throughout the day. Perhaps the garden needs a sun-dial, the original clock,  to monitor passage of that big ball of  fire in the sky. Maybe I should acquire that most poetic of timepieces, an hour-glass, and watch the grains of sand slip away.

Right now, as I write this, the sun filters throughout the leaves of the elm tree above me, and I imagine it's after noon, but not by too much.

And now, the light has moved again, as I sit under the trees and feel it on my back as it spreads across the lawn at an oblique angle. What a privilege it is to feel the sun move across the sky, to sense the hours of the day move forward, measured only by the changing quality of the light.

I hear sea lions barking from a cove to the north of here, the sound travels all this way.  In the dawn I heard the yipping of too-near coyotes and multitudes of chirping finches. Sometimes the canyon air carries the breath of spouting whales, from the ocean way below.

Raking maple leaves, I watch them fall delicately, slowly, around me. I take laundry off the prettiest clothes-line in the world: removing a sun-dried white sheet to see the coastline to the south, the fog hugging the ridges like a soft down blanket tucked up into each canyon, up against each cliff.

Perhaps knowing the accurate time is over-rated, another side-effect of modern life. Living in the present moment can be accomplished gently, too. Maybe all I need to remember is the line from that wonderful old song, "Enjoy yourself... It's later than you think."

Enjoy yourself, it's later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you're still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it's later than you think

First Rain

We are so happy when it happens, ideally on a sleepy morning cuddled under the covers. First, there is the sound, that gentle splashing of water on roofs, decks, lawns.

It begins slowly, and perhaps you think it's drippy fog. But no, this morning it was genuine, grade AA raindrops. Then, an hour into the moist symphony of sprinkles, the rhythm picked up and it is Rain, Blessed Rain, for real.

Little birds wake up and trill their delight, fluffing their feathers between splashes, feeding on freshly washed seeds. Each drop lands with a perfect still note, a precious daub of wetness touching earth, stream, tree and flower.

Precipitation is protection here, the beginning of the end of late summer when we review our valuables - packing them into boxes next to the front door for a quick exit in case of forest fire.

So the rain means freedom from worry, as well as a time to reflect on yet another turn of the seasons.

I sit up in bed, drink coffee and pet my cat, relishing a moment of domestic bliss. All the beings in the garden rejoice in the refreshment.

Now I must sacrifice comfort for adventure. Out the door to dance on the grass, to lift my head to the heavens, to wash my soul in the freshest, purest water there is.

and from e.e. cummings:

...nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the color of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing (i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands -- from W, 1931