Living with ?????

For years now, I've had a secret friend, who lives in the cabinet in my office, sitting on top of a bin of paper clips. He's rotund, shiny, black and plastic. When I'm agitated or curious, I turn him over and see what he has to say.

My least favorite answers are "Concentrate and Ask Again" and "My Reply is No." Much, much better is "You May Rely on It" and "YES" in resounding capital letters. If I've asked the same question over and over and over, essentially demanding a positive response, the YES feels as if he's saying, "Enough already!"

Like throwing chicken bones or casting lots, reading my friend's bright white words on a ghostly blue cube connects me, in some strange way, with the un-manifested, with what is yet to be. While Rilke has said that it's more important to live the questions than to have the answers, my plastic, fantastic, magical friend comforts me. Especially since I practice patience (or is it obsession?) in searching for my answers.

A teacher once told me that our needing to know is a kind of addiction, a part of human nature that seems emphatically expressed in Western culture. When we don't know, when we take those leaps of faith, we can plunge ourselves into considerable discomfort. It would be so nice to be certain that we are "right," that the outcome of our actions will be good, enhance our lives, make us better people.

I've known precious few individuals who have that elusive, rock-solid certainty about what they're doing in Life. Those who go directly from point A to point B, in their personal and professional lives, who laugh at horoscopes, and would never dream of having an emotional response to a fortune-telling toy. I wish I was like them and I detest them, simultaneously!

There is a freedom to be found in laughter. My friend's gift to me is that I feel lighter in the goofy process of consulting him. Originally marketed in 1946 as the "Syco-Seer" he's about as silly as a fortune cookie and only slightly more complex than tossing a coin. But his predictions can be profoundly satisfying. At turning points in my life, I generally ask the Universe, again and again and again, in a variety of ways. Then, when I (finally!) act, at least I feel like I've covered my bases.

But then, my most favorite answer is Ilsa's in Casablanca, in 1940's Paris: "There's only one answer to all our questions," she coos in her satin dressing gown, as she plants a big wet one on Rick, and they melt into each other's arms.


Mattel's Magic 8 Ball: Does it hold the Answers?

Here come the Lupines!

Today is the first day of Spring, and here in the Sur it is lovelier than ever. We've had our gentle and only slightly scary Spring rains (200,000+ acres of back country did not flood the valley or close the road) and even the mysterious Chantrelles made a comeback appearance, peeking out through the ash and leaves beneath the oak trees.

Now comes the time of the Lupine and the Poppies. Walking through a field of lupine flowers is divine: imagine Grandma canning grape jelly on a springtime afternoon in her farmhouse, a warm breeze wafting through the screen door, carrying the scent of grapes cooking in sugar. Like the peasants in Monty Python's Dennis Moore skit, we too could possibly enjoy a lupine sorbet. Something that smells so delicious seems like it would also taste good.

Smelling the warm earth and the sweetness of the small, ankle-level purple blooms smeared across the mountain, you feel Life coming up out of the Earth here like no where else I know.

We're now preparing for our annual Pagan Spring Festival, aka Easter. Several years ago I re-read Oscar Wilde's The Selfish Giant and became determined to share where we live with children. (Finding pretty eggs and chocolate bunnies in the green grass of Partington Ridge is an experience no child should miss.) Wilde tells us that Spring cannot really arrive without laughter and love filling our hearts. The metaphor for renewal and redemption is almost too much for me!



This year, the California poppies splash like gold dust (or saffron, as a friend says) across hilltop meadows, contrasting with soft purple carpets of lupines. Nature is the best designer, fiery golds and cool blues complementing each other against the mountains' bright green canvas. Everyone is talking about one special spot where the poppies really, well, POP.

As a young person, I remember learning that our state is the "golden state" which only makes sense, as anyone born in California will tell you. In Camp Fire Girls we learned that one should never, ever pluck the state flower. Here's a little poem from those days which I often think of at this time of year:

I will be the happiest person under the sun.
I will see a thousand flowers and not pick one!

Photos by Linda Sonrisa
Photo of Camille and the Wedding Tree by Toby Rowland-Jones

Missing da goaties

It's funny how ten years ago can seem a different lifetime. What happens to us each decade? What skin do we shed, how do we re-grow ourselves, and into what? We are unfolding mysteries, always.

From 1998-2001 we raised goats on Partington Ridge. A funny story from the beginning, when our back-to-the-earth friend showed up one afternoon with about a dozen goats crammed into the back of his pickup, under the camper shell. Three Mamas and lots of babies.

When this same friend taught me how to milk the nanny goats, I felt I was crossing back into another time, another world. Yes, I’m going to firmly grasp this animal’s teats and pull down hard, squeezing out streams of warm animal-smelling milk. It was delicious.

My hands got really strong, as an old friend commented when we held hands several months after I became a milkmaid. Milking the goats made me feel connected to people around the world who live close to nature, and gave me a wonderful sense of calm each morning. I was even able to feed my puppy directly from the source, shooting a stream of milk into his open mouth.

We made goat cheese too, cooking it slowly over our stove or leaving it to turn in large jars set in the sun. We’d flavor it with herbs and sell it to the fancy-pants restaurants in the valley. People loved it!

But milking the goats entailed breeding the goats, since milk production is ostensibly for goat kids, not humans. The babies came and then the milk came. So, we'd invite the billy goat over, avert our eyes, and a few months later watch (if we caught them at the right moment) the nanny goats give birth. They delivered their kids calmly, lying down in the straw and bleating occasionally, with a resounding bleat at the moment of truth.

Once I left two nannies with an enormous billy, big as a large pony, for a few weeks. As I was leaving the paddock, both of them ran towards the fence after me, bleating in distress, as if they were saying “doooooon’t leeeeeeeeave us here with this beeeeeeeeast!” But we did, and they both came home pregnant, producing a bumper crop of kids.

Mostly, I miss the babies, spindly legged little damp guys with horizontal pupils. We’d help the fresh arrivals to stand up and nurse, made sure everyone was comfortable and well fed, and would depart the manger, leaving the nanny madonna to rest with her new family. The hard part was selling the billy (boy) babies for stew meat several months later.

There was a reason for this sale, other than the purely mercenary one: billy goats mature sexually really fast, in less than 6 months or so, and, well, they’re randy little buggers that will mate with their own mothers, aunts and sisters. Not to sit in judgement of course, they were simply full of themselves and their sexual mojo, in some very amusing ways.

I remember when Captain Fuzzy (yes, we named all of them) began to grow into his adult billy goat-hood: As I was milking his mom, Felicia, I looked over to see him in a wide stance, head dropped between his forelegs, peeing on his tummy and face. And relishing it. He lifted his little head and wrinkled his nose, taking a deep, blissful whiff. Ahhhh. Yeah! A grown up billy, as you might imagine, stinks to high heaven. The urine is their pheremonal cologne, and like a slightly oily Casanova, they love the way they smell.

But still, I was always unable to eat cooked goat even though my husband encouraged me to think of it as if I was munching on a carrot from our garden. It just didn’t’ work; I couldn’t enjoy eating Captain Fuzzy, or Bebop, or Sigh Happy, or any of our capricious friends. They weren’t particularly disciplined at clearing our thistles either, though I do have a sweet memory of chasing them out of our elderly neighbor’s garden, with his help.

So, our lives changed again. As we became more occupied with the world beyond the property, we dispersed our tribe of goats to local chefs and neighbors. The era of the goaties comes back to me each Spring, though, when I imagine them nibbling on all the lovely new green growth, and I wake up to cold mornings dreaming of fresh warm milk, and the peace that only a happy goat can provide.


Cappuccino, Curious and Bebop
Me and Sigh Happy
Green Acres Christmas, 1998 (photo by Jeff Prather)

Oscars on the Mountain

Every year, on a Sunday evening in February, we host an Oscars party that has ranged from the raucous to the intimate. We hand out ballots, dress up, drink bubbles and dish on the celebrities. Empress Sula clues us in on each star’s astrological sign, and gives pithy commentary on the state of their relationships. “Ha, Brad and Angelina just had a fight,” she surmised, to general amusement.

Even where we can see the celestial constellations so clearly, Tinseltown’s stars have their appeal. We joked that we would spray paint a path from the front door to our couch, Partington Ridge's own red carpet. This year's show seemed homey and kind, and as the six of us noshed our way through delicious homemade lasagna and swilled champagne, there were a few tears as well.

Toby dressed in his tux, (his best "up yours Daniel Craig" look) white shirt open to the waist, bow tie dangling from the collar. I wore tight pants and a push-up bra under a slinky top, going for that starlet look. Our best girl (and singing instructor) Lisa G. (who I coaxed out of her cabin fever by belting out the theme song to "Cabaret") wore her Snow White dress and we giggled all night.

Our lasagna chef won the prize for guessing the most correct winners, happy that his favorite "WALL-E" received the golden statuette. Other favorites of the evening were Penelope Cruz, Mickey Rourke and the courageous Sean Penn. Our exclusive Oscars party continued until late evening, complete with dancing (yours truly demonstrating her just-learned Flamenco moves) more laughter and a pause to admire the real stars outside, sparkling above us on the dark carpet of heaven.

The Long Drive Home

If you live in Big Sur, you pretty much have to enjoy driving. (You also have to have a reliable vehicle, and after 15 years here we have some hair-raising tales on that subject.) There are lots of different strategies for making the 80 mile round trip excursion to "town" i.e. Carmel / Monterey, for grocery shopping, doctor's visits, classes, and social events.

Some folks make once-a-week "town runs" and are content to curl up on their mountain-tops, working in their gardens and hiking up and down their ridges for the rest of the week. Others drive to town twice a week or more for work or personal reasons. We are the road warriors. Good music is required, or as our postal worker says, you can just "listen to the sound of the rubber on the road," which has its own hypnotic power.

I have noticed a migration of certain fortunate neighbors to second homes or studios outside of Big Sur. They create "love-nests" or art-work spaces or rent houses so their children attending Carmel schools don't have to get on that bright yellow bus at the crack of dawn each weekday. Some are bona-fide nomads, "peripatetic" as my friend Archie says, making their living in places far and wide, in California and across the country. They return to their sanctuaries in Big Sur to re-charge their batteries, to rest, to touch the earth again.

For my family, it seems to be about driving. Lots of it. Three years ago when both of our used vehicles died spectacular deaths (our pickup truck lost its steering and we plowed into an enormous poison oak hedge) we bellied up to the bar and bought much newer and safer cars.

Each bend in the road has a name, each spot its special beauties and hazards. There's "Old Faithful" where the big rocks explode down the cliff face after winter storms; there's the curve of pristine Little Sur, marked by a cross where a young man flew off the edge some time back, 200' down and into the river below. Suicide? Or just late to work? We'll never know. Cows sometimes cross the road at Lighthouse Flats, and cattle have actually become an "in-joke" as the excuse for alcohol-induced rollovers. "I swerved to avoid a cow," people say.

But that part is really not funny, since drinking and driving (a clear no-no given the nature of Highway One) is an unfortunate behavior that has hurt many local people. There's no late-night police presence, we know the roads, we're immortal. This past year has offered up some sobering examples of how this is definitely not the case. Today we see more "dry" weddings and parties, more car-pooling, more conscientious bar-tending. The community here is growing up in that regard.

But back to that long drive home. Once a week or more, late at night, with my car full of groceries and my body happily aching from a couple of hours of dance classes, I follow the winding road down the coast back to Partington Ridge. Carefully dimming my brights at each approaching car, listening to wild music (or not), singing to myself (or even talking to myself—I confess, long conversations of the things I'd wished I'd said, or want to say, kind of a psychic dumping process) I make the drive I sometimes feel I could do by heart.

If only our cars were horse-drawn buggies. We could relax the reins in our laps and let the confident horses take us home, to their beds of straw and cups of fresh oats, us to our hot toddies and futons overlooking the sea. The trip to Big Sur was done this way by the pioneer types many years ago (more or less) but you can bet that they weren't doing it twice a week, or in order to take a yoga class.

When there is no traffic but me upon the road, and the moonlight shines on the ocean to my right as I drive south, I become aware that I am the only person on the planet in this moment to be sliding down the edge of the continent, like an ant traversing a rolling glass globe, slipping down the surface of the Earth to my home. I wonder about what all the other souls on Earth are up to, and meditate on the enormous geographical solitude of my long drive home.

Jupiter reflected on the Pacific Ocean
(photo by Toby Rowland-Jones)

Let's Celebrate the Safarians

Ronna Rio is Big Sur’s most inspiring metaphysical guide, and her medium is oil paint, shamanism and the human spirit. Her mission is to give her painting students (she has mid-wifed scores of them over the past 15 years) a deeper sense of their own divinity, by claiming their creativity in relationship to this land. “The painting process heals," she says, "and offers us the opportunity to transform matter into spirit, spiritualizing our instincts."

Ronna’s mother was an actress as well as a speech and drama teacher in Hollywood, a Scandinavian beauty who gave her daughter a sense of wholesome glamour. She began painting at age 10, and like many little girls, painted horses, going on to ride and jump these creatures in equestrian events. A Catholic school girl, she created altars of flowers and sequins, dedicating them to her favorite goddesses, the Virgin Mary and Marilyn Monroe.

Majoring in Art, Art Education and Psychology at San Jose State University, Ronna also studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. She then pursued a dream and trained wild animals with “affection trainer” Ralph Helfer, creator of Marine World / Africa USA. Working with animals— giraffes, water buffaloes, monkeys, lions and bears, gave her the deeper wisdom needed to work with people.

“I understand that, like with the animals, the most important thing for my students to overcome is fear. Learning to trust their imagination sets them free." Her grounded, confident approach to teaching helps her students understand that, “Being artistic is not necessarily a ‘gift’ but something we can learn and develop.”

Ronna began her career as an art teacher at Lake Tahoe’s Sierra Nevada College, where she taught design, sculpture, pastel, watercolor, and oil painting. She also obtained another degree while there, in Environmental Science. She currently teaches her students the design principles of painting, but the style is decidedly Expressionist. As a dynamic instructor, what she offers is always growing and changing.

One of Ronna's first students, Sula Nichols, credits her with teaching her how to use color. "Color is like learning a language. You look at a color and learn how to mix that color for the canvas, so that you can best convey what you feel. Ronna is also a supportive teacher, whose confidence in her students gives them confidence." Long-time student Marlene Adair adds, "I've studied with her for almost 10 years. She often says to me, 'Flame out, and let go! It works."


The Safarians, as Ronna's women's painting group is known, attend two series of classes year-long, one in the Fall, one in the Spring. The Fall series, which runs 14 weeks, is titled Painting Altars of Gratitude (An Inner Life Refuge.) This Spring's upcoming 12 week series is titled Tuning into the Immortal Rhythm of Nature's Forces. Students will paint Expressionistic landscapes of Big Sur's power spots.

The Fauves (French Expressionists of the early 1900's) is the school of painting Ronna identifies with most, and perhaps it’s no accident that Fauves means Wild Beasts. These painters went into new, colorful territory, much like her Safarians do now. Other influences she cites are Carl Jung, Eduard Munch, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Campbell (whom she studied with at Esalen Institute.) She adds her mentor, local painter and writer, Carolyn Kleefeld to her list. Carolyn, Ronna says, "has no inner critic, she is pure creativity, and it simply flows out of her."

In her classes, students discover their mythological journey, by painting and dialoguing with archetypes and symbols, discovered in a Jungian collage process. Ronna has developed what she calls "Matrix Painting." This is an autonomous method that begins by moving the paint playfully on the canvas, evoking and intuiting images from the unconscious for personal and planetary wisdom and healing. "All the transformative forces of nature move through us, both destructive and creative forces," she says. "As artists, we’re constantly destroying and creating, responding to these primal energies. We are Nature."

Living in Big Sur is the perfect laboratory for this life process. The contrast between epic natural beauty and pioneer style hardship (fires, snakebites, mudslides and all the rest) calls forth exponential personal growth.

During a snowstorm in Tahoe 20 odd years ago, her husband Michael Emmons called her to ask if she'd like to move to Big Sur. Curiously, she was reading Henry Miller's "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch" at that moment. Ronna and her husband lost their studio during the Basin Complex Fire last summer, but their home is still standing proud on the edge of Partington Canyon. "We have to practice radical acceptance no matter what happens," she says, "this is how we overcome fear."

“As Safarians we are nomads, and aren’t afraid to get lost. We explore new territory, making multi-dimensional discoveries," Ronna says. "Our map is oneness with the Divine in our creative process, and our paintings are like our journals and dreams, showing us the deeper meaning in our lives." She adds, "To honor the Divine within ourselves is our goal."

For more information about her classes, please contact Ronna directly at her Big Sur Studio: 831 667 2133.

All of the completed works by Ronna Rio shown above can be found at the Big Sur Gallery in Carmel.
Rio's work can also be seen at the Del Campo Gallery in Big Sur.
Ronna working at home, on Threshold.
Genesis of the Feminine
Worship of the Morning Star
Heading North in Paradise

Ronna with Twinkle

Yahrzeit for Bob Nash

February 10 marks a special day in our home, and in our lives, from now on. It's the day that our beloved nonagenarian, Bob Nash, passed away last year. A friend of ours recently told us that in the Jewish tradition, the death date of a loved one is marked by an annual memorial ritual called Yahrzeit.

While we won't be saying the Mourners Kaddish prayer for Bob tomorrow evening, we will light a candle and place it in front of his picture at Deetjens Inn's family dining room. Several of Bob's friends will be there, people who played with him, made art with him and took care of him during the past couple of decades here on Partington Ridge.

Yesterday afternoon, I said to my dog, Kip, let's go to Bob's house, and he trotted away down the path towards his shack without any hesitation. I sat in his "enlightenment chair" on this cold day and thought of the many hours he'd spent meditating there. Kip lay down at my feet, just as he did all those years while I'd read to Bob fairy tales and news of the world.

The flame of the Yarhzeit candle symbolizes the human soul, always dancing towards the greater light. We think Bob would like that. We also plan to call his spirit to us with our laughter and stories of his life. We will raise his famous toast: May your hearts be filled with love, with rainbows and with fragrant yellow roses.

While many of you who loved Bob can't be with us tomorrow night in the physical realm, we'll be sure to bring you into our circle in our hearts.

And we will recite these beautiful words of songstress Camille Bright-Smith:

The day you died I had a dream
Of lines like feathers shifting
Of two paths intersecting
Of faith like simple melodies
Of butterflies and spiders
Of silken webs and flowers
Of fine white hair flowing
Of you and Rosa glowing.

We love you, Bob.
Photos of Bob by Toby Rowland-Jones, Dick Sonnen