The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--55. Now, Space, and Walking Things Back

Walkabout the Rock, Steve Brown 2025

Writing this book has been an active discovery, not only as a project, but as a saner way to live my life.  It has been less about sharing what I know and more about recording how my approach to life is changing, and at least for me, in a manner that is easily identifiable as better.  Whether or not others have noticed the change or not, I do not know.  I do have my days when I seem to forget everything I've learned and behave as if I'd never began this journey.  However, overall, I spend less and less time reacting to world as I once did and more and more time being curious and open to now.  None of the ideas are my own.  However, one moment of realization was clearly my own.  Learning doesn't occur simply by receiving new information.  It occurs when you absorb it, and it becomes one with who you are.  That usually involves some experience that can be tested-out in your own mind.  Learning is active, verifiable, tangible, and changes the learner forever in ways big or small.  Writing this book has changed me.  I am not who I was previously.  This is how it generally progressed up until now:  

First, in January of 2022 I found out I had kidney disease, which for several months, Marci and I didn't know how serious it might be.  Furthermore, because of genetics, there was a small chance it could be Amyloidosis, which is very serious indeed.  The greater than usual possibility of my impending death made me acutely aware of time, especially time spent with Marci.  As our 25th anniversary was coming up, we decided to redo our honeymoon trip, which had been to Monterey because of my love of Steinbeck's work in general and specifically the book Cannery Row. 

Second, our car broke down in Salinas, which I now believe was no accident.  This provided me the opportunity to literally walk back through Steinbeck's work on our visit to The National Steinbeck Center.   And as luck (or providence) would have it, all the research books on Steinbeck's life and writing were half-off, allowing me ample resources to read while writing this book. 

Third, in the early stages of writing, I honestly felt Steinbeck was guiding the process, including the theme, which came to me the second day of working on the book: We are all connected, and what we choose to do now will impact our individual and shared realities through the eternities.

Fourth, while writing on September 14, 2023, I had the realization that although I'd been unhappy for a good chunk of my life, I'd never been unhappy while in the now--that whenever I was fully present, I was happy regardless of circumstances.  In that moment, I realized all my unhappiness was in my head and that if I'd spent all my life in the now, I would have been happy my entire life.  I even had the sense that except in rare traumatic events such as war, rape, abuse, etc., that it actually is impossible to be unhappy if one is intensely in the moment because being fully present brings an openness, understanding and empathy towards life and everyone around you that allows one to transcend things like a loss of a loved one, going through a divorce, or losing a child.  I had a sense that there is a type of joy that included deep sorrow and that type of joy was accessible through being fully present in the now, whatever that might entail.  All this I felt I knew in one moment while looking out my sliding glass door at a single sunflower glazed with late afternoon light.  However, I only felt I knew it.  That is close but not the same as knowing it.  I would need to experiment on it to know it more solidly.

So, I began to practice now-living.   It was and is still a struggle.  I don't always do it well.  My ego takes over, and I slip back into old ways of worry and living in my head and comparing myself to others and imagining crazy scenarios that don't even exist.  But overall, I do keep getting better and better at living in the moment, and sometimes I do it absolutely splendidly.  And when I do, I notice something very significant:  

Living in the now opens up space.  Space to observe, space to be still.  But most significantly, space to walk things back.  One day, I was talking to Marci, and we were heading towards an argument, and in that present moment I noticed how beautiful she is and how much I love her, and I had this thought I had never had before:  I can walk this back right now, in this very moment, and end this argument instantly.  I don't need to be right.  And I did do that, and it worked.  I don't even know if she knows it occurred, but I do.  All I had to do is give up my need to be right in exchange for something greater, that moment we were sharing together.  I didn't even have to admit I was wrong, which I didn't think I was.  I just didn't need to prove I was right.  The ego is all surface.  It cares nothing about integrity, morality, truth, especially not reality.  All it cares is about is perception--what others think. 

There is something about entering the now that totally obliterates the need to put on a show.  Mindfulness eradicates selfishness.  When we observe something acutely, we become one with it on some level.  I knew that well in sixth grade when I observed closely the cute freckles on Kelly's nose.  There was such a connection that it felt like love.  It always does.  I now feel that same connection to the bees in my garden and the small but great oaks in my front yard.  Living in the now connects us to life and opens up space--space to just enjoy but also space to revise our lives instantly, without any regrets.   For where there is no ego, there are no regrets.  Empathy for the feelings of others, yes.  But regret, no.  When you're fully in the present, you know all that matters is the choice you're making right now.  The past is gone, and the future will take care of itself, but based on this moment.  All life and all accountability is reduced to now.  It doesn't matter if you've needed to apologize to your son for ten years.  You can't do anything about that.  All you have to do is decide what you're going to do now.  And then do it.  And you don't even have to worry about how he'll receive it.  You can't do anything about that either.  But that apology will feel oh so good no matter the outcome because it has been weighing on you for ten years and because regardless of how it is received you will know it was needed.  Now obliterates guilt because when you're truly in the present you take care of whatever you can right now and don't worry about anything outside what you can do here, now, this moment.

Recently, I had a couple weeks where I let my ego take over again.  This led to worry, defensiveness, and ultimately some very bad behavior by me at a meeting at work where I could have severely damaged the relationship with my boss.  The old me would have just sat in that moment of regret and piled on the doom for a couple of weeks.  What have I done?   

But because I’ve spent enough time consciously in the now to know that ample space exists to walk back the ego at any time, once I came to my senses, I did just that. I set up a time with my boss to formally apologize. 

Apologize.  I can do that; you can do that; we can all do that. And each time one of us chooses to do that, the world becomes a little less broken, a little less fragmented, and a little more one—which it already is whether we like it that way or not.   That illusion of isolation, of separateness, of superiority and inferiority causes so much stress, pain and heartache, personally and globally because we act out the illusion as if it were real.  And so, the consequences are real even if based on a misinterpretation of reality.

Now makes us all equals in this moment, all just trying to get along the best we can based on the information we've gathered and experiences we've had.  Nothing I've written here is original, but it wasn't original for my sources either.   What made it original for them is the same thing that made it original for me.  They had one moment, or more likely a series of moments, where they had this realization:  I finally understand.   Currently, I practice living in the now very imperfectly.  But I have the sneaky suspicion that is true for my sources also.  Great ideas only get lived grandly one moment at a time.  I've read enough about John Steinbeck to know he could be a real jerk at times.  I assume the same about Wayne Dyer, and Gandhi, perhaps even the Buddha.  Christ may have been exempt from imperfection in this life, but I think even he must have been a novice once upon a time for evolution and growth seem to be universal laws. But flawed teachers don't change the universal truth: We are all connected, and what we choose to do now will impact our individual and shared realities through the eternities.

My hope is that just like when the first Steinbeck book fell into my hands, the many times I heard Doctor Daniel Sanderson speak at work, or after I rediscovered Wayne Dyer after almost 30 years, and I'd get these small ah-ha moments, I hope something said here will touch you as an original experience although I'm well aware there is nothing original here at all.  

The Tao, God, Love--they are eternal but only when witnessed from right here, right now.  And the moment we let our ego back in, they vanish until we once again enter that space where we are free to walk around, observe, just be.  Even if that mindfulness only lasts ten seconds, it can totally derail an entire drawn-out argument.

Look for those spaces.  Try it out.  See if it's not so for yourself.  There is so much space in a second if you just look for it.

That just may be how we find eternity when we're finally ready.  Right Now.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--54. The Void Between H.V. Eastman Lake and Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks

Palm and Orchard Near McFarland, Steve Brown 2022

Somehow, the next morning, it felt like the trip was over even though we still had Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks on our itinerary, as well as a second swing through Death Valley National Park.  It may have been our decision to skip Yosemite due to weather that gave the trip its premature feel of finality.  Perhaps it was just because we were tired.  But, for me, I think, it was that my soul knew the real reason for the journey was for me to visit The National Steinbeck Center even though I hadn't put that on the itinerary.  It took a well-timed death of an alternator and the perfect geographical location for the garage to make that happen, but sometimes the soul needs what it needs, and the universe complies.  In the moment, it feels like the universe is blocking all of our plans, but in hindsight, we realize we really would have missed out had things gone our way.

That morning, looking at the sky, I felt that way.  We agreed that we both felt tired, satisfied, and ready to head home. 

However, I was still excited to see more of the Central Valley.  I wanted to see more of California's agricultural empire.  I didn't yet know what I was going to get out of revisiting Steinbeck, but as I knew how central the farm field is to most of his work, I figured it was important to get that feeling down even if the cropland I was observing was outside the Salinas Valley.  There is no story of California without its fields.  You can say the same for America, as well as most of the world.  Even deep within the concrete jungles of civilization, humanity is still deeply tied to soil, not only physically by still needing that nutrition, but also spiritually.  We have all farmed for so long we are all farmers whether or not we've even grown a tomato.  Drive by an orchard and just see if you can keep your heart strings from being tugged.  The trees don't even have to be in bloom or be glazed with low light and casting long shadows between the long rows.  Even midday there is a pull towards the apple, the orange, the pistachio orchard.    And the same is true of a field of cows.

We may be revolted by an enormous industrial dairy with cows dotted among the mountain tops of dung and thousands more roaming around the squishy valley below, a thin green haze obscuring everything under the bending, twisting and tortured green light, but that's because our ancestors never knew of such agriculture.  We are not tied to such monstrosities.   I assume laboratories that grow meat will also have no such pull.  But the orchard, the field, the average-sized barn and farmhouse--they will always whisper Remember me?  They speak of our parents or at least our grandparents and every generation going back thousands of years.  And our genes know that even if we don't. A farm says to a person:  This is you, this is your story, and this is how you carried on.  It can be no other way because for thousands and thousands of years there was no other way.  We are all farmers deep in our souls.  There is no way to truly find yourself without at some point finding your way back to the farm.  Up until the 1970s pretty much every suburban yard also had a large garden in the back.  Canning was still a common thing.  There is a reason even people in high rises have the urge to grow things in pots on their balcony.  We are just born to have our hands in the soil.

Steinbeck knew that.  And I knew he knew it.  So, this journey needed to be as much about the field as the sea.

And yet, it really wasn't.  I was done.  I'd lost my focus for the day, if not for the rest of the trip.  And a void then is a void now.  I really don't know how we got to the tall trees of Kings Canyon and Seqouia. I just know we did.  

What little I captured of that irrigated empire I caught further south, on the other side of the high, high hills and passes and mammoth trees, and then back down in hotter, much dryer places, like McFarland, USA.

I had planned to go back, to feel that dirt, to know that space.  Yet, every journey is left incomplete.  Even one's life.  Perhaps the best attitude is to absorb all that you can in the moment and don't judge yourself too harshly for all the amazing life you let slide right on by.  We are, by design, creatures pulled oh so easily from purpose.  If an unfocused life can't be appreciated, there can be no real appreciation of life.  I am distracted because I am.  That distraction, that milky white blur where there should be pulsating pigment and stone solid experience, are in the end, part of the journey.  If you ain't ever been lost, you also ain't never been found.  You ain't even is.   You ain't anything.  Incomplete is complete.  The journey just ends when it ends, that time being known only by someone greater than us.  And my belief is, then the journey just starts right back up.  The trick is to be in the moment more often than not, and quick to self-forgive for the moments when you're not.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--53. Eighty Percent of Each of Our Nows Are Essentially the Same; We Can Learn to Live All with Novelty and Wonder

Sunset, Galveston Island State Park, Steve Brown 2025

10/29/25 

Exactly one week ago I woke up in a tent in Galveston Island State Park, Texas.  It was still dark, and I had to go pee.  Marci was awake for the same reason.  It had been a hostile night for sleep.  First, there was unbelievable heat and humidity.  Late October, and it was still in the low 80s when we set up our tent after 9:00 that night.  Then came fantastic electrical storms and great winds that swept across the tent and vibrated the poles fiercely.  The tent held; the rain never came.  Things did cool down, and I eventually crawled into my sleeping bag, but sleep was short and sporadic.  I so wanted to close my eyes and drift off now that things were calmer, but my bladder wouldn't let me.  Marci was also stirring, so I asked her if she wanted to drive up to the restroom.  She did.

Here at the beach, our days would begin basically the same because of our same basic need.  The change in our sleeping conditions from our typical Tuesday night's rest didn't change at all what we would be doing Wednesday morning.  True, the restroom was a lot further from bed than what was typical, but what drove us out of bed against our will was exactly the same.  Nothing had changed.   The journey to the toilet would be more filled with adventure and wonder than normal, but only because it was new.  If I had been blinded all my life and woke up one morning to a full bladder and full sight, the short journey across my bedroom would be even more spectacular than stepping outside my tent to a misty, dark morning and the sound of waves hitting the beach across the dunes behind me and the flames of a refinery across the bay lighting up the fog in a big, pulsating ball of orange-glow.  

Novelty awakened my senses and created the wonder of the beachside bathroom journey.  What if I could learn to bring that same sense of novelty and wonder to each bathroom journey?

The bathrooms in Galveston are alive with the sounds of bugs because bugs there are everywhere.  The restrooms are big and clean with showers and concrete bench seating areas and shiny hooks for clothes and shiny hand dryers.  There was even liquid handwashing soap, a rarity in campground restrooms.  Yet, there were bugs bumbling and buzzing in the sinks and crawling up the walls and swimming in the toilets, and because it was new, although it was an irritation, it was also a wonder.  Flies out west indicate a restroom or outhouse is unclean.  They are vile because they go hand and hand with the vile smell.  But here, the restroom was clearly clean, and the bugs took on a different meaning--at least to me:  Here is an ecosystem so rich and diverse you can't even bleach the life out of it.  I'm sure that's not true--man is capable of sterilizing life out of anything--but that's how it seemed.  Fecundity everywhere.

Outside, waiting for Marci, I listened to the waves lap the shore somewhere beyond the mist that seemed to gather around the light poles.  The air was damp and I could breathe.  I was glad my bladder had woken me up to take in this moment.  Yet, if I was more disciplined, I could answer every morning call to use the restroom similarly.  Although the bathroom is four feet from my bed, I could slip on some shoes afterwards, step outside, and walk up to the end of the driveway and back.  In fact, I think I will.  That will be part of my morning routine, to bring a sense of wonder to each day.  I will set my shoes beside my bed with fresh socks for my short morning walk to bring the wonder and adventure that going pee has when camping into my everyday life.  This is a promise to me, to start each day with a way to bring me naturally into the present, which in January will be very real indeed.  Shockingly so.  I can't wait!

I loved our short visit to Galveston.  It is a place I once knew fairly well and loved immensely.  The heat and humidity and ocean and bay are alive with life and fecundity.  Yet, that is true anywhere, even Death Valley.  Although there is much less life in Death Valley, there is so much more silence and space, that the life and the fecundity that there is, takes on so much more significance, and one is still drawn to the rattles of life stirring all around.  Life is always alive all around us.  It's our senses that become dead, and they are always deadened by the same old thing: a wandering mind driven by an ego always soldiering up to protect our self-image even though at least 80 percent of nows are essentially the same and realistically pose no threat to us at all.  The looming deadline this week is essentially the same as the one last week, which even though we survived it just fine, somehow, we don't get that in our head: it all works out; all is well, all is well.  

But it doesn't have to be that way.  We can choose to be essentially on vacation always while going through the motions of meeting those pesky deadlines if we focus on the wonder around us.  Light still streams through the window and bounces around the room while you do dishes.  There is that certain slant of light igniting suburbia on the way to take the family to the soccer game.  And there is always the silence deep below the stirrings of your own thoughts anywhere, even downtown, waiting for a bus on a busy street corner, with car horns and heavy exhaust, which you can find if you're willing to wade out into the warm, lapping water and feel the hush of the ever-present now fold all around you.  Every moment can be filled with novelty and wonder if we choose it to be so.

Sink Light Show, Steve Brown 2025

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--52. One Night at H.V. Eastman Lake and One Moment Now

Grasslands Near H.V. Eastman Lake, California, Steve Brown 2022

After we picked up the Camry from the garage, we headed towards Yosemite.  It would be quite the push as we lost a day of travel waiting.  Yet, we lost nothing.  We only gained.  The visit to the National Steinbeck Center was probably the most important part of the trip for me.  Although the vacation was already somewhat about Steinbeck, as the choice of our honeymoon twenty-five years earlier had been about me wanting to visit Cannery Row, I doubt this book would have come into being if we had not broken down in Salinas.  I try now, each moment, to realize how deeply derailed plans are part of our journey, both individually and collectively.  I'm certainly not there, but I don't think anyone has fully arrived in this life until one is glad to see things fall apart.  Those moments when we don't get what we want are the same moments we are forced to pause, focus, and realign ourselves with our true being.  It is a wise man who notices the magic of disappointment in the moment and doesn't have to wait until hindsight forces him to admit that the day gone wrong did him well.  

Although, at the age of fifty-nine, I haven't fully arrived in my life, at least I am now fully aware of what arrival will look like when it occurs.  It will be the day I decide to see each moment as detailed as the head of a single bent blade of dry grass in a field of hot, seedy fecundity-- the day I am finally determined not to let the worries of my mind, no matter what, draw me out of that precise focus.  Knowing that's what my full arrival will look like lets me return to the practice of being without forcing it.

The California trip of 2022 gave me my first real glimpse in a very long time into is knowing--that simple knowledge of We are, and that is enough that isn't experienced in the brain but in your entire being. Having to face the uncertainty of my kidney disease and having this trip before me, which I thought could be my last, forced me to value a moment enough to fully sit in it as I once did as a child without expectations.  And now, I don't care about what anyone else wants out of life.  Whatever gives their life meaning, let them experience it.  But I know what matters to me:  now.  Each moment that I am here: this moment that my pug Buddha is curled up in her bed snoring, that the fish tank is gurgling, that there's a good chance a toad is hopping down the path outside my back door towards some greenery as the morning slowly lightens.  And if that wasn't my reality now, there would be some other reality just as important, and whatever that reality was, I now am absolutely certain, it would be the one the universe picked out just for me to sit in, to realize, Oh this is what this feels like now.  When I have that down, I am living.  When I don't, I'm just floating around existing, waiting for the moment when I'm ready to get down the actual purpose of life again--to exist and be fully aware of it.  The mind used improperly removes you from all that is.  The mind used properly is at home anywhere and in any circumstance.  I haven't experienced that.  It doesn't take much to derail my mind, and yet there is a part of me that knows that it is absolutely so.  Peace and presence are not some unattainable illusions.  They are our birthright.  We keep ourselves from finding them.  But they are there, always, waiting for us to arrive.

We never arrived at Yosemite, and we were okay with that.  We'd been there together on our honeymoon, and it was wonderful.  There are still fragments of that day of us strolling down through the valley with golden leaves all around, thin slivers of silver water spilling over polished granite canyon walls, auburn grasses in the meadows shaggy and tufted around the bends and wiggles in the river.  We still had these things, at least in shards, fragments of what once was our day together.  And a storm was coming, and we hadn't been to Sequoia or Kings Canyon, and the weather wasn't expected to hit as hard further south, so we decided to build new memories instead of seeking to relive old ones.  We talked this out as we drove as the sun slowly lowered, and the shadows from the scattered bulky oaks slowly lengthened, and the hills slowly rose from the flats of the Monopoly board valley.  I don't remember how it happened, but at some-point we decided to camp at H.V. Eastman Lake.  If I remember right, we were afraid campgrounds closer to Yosemite were likely to be full, and now that Yosemite wasn't a destination, it didn't matter where we camped.

I remember how remote the low, boulder-blobbed hills thick with dry grasses and scattered oaks looked, the sky of thin drawn-out clouds slowly turning marmalade as the sun sank towards the horizon.  The campground was almost empty.  We found a great site next to a large boulder with views down to the lake far below.  The site had a covered picnic table, which we moved, so that we could set up our tent under the canopy.  We weren't sure when the storm would arrive, and packing up a wet tent isn't fun, so we took advantage of the chance to have a solid roof overhead.

After we set up camp, we went exploring.  It was then, a little way down the trail, we noticed the massive inside of the earthen dam.  The lake was only far below us because, although still large, it was almost entirely empty.  What we were seeing was a puddle compared to what once was this mammoth reservoir.  It must have been drying up for a very long time because the grasses were so high and dry one did not immediately detect a shoreline.  It was not until we saw the inside of the dam that we noticed there was a line at which the oaks stopped, and looking at that one could determine the normal shoreline.  It was subtle though, very subtle.  I have a sharp eye when it comes to looking at landscapes and am not easily fooled.  The drought had been so long and extended the vegetation was able to establish itself as if the water had never been there.  My heart ached for California when I saw how much water wasn't there, that should be.  If that was the story at Eastman Lake, it was the story for most, if not all, lakes in the state.  It's so sad that the state that is doing the most to mitigate climate change is also the one that gets hit hardest by it.  I would love to visit Florida.  My heart goes out to the South too when disaster strikes.  We are one nation, and we need to act as one.  But there is a difference.  California is trying to respond responsibly to climate change; Florida is not.   It seems unfair that the state working the hardest to reduce emissions is among the hardest hit by its effects.

But life isn't fair; it is.  Nature isn't reactive; it's predictable.  It operates according to natural laws, laws scientists understand surprisingly well, yet societies foolishly ignore.  California doesn't get back its karma, nor does Florida.   Because we are one world, both places, like all places, receive global karma.  Predictable, measurable, clearly understood consequences that hit different places differently because of very understood local conditions.  That's what's so frustrating.  We know what will happen to California and Florida, or Kansas or Utah, if we don't change our ways, and yet we don't change our ways.  We are burning and flooding and tornado-tearing apart our homeland (not to mention what we're doing politically), and we're doing nothing to ease the pressure.  We see the cliff, understand the distance between us and it, and run like hell towards it anyway.  

No amount of denying the laws and dynamics of climate will save us; only changes in behavior will.  You can pretend the gun you're pointing at your own head is a flower all you want and say that trigger is nothing but a leaf, but if you keep putting pressure on it, it will react predictably according to the physics behind it, and the story you are telling yourself while you keep increasing the actual pressure won't do diddly to alter the outcome.  You must ease the pressure and put down the gun.  We all need to ease the pressure so that societies together can put down the gun.  

I know I didn't fully understand that reality the night we camped H.V. Eastman Lake.  Traveling is in my bones; perhaps, because of my dad, it is who I am.  When I am on a quiet highway, there is only the road ahead of me, and everything is so ultra-real--the variety of reds in the tumbleweed growing through the crumples of asphalt at the road's edge, the shades soft grays and greens of the sage, the shocking yellow of the late-blooming rabbit brush, all the various beiges, reds, lavenders and blues in distant ridges .  When I'm on a lonely highway, looking out that window, I finally vanish and I am.   So an automobile is a very difficult thing for me to give up.  The distance between my home and work and the rural nature of where I reside further complicate things.  Yet, if I understood the nature of the gun and the amount of pressure we're putting on that trigger deep down in our bones where I need to feel it, I would do anything, absolutely anything, to lighten the load.  I think I might get that now, right now as I write this--perhaps for the very first time.

Yet, at the same time I've known for some time.  I finally dreamed myself a Tesla because I've been wanting one deeply for a very long time, but not because I care about cars.  I care less what I drive.  A car for me is just a way to transport an eyeball.  It is the vision, not the car I need.  But I do need that space, that open road, that place to just be.  I felt guilty as hell though needing that knowing climate change indeed is.  So, I guess I manifested a Tesla for myself to ease the pressure I'm putting on that trigger.

I don't know how each of us needs change to reduce the load we're putting on our environment, but I do know the laws of physics and the chemical reactions in our atmosphere are real and predictable and that we have very educated people who have been telling us for decades what will happen, and all those consequences are indeed unfolding in real time and are very observable.  So, I know I need to understand that gun better, to picture me putting my weight on the trigger, because, through my choices, my actions, I am doing that, whether I think about it or not.  I do not like a man named Elon Musk; but I care about living in a world where I and my children and future grandchildren can exist a whole lot more than I dislike that man.  Buying a Tesla is not the only way to ease up on the trigger, but it is one way.  What is yours?  The gun is loaded.  That isn't propaganda.  It is as real as the grains on the head of dry grass blowing in the winds coming down the foothills of the Sierra in California.

We are on a road headed towards a cliff with our foot on the accelerator.  We do have the choice to let up on the gas even if we're not sure we've left enough breaking distance.  Why in the hell do we seem to want to gun it?

I think I finally feel this deep enough to change.  I sure hope so.    Now is all we've ever got; this moment is the only thing that actually is.   In an instant, it will become part of the past that can never be fully recovered and definitely never altered.  The past is the past.  Done.  Dead.  Forever out of reach.  How we collectively act now changes everything collectively forever.  And yet I am the only thing I can control.  My choices now, in this instant, in any instant, is all that I have at my disposal to influence the outcome of eternity.  It isn't much, but it is reality.  And I am here now.  So are you.  It's all we've got alone; it's all we've got together.   One now after another, that add up to be everything.  We are all collectively determining the nature of our future now, not only for us but for all upcoming generations, whether we like that responsibility or not.  That joy or burden is ours to carry because we are here now carrying it regardless of our wishes.   God, chance, the cosmos--together, they say it must be so, and so it is.  Now.  And so it is that I think good thoughts because I want good outcomes--for me, for everybody, forever.

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--51. All Together Now

Sunflowers, Steve Brown 2025

Sustained belief in anything isn't easy, especially over the last decade.   We seem to all be passengers on a runaway train headed towards catastrophic chaos, and instead of working together to somehow slow that train down, we yell and scream and throw apples and shoes and bananas and brief cases and circus fliers and political pamphlets and diapers and dynamite at each other, and yell, "Fowl, fowl fowl!"

Well sort of.  We all have been through an awful lot together.  COVID-19, three very-heated elections, a seemingly never-ending list of increasingly disastrous natural disasters, as well as political assignations and mass shootings.  And that's completely skipping over the endless footage of bombs and carnage in Ukraine and Palestine we view together separately daily.  And yet we still smile at each other at work, at church, and in the supermarket.  We still say Thank-You in the drive-thru or in the bank.  We unfriend our sister or brother in-law on Facebook because of their idiotic ideology and their politically warped brains, but we usually re-friend them again because they're family.  Given the unending stress of our times, maybe we're actually handling the collective trauma of our times reasonably well.

Maybe.  It really is very hard to believe in anything these days.  Especially love and peace.  

But stillness is still there if you're looking for it.  On Saturday I went to get a hamburger.  There was only one car ahead of me at the drive thru.  It shouldn't have taken long.  But the man in the truck ahead of me had this incredible ability to stick fourteen "Uh, let's see, I'll take, no, maybe, do you have?"'s into his one order for himself before he ever got to his car full of kids and a wife too.  And the cashier had this incredible ability to say, "I'm so sorry, we're out of that, we're so busy, would you like, now take your time darling," between each of his "Uh, let's see, I'll take, no, maybe, do you have?"'s.  And the sun was out, and it was hot, and I was hot, and I glared at him the best I could through his side mirror, me all righteous and mighty and angry and hot and pristine and vindicated in my holy cause to just get a hamburger and shake.

But, once the ordeal was over, I thought to myself, I can either take this frustration home with me and ruin my day, or I can go find a grand view and some shade.  

So, I did just that.  I hooked a right just past Steve's Tire, went past the golf course, through the narrow graffiti-plastered tunnel under the interstate and found some magnificently tall sun-bleached rye before thick straggly elms and a leaning barbed-wire fence.  I opened my window to the sounds of cicada and the muffled interstate.  And it was good, really good.

I think if we consciously take in such moments, if we actually sit back down in our seats, and look out the window at the blur of the country-side instead of yelling and screaming and tossing bananas and briefcases and dynamite and GOD!-pamphlets and political propaganda, and sit in our own emotional crud for a while, we just might get some ideas on how to actually slow the train down, and when we do, if we're all looking out those windows, all coming up with ideas, and if we share those out, open to listening, to adjusting our own thinking, refining, improving, adding upon--well, just maybe we can slow that train down enough to see if the disaster we think is coming is even necessary.

Maybe.  I don't know.  It's hard to believe in anything.  But rye is real.  Elms are real.  The water running in the irrigation ditch is real--at least for now.  And it is grounding, sustaining.

And if you don't have that, you have a parking lot looking out on a fantastic city skyline nearby, or there's a soccer game at a neighborhood park tucked back in an endless coil of shady suburban streets and cul-de-sacs.

There is peace in presence.  If we choose it.

It may not be perfect, but it's got to be better than bullets and blood and dead people leaving behind their spouse and children to weep and wail.

Perhaps now is a time say less, move more slowly, listen to birds and cicada and think What am I doing to add to the chaos?

  

  

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--50. At Home in the National Steinbeck Center

There is something about experiencing a good museum that is difficult to put into words.  When writing about nature or a bustling city, all you have to do is focus on a few details precisely and you can place your reader there because we have all seen early morning dew glisten on a blade of grass with diamonds dancing off a brook or ditch in the background.  We have all stood on a corner and taken in the heavy, thick whiff of exhaust as the light turns green as either a city bus or delivery truck rumbles forward and you look at the red Do Not Walk sign that appears and vanishes behind trucks and busses.  

Because we all know these things, the writer can take short cuts.  Each place is both its own place and universal simultaneously.  There is only one Las Vegas (even though technically, there are at least two), but there are enough ingredients in a Las Vegas street corner common to an intersection in Salt Lake City or San Antonio that the writer can still have the reader fill in most the details while he or she focuses on those unique qualities that separate Las Vegas from other places.

I'm not sure you can do the same with museums.  Even art museums all have such a different feel.  The Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth Texas, even though it is a pure piece of modern architecture without one single classical column, makes you feel like you're stepping back in time to ancient Greece with its calm, cool fountains, thick travertine walls, and long vaulted concrete ceilings.  Everything feels hushed and sacred, and you expect to find philosophers sitting at the water's edge expanding on the meaning of life.  The DMA, on the other hand, just next door in Big D, feels like a favorite neighborhood diner--someplace you hang out and relax at after a hard day's work.   It's casual, known.  Even if it's your first time there.  That's because the architect and art collection determine the feel of a museum.  Time and evolution determine the feel of a city.  Time and evolution have a similar play on all of us as the universe marches forward.  Cities are cosmopolitan in nature.  Museums are individuals within that cosmopolitan setting.

So, how do I capture one particular museum well enough to put you there--especially a museum dedicated to something pretty hard to display adequately, words and ideas?  Most museums are designed to display objects, not the rhythms of phrases and the slow gathering of thoughts until a philosophy is formed, not the deep ties of a life-long friendship between two visionary thinkers.

Yet, that moment I stepped into the National Steinbeck Center was profound.  I don't know what effect that space has on other visitors, but for me, it was coming home to a place I've always known.  There is something about Steinbeck's writing that takes me back to who I already am.  It has always been like that since I first read The Grapes of Wrath back in the late 1980s.  I don't read him frequently, and these days, when I do, it's extremely leisurely, with big spaces and other books, other images, other voices and ideas between readings, but with each and every paragraph that is specifically his, I always feel I know this.  Often that is literally true.  I've read The Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row multiple times.  But it's more than that.  Every book with the exception of East of Eden has felt that way from the very first paragraph read for the very first time.  And the same with stepping into The National Steinbeck Center.  I knew instantly that I was home.

Perhaps it is because they let the books do the talking.  The covers, the font of the text, the feel of the words in those perfect sentences--they're all enlarged, many on large sheets of glass suspended, made three-dimensional, casting shadows.  That's just what his books do too.  Steinbeck writes in vignettes, in little scenes, in these visually perfect little slices of life, that tell a specific story and all stories simultaneously.  I'm not exactly sure how he does that--how he seamlessly moves from the narrative into these astonishingly real stage-sets of life so that you as the reader aren't really aware of when you're in the narrative, hearing that very narrative voice, full of humor and tenderness, full of oral history and the art of good story telling, and when he's moved you onto his stage and surrounded you in a magnificently complete world based on just a few perfectly placed stage props.  I don't know exactly how he does that--tells one very specific story while simultaneously telling all stories.  But I do know it was intentional and that he was aware that he was doing it, that he knew it was part of his art for he tells us so in East of Eden:

If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.  And here I make a rule--a great and interesting story is about everyone or it will not last.

Steinbeck creates stories that are astonishingly singular and universal simultaneously by shifting almost seamlessly from specific vignettes to classic story telling, as seen in Chapter 6 of The Grapes of Wrath:

The Reverend Casy and young Tom stood on the hill and looked down on the Joad place.  The small unpainted house was mashed at one corner, and it had been pushed off its foundation so that it slumped at an angle, it's blind front windows pointing at a spot of sky well above the horizon.  The fences were gone and the cotton grew in the dooryard and up against the house, and the cotton was about the shed barn.  The outhouse lay on its side, and the cotton grew close against it.  Where the dooryard had been pounded hard by bare feet of children and by stamping horses' hooves and by broad wagon wheels, it was cultivated now, and the dark green, dusty cotton grew.

Here, Steinbeck writes through the lens of a camera, and captures one specific place in a specific moment in time so vividly the reader feels as if he is actually standing there taking the picture.  This is how he places his reader in the now of his narrative.  It gives the text immediacy, particularity.  Like Hemingway or William Carlos Williams, he's very Modern in his approach--no ideas but in things.  But then, unlike Hemingway, he smoothly transitions to the good ol' fashioned story telling:  

"If Ma was anywheres about, that gate'd be shut an' hooked.  That's one thing she always done--seen that gate was shut...  Ever since the pig got in over to Jacobs' an' et the baby.  Milly Jacobs was jus' out in the barn.  She come in while the pig was still eatin' it.  Well, Milly Jacobs was in a family way, an' she went raven'.  Never did get over it.  Touched ever since."

The curators of the National Steinbeck Center have digested his words deeply enough that they have done the same thing.  By selecting just the right words, phrases and images, they've created these wonderful little vignettes that capture Steinbeck's world marvelously.  They even have Ronchamp; the truck and camper Steinbeck took across country in Travel's with Charlie. I especially love the model of Cannery Row in Monterey that lets you see the setting of the book from above.  I think if you were visiting the National Steinbeck Center and had never opened one of his books that you would make sure to pick one up on your way out to make sure that no longer remained true.  I can't know that for sure, of course, as I was already at home in Steinbeck's books many times, but that museum has done such a fine job, I can't imagine it would be any other way.

For me though, specifically on that trip in 2022, no travel destination could have meant more.  I had been diagnosed with kidney disease but hadn't yet found out what type.  My dad had died pretty quickly from amyloidosis, and my doctor hadn't ruled that out for me.  I was keenly aware there was a greater than normal chance I might not have too many years left.  At times like that you think thoughts like What's it all been about?  I knew for me, even though I didn't and still don't have a book published, part of it has been about words.  Not just words in general though.  I've never been an avid reader.  I'm incredibly slow, and it takes me a long time to get through a book.  Because of that, I'm pretty selective about what I read.  Not out of some type of snobbery, but because I know the time involved.  Yet words matter deeply to me.  A thing said Well moves me.  In particular, I like words that capture three things:  time, place, and vulnerability.  Whatever I got right or wrong in my life, I knew I had tried my best to do that:  be here now in this place and be vulnerable enough to experience whatever this particular experience means.  I spent most of my life terrified of people, which is sad.  I'm sure I let that fear rob me of a lot of living.  But I also knew that I'd been true to moments and not afraid see deeply and be present in my emotions rather than running from them.  And I had wrote those experiences down.  I knew that was good.  That in itself is a noble cause: to capture one street corner in one city at one moment, open and vulnerable enough to explore exactly what that is instead of chopping the hell out of that experience and plugging it into socially predetermined paradigms, needing to find some meaning, some moral, some metaphor beyond this moment now.

Steinbeck, along with William Carlos Williams and John Lennon, first gave me that: what I already knew is what really mattered to me in life: now.  That has always been enough of a life for me.  When I've been in the moment, I've been happy--even when I've been incredibly sad.  After my dad died, I drove the Oregon coast, his coast, and took in again all the places he'd taken me.  I cried deeply, but I was also totally there, totally alive.  Not numb.  Present.  Now always does that for me.  Yet, when I haven't been in the moment, I've been lost in my head: envious, anxious, distracted, dull, distanced, removed.

Steinbeck gave me back that sense of connection, what I already knew as a child.  Life is about floating an empty pop can down an irrigation ditch and watching light dance dart off the ripples.  If you understand that deeply, and live it well, you understand all moments, all places, all times, and can just naturally be that you, you were meant to be.  In such a place you comfortably arise to whatever the occasion calls for without ego, without enterprise, just as you are.  Out of that place though, everything is always a constant struggle.  It has to be.  Because you are no longer home.

Steinbeck takes me back to being vulnerable, to being human, to being home.  The world needs that like never before.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--49. One Young Ecosystem

Growing an Ecosystem, Steve Brown 2025

The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in a path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.  

-- John Steinbeck, East of Eden,1952

Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and the expanding universe, all bound by the elastic string of time.  It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.

--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941

Heavy, blue-gray clouds drag along the juniper-blobbed ridge outside my front window.  Dark oaks stand sturdy in the blond field of dry grasses up front.  Bright green young elms dot the space in between.  This is all part of my daily world.  The clouds, the ridge, the juniper would be here if I never existed, and yet they are mine at this moment, because I'm here, now, focused on them.  

The oaks--I planted them with my brother back in 1995.  There are twenty-five of them.  He wanted to create a ribbon of forest that would connect the trailer, where we lived, with the natural forest in the canyon.  It was his idea, his vision.  We planted bare-root saplings.    Then we both picked up and moved on to different lives.  It's very doubtful the trees would still be here if there was not something in my stepdad that would not let them die.  He had a faucet installed in the middle of the field even though it is about a block away from his house.  And in our absence, year after year, on hot summer days, he came down and dragged the hose around to water them while Lloyd was off in Dallas living a different life and Marci and I were in Arizona.  He hated doing that.  It was hot and time-consuming.  He cursed us for planting the trees and then leaving them.  Yet, there was something in him that would not let them die.  They were trees.  It was his land.  We were his family.  He had a commitment to our efforts and this place, Dry Creek.

My house sits where it does because of those oak trees, and the vision of my brother, and the determination of my father.  It could be situated along the edge of the canyon with a full mature forest out the back door.  I sometimes wish it was.  The yard would be all there, already established, a full functioning forest that needs no care.  But I'd grown attached to the single-wide trailer that was the summer home of Marci, me, and our children for eleven years.   I was attached to a little shed we turned into The Blue Door Bar where we hung out each night, made milkshakes, and watched movies.  I was attached to the old lean-to barn that was, and still is, slowly tipping over.  I was attached to watching those stupid little oaks slowly grow.  And although I knew the better site for the house would be along the canyon edge with the forest down below, I could not let go of all those years we'd spent in the trailer for reasons I did not and still do not know.  

So, the oak trees are still here, and the oak trees still grow.

Between them now are elms.  In the spring, until recently, we have been able to run irrigation down through the trees April through early July.  The wet soil has given a place for elm seeds to settle and grow.

The ridge and the juniper were here, and would be here, whether or not we ever existed.  The oaks are here because we planted them.  The elm trees are here because of the oaks we planted, as are a few Russian olive and a volunteer apricot tree.  Now that there is a bit of ecosystem established, as long as there are at least a few years with adequate water, more will follow.  There will be a forest where there were once only dry grasses.  There will be soil where there once, and still is, very little.  There is already so much more shade than there once was, and as the shade grows, so will more variety of plants, and with more variety of plants, there will be more insects, birds, mice and squirrels.  More sounds.  More smells.  More life.

All because my brother and I planted twenty-five seedling oaks trees and my dad took care of them for twelve years in our absence.

Now that the house sits here, I have extended the yard outback.  I planted a peach tree and a few others.  Because I water flowerbeds, and because I let most anything that wants to grow stay and live, I have far more volunteer trees than planted ones--elm, ash, oak, apricot, peach, boxelder, Russian olive, and sumac--and so the forest grows. 

It is time now to put down this writing, go out and water a forest that is growing me as much as I am growing it.

We are one.