The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 65: Death Valley and the Space Between the Sounds

Writing Studio, Death Valley, Steve Brown 2026

1.

Furnace Creek Campground, 5:02 a.m.

I woke up at 4:45 and many times before that.  Somehow, I still managed to get six hours of sleep.  Outside the tent, I head over to the restroom in the soft shades of gray.  Camping turns the smallest necessity into ritual.  Everything becomes significant.  The short path to the restroom runs between two clusters of struggling mesquite trees that standout significantly even in the low light because of the chalky soil.  You know shade is needed badly when the park service purposefully locates a campground in a wash.  Yesterday afternoon I came to love these broad, low trees as they blocked the day's most intense rays.  

However, this morning it is slightly chilly even with my hoodie.  These tree-heaps that grow like clumps of prairie grass bent over after rain are pleasant to look upon in the low light.  After just one night, I am already at home in this place.  I'm not sure why but nowhere touches my soul like here.  I can't imagine my life without these few short visits to this valley.  It's strange, but it almost feels like I came into this world for these exact moments.  Perhaps that is why, even with global warming, some travel is good.  How do you find your place in the world if you never leave home?  Staying put is good most the time.  You can find beauty absolutely anywhere.  Every neighborhood is a visual paradise with the right eyes.  Yet, I absolutely know my life would not be the same if I never came to Death Valley.  It is my place.  Mine.  I have no clue why.  Our souls know more than we do.  But now that I've been here, it is deep within me, always.  Part of me wonders if this place was intrinsic to me even before my first breath.  Maybe we each select our journey through this life before we are born.  

Big Bend has a similar hold on me as does Canyon de Chelly.  Although not quite as strong here, there is a view near the mouth of Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend that upon my first arrival I swore I'd seen it before.  My brother, more scientifically minded than myself, has tried to convince me many times that I probably saw it in a photograph when I was very young.  But I don't believe that is the source of my connection.  The Deja vu was so intense.  I don't know why I knew that place before I saw it, but I know I did.  Though fuzzy around the edges, that distant meeting with those cliffs is as real as the pressure under my fingertips as I type this sentence.   There are connections the conscious mind can't make that are real indeed.  That doesn't mean nothing is solid, measurable, or quantifiable.  It just means our lenses are limited.  There's real, and then there's the bedrock beneath real.  Santa Elena Canyon, Death Valley, and Canyon del Muerto set off sparks and ignite some part of me I know but don't know, understand but don't understand.  

Canyon del Muerto in Canyon de Chelly National Monument might be explainable spiritually.  In Marci's family it is said that when Kit Carson's army burned up the dwellings and orchards in the Chinle Valley, and her ancestors fled into the canyon for safety, Marci's great-great grandmother was hidden in a tree as a baby for safe keeping and survived several days until she could be retrieved.  If that hadn't happened, Marci wouldn't be here today.  It makes sense to me that if that oral story is true that I might have witnessed it myself previous to my birth given how important Marci is to me now.  My brother, of course, also points out we visited Canyon de Chelly when I was five, and I might remember it from then.  I probably do.  But I don't think that alone would give me such a strong feeling of connection.

It is significant to me that the three natural holy places I've encountered in my life so far are places of exposed rock.  I love the bones of the earth.  Deserts reveal much to me.  I can't fathom getting through this life without spending a night at Furnace Creek campground.  I was born to be here and write this paragraph.  This is more real than any job I've had even though I love teaching.  How often do we spend our time focused on what our soul knows we were meant to do?  I have come to believe we all came here with set agendas, and that we often when we feel lost and disconnected it is because we are spending our time doing everything else except what matters most to us.  I intend to spend less and less time away from who I am.  

And so, I'm headed off to Zabriskie Point to watch the sun rise.

2.  Furnace Creek Campground, 7:03 a.m.

It was a slow, magnificent unveiling of the valley with light and color moving down the mountains, across the valley, and finally to the badlands that are Zabriskie Point.  The wind was cold and brutal, but it was well worth it.

Here at camp, the sun is already warm enough that I have taken off my sweater to feel the warm rays directly on my skin.  It's wonderful, but as it is only a little after seven and already 59 degrees, it will be a warm one.  81 is the forecasted high today and 86 tomorrow.

I will have to drive to Beaty today to buy some shorts as I left my suitcase with all my clothes at home, and all I have to wear are long, black pants, which are not ideal for here, the hottest place on earth.

3.  Roadside, 7:44 a.m.

I sit in a fold out chair at the north end of the salt flat.  Except when a car passes, which is seldom, there is no sound.  If I were farther from the road there would be nothing auditory, absolutely nothing.  

Beyond the gravel of the highway, there are chunky baseball-sized rocks of various colors--orange, green, white, blue--pastel-grayed versions of those hues, but still not colors you associate with stone.  They are normalized a little by the scattered salt brush and thin, yellow blooming weeds.  Then, beyond that is the bright white flat, and farther back, the red and gray basalt mountains.

This to me is life.  Everything else is just a means to get to moments like this.  A gentle breeze, almost no thought, and timeless space.  

I'm startled by a fly-buzz.  Even that is noisy here.

I fold up my chair, my movable writing studio, and get back in the car.  When I get home and write this thing out, pacing will be important to capture time, place and space.  A vehicle covers so much distance in not much time.  It blurs together what should be separated and unique.  Landscapes change quickly in the 21st century because we no longer move at natural speeds.  A good book could capture that speed.  Another good book could capture the space between things.  

More and more in this life I am looking for the space between.  I think my brother Lloyd has always done that.  When we were kids, I would often catch him staring into space, and I would ask him what he was doing, and he wouldn't be able to tell me because on some level he had vanished into a moment.  That is now my goal in life, to vanish into moments, to savor details, to slow down time by focusing on light and textures, to be rather than do.  The doing is inevitable anyway.  We think.  We move.  We do.  We are distracted, pushed always to accomplish something.  And that's okay.  I'm not trying to slip out of life or responsibility.  I'm just trying to slow down enough to notice I'm actually living.  It seems absurd, but most of the time we're so caught up in the world inside our head, always worrying about the next item on the to-do list, that we actually seldom savor what it means to be alive.

Even here, one of the quietest, least inhabited places on earth by plants or animals, a fly buzzes by. And what I do here is no more or less significant that what he or she does.  We are objects in space and together we are experiencing sunlight and sound together, separated by our own senses, yet living this moment as one.  The fly could drop dead.  I could drop dead.  The valley would remain unchanged.  But at this instant simply because we are here, we are part of it.  

That realization, whenever and wherever I have it--to me that is what living is all about.  The other stuff is good.  Nothing wrong with a good bowl of cereal in cold milk.  Nice, warm socks on a cold morning feel great.  Careers, a little extra money to buy good things or go cool places.  Those are all awesome.  But for some reason that isn't life to me.  It's extra. Only friends and loved ones match the importance of now.

This is real:  Connecting to a fly.  Silence.  No-thought.  Just being.  That's where I truly live.

We spend so much time hung up in the notes of life that we don't notice that the real music is in the space between the sounds, and that notes just provide boundaries so that for a minute we can slip into the infinite.  All those daily tasks are not the point of living.  They just frame infinity into digestible bits for mankind.  But if you're not noticing the objects on your desk in sunlight while wading through that stack of papers, you're missing out on a lot of what life has to offer.  And that has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with accomplishing anything today.    In terms of happiness, the real accomplishment may just be slowing down enough to notice the space between the accomplishments.  

Once we find grace in the void, we begin to encounter grace in everything.  All glitters God.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 64: Death Valley and Deep Peace Revisited

Looking East from Furnace Creek Campground, Steve Brown 2026

Furnace Creek Campground, Death Valley National Park

I have come here again to watch shadows lengthen and shorten and lengthen again in the near silence as I write the ending chapters to this book.  It has been a four-year journey and much has happened since writing the first paragraph.  The world was in turmoil then.  Joe Biden was president.  Russia had invaded Ukraine.  I firmly believed Ukraine would fall within six months.  It didn't.  

The world is in much more turmoil now.  Donald Trump is president again.  United States attacked Somalia and then Yemen and Iraq. Israel invaded Palestine.  United States participated.  ICE invaded Minneapolis and other cities.  United States attacked Venezuela. United States and Israel attacked Iran.  Israel also attacked Lebanon, Syria, Quatar, and Yemen.  

I have had my own turmoil, most of it in my own mind, luckily with little lasting impact outside that gray matter.  It could have been otherwise.  And yet, I am closer to personal peace than ever before, and soft silence takes up more of each of my days.  I pray that the world will move in that same direction.  It is the only sane move.  I know it works on an individual basis because I have felt the shift.  I am still somewhat crazy, an easy victim to my own ego, but much less so than before.  I believe what is possible on a small scale is achievable on a grand one as well.  If that shift happens, it will happen when nations turn inward with persistent kindness and work on their own egos, asking, "How are we adding to the chaos?"  

Peace cannot be found any other way, individually or collectively.   It begins with kind determination to alter oneself in a manner that makes it possible to integrate into the whole.  It's a huge shift in thinking.  We are so used to battling to be supreme, but there is no way for supremacy-thinking not to lead to war.  You cannot compete for peace.  You cannot win peace at all.  You unfold into it by letting go of the need to be separate and superior.  Peace is a process of integration into something greater than yourself.  It's not about giving up identity, but rather recognizing layers of identity within the whole.  A cell within you is still a cell and part of you simultaneously.  I can be myself, part of my family, part of my community, a citizen of my nation, and a citizen of the world, and part of God's handiwork all simultaneously.  That seems obvious.  Yet, we think and behave as if it is not.  Our go-to identity is always one of separation, especially now.  Much of the nation believes it is unpatriotic to be a world citizen.  How can we be anything else?  We are part of Earth's biomass.  Collectively, this planet is our tidepool.    We are one.  

It is 7:02 p.m.  The badlands east of camp are lit up with the last direct light of the day, highlighting the green and yellow striped and blotched eroded soil.  South of Zabriskie Point, deep shadows cut into the mountains.  I have come here to sit in silence and write.

I remember when I wrote my first poem.  I was probably ten.  I had been looking through a photography book of New Mexico that belonged to my brother.  He used it as a visual source for his paintings.  I was looking at an old, weathered church in a ghost town.  I don't remember where it was.  I do remember the sky was heavy and gray, and it looked as if the clouds would dump their load any moment, all at once.  Something in that picture made me want to reach for language to record that visual experience even though the picture was right in front of me.  I asked Mom for piece of paper and wrote my first poem.  It wasn't an idea that first drove me to words.  It was capturing the now in that photograph.  It seems silly, as that moment had already been captured.  But I really don't think it was.  A world captured in pixels, a world captured in pigment, and a world captured in words all hold some part of that place, but none of them grasp the complete essence of it.  Only being there does that, and even then, only if one is still and emptied of thought.  And yet each attempt to record place through a particular medium brings something unique to it precisely because of the mode of translation.  Place recorded in writing automatically becomes space and sound also, a slow or quick unfolding in the mind, controlled by the pacing that comes through when the writer steps back and allows space and sound to unfold naturally.  I was meant to do that.  That is one of the reasons why I am here on earth.  To feel and share place through words.  That is what made me write my first poem.  I didn't want to share a thought.  I didn't want to share my own feelings.  I wanted to become transparent and translate the awesome sense of space and temperature and texture of that scene through the specific medium of words.  I have come to realize my first impulse with words were authentically me.  I don't desire to communicate through images; I desire to get out of the way and let the sights and sounds speak for themselves through words and the space around them.

Here at camp, the natural silence is frequently broken by RVs circling, looking for sites.  This is due to the time of day.  But in between the passing vehicles, the only sounds are the soft hoot of an owl and soft crunch of footsteps on gravel.

This book contains a few ideas, none of which are mine, and none of which are new.  Thematically, it is centered around Steinbeck's realization that either all of it matters or none of it matters.   But if this book only restates what has already been well-said then I have failed.  I have never had a new thought in my life.  Every concept I live by is borrowed from someone else.  In sixth grade I essentially discovered plate tectonics while looking at a map on the wall during reading time.  Athough the realization that all the continents fit together was new to me, it certainly was not new to the world.  I am not a discoverer.  I am an exister.  And when I am my true self, I exist very well.  I always knew that when I was young.  I didn't want to do anything.  I just wanted to be.  But that didn't get me any attention from those around me, so I came up with big dreams and shared those instead.  I'd be an architect.  That came from an honest place.  I did and still do love structures.  But it lost its authenticity the moment I moved the realization that light on stone is breath-taking to the declaration I'd be a famous architect.  My true essence is about becoming that invisible eyeball Emerson wrote about so eloquently.  Taking in the majesty of light hitting stone comes naturally true me.    I may have easily translated that into a career as an architect, but I only would be doing so authentically had it remained about the light and the stone and not me.  

Others may do.  That may be authentic to who they are.  But I exist.  That is my primary purpose, when I'm most at home, emptied out and witnessing the majesty of life all around me.  When I do that well, I never wonder if my life has meaning.  I know my purpose.  To be.  So, if this book works at all, and I hope it does, it will not be because it teaches anything.  It will because it shares well the only thing I know how to share--how to sit in a place and be.  

Here, in this valley, camp is the big city, where noise and lights break up the eternal silence.  But you don't have to travel far to hear the thundering of nothing.  I live in the fourth most rural region in the country with a population density of less than two people per square mile.  My house sits with one other residence on ninety acres, so as far as human noise goes, I could find more peace stepping out my backdoor than in this this campground.

However, Death Valley isn't just about the absence of human noise.  Often it is about the absence of sound period.  It is the most silent place I have been, and that void makes any little twitter or hoot or skuttle shockingly beautiful.  The silence makes you hear sound like never before.  Death Valley is the sound of silence, and on a moonless night, the deep darkness turns on every light above.  Peace is here.  Deep peace.

The only thing that gets more extreme is the heat.  Right now, though, it is pleasant, real pleasant with the moon taking on significance now that the sun has set.  It is almost full, which, in a way, is too bad as this place gets so dark you can't see your own hand.  Marci and I got to experience that on a visit in 2023.  Who knows, maybe the moonlight in its own way will be just as magical.  

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 63: Near Silence

Moonrise, Angel Lake Campground, Nevada,
Marci Brown 2025

I'm changing.  I'm becoming aware of these perfect moments of near silence, and I love to sit in them and do nothing.  They can occur almost anytime and anywhere, and they are intensely calm.  I used to approach such moments only out in nature, often my garden.  But now, I'll be sitting in my chair in the living room and Marci will be in the office or in the car, running her sister somewhere, and I'll just become aware of the space and silence around me, no noise other than the fishtank pump running.  It happens at school too, before and after class.  Also, I often don't turn on music in the car anymore, not because I'm seeking silence, but because I'll get in and think, This feels nice, before I have time to reach for my phone to select a play list.  At home, I like closing my eyes and doing absolutely nothing.  I don't do it for long, maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and it isn't planned or intentional.  I'm just more aware being has a profound meaning that has nothing to do with doing.  Getting things done is important.  A clean house is a nicer environment than a messy one.  It is fun to create, whether writing or painting, or building something in the yard.  Those are good things.  But they aren't near as rewarding as just sitting in silence with your eyes closed.

Fretting is the opposite of that.  And I still do a lot of that.  So, it's not like I'm this totally new person.  But I'm also not who I used to be either.  I'll just stumble upon this silence and think Oh, yeah, this is where I'm meant to be.  The worrying and the doing are just a necessary distraction to keep us playing the game, which must be important or we wouldn't play it, but this, this is what life is about.  And then I just slide into a moment and be.  After five or ten minutes, I intentionally step back out of the silence again.  Then I usually find a different task more or aligned with who I want to become.  Or I go back to the previous one, but without inner-dialog and judgment that so often goes with chores, such as, Why am I the only one doing dishes again?  

A couple weeks ago we all went out to help a struggling family member clean out her house and get it ready to sell.  Most of the time she was not in a place emotionally where she could help.  And I noticed something.  Even though the work was difficult and disgusting, dealing with great amounts of mouse urine and droppings, while engaged in the actual task of cleaning, I got great joy out of seeing the improvement.  It was only during breaks, when we had time to reflect that the person we were working for wasn't there helping that we became resentful.  The task wasn't making us unhappy.  Thinking, judging, and voicing our frustrations was.  Moments aren't toxic--at least not emotionally.  Resentment is.  Work, even dirty work, is rewarding because engagement forces you into a moment, and a moment is everything.

I have no clue on how to help those around me realize that.  Attempting to help someone usually never helps anyone anyway, especially if it's through advice.  All of us are eager to reform others, and almost none of us are seeking reform ourselves.  It's always someone else that has the problem.  It's especially useful if we can find a scapegoat, because then our egos can join forces and support each other in negativity.

Happiness has nothing to do with what you're doing and everything to do with what you're thinking.  The most blissful moments are when you have no thought at all, and space opens up all around you.  There's no way to put into words what that is because it's no-thought being.  It has no words.  Yet, it is precisely in those moments, and only in those moments, you understand what life is.  And yet that knowledge, whatever it is, has no words.  It just is.  I think stillness points towards the essence of God rather than being God's essence.  I can't conceive of a God that isn't about doing, creating, engaging lovingly with his creations.  Yet, somehow silence, stillness, an actual void, is at the center of his command.  Moments without evaluating life are the only moments when life is actually understood.  

Living is more than doing.  Living is being.  The greatest gift of God is life itself.  For whatever reason, in this realm at least, that can only be comprehended in moments of complete personal silence.  Not silence out there, all around you, although that helps, but silence deep, deep within where everything is cool and calm always, that perfection in absolutely everyone and everything. You can't earn that.  It is God's grace.  All you can do is witness it, and that comes in moments like this.  Moments of total peace in the near silence.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 62: Pioneer Park, Tehachapi

Pioneer Park, Tehachapi, California, Steve Brown 2022

           Mrs. Malloy… came into the boiler on her hands and knees one day and she stood up and said a little breathlessly: "Holman's are having a sale of curtains. Real lace curtains and edges of blue and pink — $1.98 a set with curtain rods thrown in.”

        Mr. Malloy set up on the mattress. “Curtains?” he demanded. “What in God’s name do you want curtains for?”

        “I like things nice,” said Mrs. Malloy. “I always did like to have things nice for you,” and her lower lip began to tremble.

        “But, darling,” Sam Malloy cried, “I got nothing against curtains. I like curtains.”

        “Only $1.98,” Mrs. Malloy quavered, “and you begrutch me $1.98,” and she sniffled and her chest heaved.

        “I don’t begrutch you,” said Mr. Malloy. “But, darling—for Christ’s sake what are we going to do with curtains? We got no windows."

--John Steinbeck, Cannery Row 1945

After McFarland, we were soon on California 58, a route we knew well.  We often came this way in the winter to avoid snowstorms in the Sierras and Cascades on our way to visit my father in Oregon.  And until we got to the coast, the most memorable part of the journey was Tehachapi Pass, which I partly knew from pictures of the wind farms I'd seen in National Geographic back in the 1980s.  Those great white turbines looked so graceful amongst the rolling hills and promised a better world where energy is cheap and clean.  A couple decades later, when we happened upon them in real life, I felt like I'd stumbled upon a sacred shrine I'd formally known only from the picture books.  Even now that I've made that drive many times, I still feel I'm entering sacred space passing those great white landmarks slowly spinning each at their own time, planted up and down the hillsides.

Though only 3,771 feet tall, the pass feels significant because both the San Joaquin Valley and the Mojave Desert are relatively low.  Crossing the ridges that connect the south end of the Sierra Nevada and the Tehachapi Mountains, the pass is steep, curvy, the road rising alongside a busy railway, through high, rolling-top mountains covered in grasses that are bright green in the winter and golden in the summer and are dolloped with oak and pine.  It's incredibly verdant with a great variety of plants and grasses.  And then the most unusual thing happens.  A city sits right at the top:  Tehachapi.

As it was nearing lunch, we got off the freeway to find a park for a picnic.  We found a jewel, Pioneer Park, established in 2006.   Located in a quiet residential neighborhood of modest lower-middle-class homes, sitting on a rectangular lot, the park is shockingly spectacular due to good planning and the high-quality materials chosen. 

I remember it was brisk, but the sun was warm--a bit too chilly for short-sleeves, but pleasant with a hoodie.  I carried the cooler and the food boxes over to the table and then walked around while Marci made Chicken Salad sandwiches.  

What makes this small, rectangular park spectacular is its combinations of curving walkways, circular concrete pads, two pond-shaped areas of grass, and a third pond-shaped area for the playground.  Without an actual pond, it has the layout and feel of a Japanese botanical garden, other than it's on flat ground.  The park is proof that good design and quality materials can make the simplest of spaces grand.

Small details and the human need to create beauty were highly valued by John Steinbeck.  The working of flowerbeds and the hanging curtains are especially significant in his work as symbols of establishing home and fulfilling that human need to connect our dwellings to the natural world.  Well-kept orchards and fields, including fences are also important to his narratives.

I think if Steinbeck had come across this park in his travels with Charlie, it would have been included in what is best about America.  

As individuals, and as a society, we always have two opposing choices, and only two:  Lean towards love, creativity, and beauty, or lean towards hate, depravity, and ugliness.  At any moment, that choice is ours.  Steinbeck longed for individuals, a country, and a world that chose the first, but understanding himself and others well, so he was extremely empathetic towards individuals, a country, and a world that so often sadly chose the latter.  But it wasn't a stagnant, still, empathy, thick with resignation.  It was an active, angry, pleading empathy, desperately urging us to choose our better selves.

I love a good public park.  It is a symbol of community, of putting the collective good above individual wants and desires.  It claims to welcome everyone, even out-of-towners, and costs nothing to visit.  It's presented as a generous giving back to the community and any wanderer that needs a place to stop and break bread.  I'm aware reality doesn't always match that.  Historically, parks were segregated throughout the country.  Today, the homeless are frequently pushed out.  Still, parks are collective spaces, often on donated land, for communities to gather, where visitors are generally welcomed.   They are spaces that reconnect us to nature and point towards our better selves.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 61: Thou Mayest and the One--Paradoxical Parallels between the Teachings John Steinbeck, Wayne Dyer, and the Tao

Us (Monterey Bay Aquarium), Steve Brown 2022

Why do we dread to think of our species as a species?  Can it be that we are afraid of what we might find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask?  This could only be partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941

Steinbeck was a scientist.  Working alongside his best friend biologist Ed Rickets, he studied marine life closely.  The two were early pioneers of ecology, observing how organisms worked together in groups within species, and how species worked together within ecosystems, and how ecosystems worked together in the web of life.  He believed we are all interconnected, that all of the earth's biology together formed one super-organism, with each individual life on it acting as a sort of specialized cell, much like each cell that makes up our body is also an organism.  And just like our individual cells form something greater than the sum of their parts (us), we as living organisms on earth form a super-organism greater than the sum of its parts, which he refers to as one.  However, one is even larger than that, containing ultimately everything in the universe.

Because of his ecological view, Steinbeck was deeply mystical, as seen in the quotation at the top of this page.  Although he rejected an old man dictator concept of God, it doesn't seem like he rejected a God-force.  He seemed to suggest God is the life force behind and in absolutely everything.  Creation and God are one, and so every living thing is a unit of the divine.

Steinbeck's interest in biology led him to observe how animals, such as fish, when gathered in groups, seemed to act as a super-organism where the individual animals become part of something greater than themselves.  The individual seemed to disappear into the whole of the group and act more as a cell of the group-man than as an autonomous individual.  

He observed the same behavior in humans.  In Dubious Battle explores both the good and bad that comes from human collective power.  Cannery Row studies one small neighborhood of Monterey as a living organism where each individual character functions as one cell for the super-organism, Cannery Row.  Although Doc, based on Ed Rickets, plays the role of a specialized cell, similar to what Malcolm Gladwell would later call a " connector" in the Tipping Point, the story is not about Doc; it's literally about Cannery Row.  The community as a whole is both the protagonist and antagonist in comic self-vs.-self conflict.  Cannery Row is an organism as Steinbeck sets up below:   

How can the poem and the stink and the grating noise--the quality of light, the tone, the habit and the dream be set down alive?  When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch.  You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water.  And perhaps that might be a way to write this book--to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.

Perhaps one could think that the above is simply a metaphor for letting the book unfold naturally (and that is clearly part of it) if it were not for the chapter "Cannery Row" that appears prior to Chapter 1, which clearly establishes that Cannery Row is not simply the title and setting of the book.  It is the book--the organism Steinbeck lets crawl onto to the knife blade to be studied.  Doc, Lee Chong, Mack and the Boys, Dora, the prostitutes, the artist, etc.--together they all make up the living organism called Cannery Row.  Individual cells, each with a specialized role, they all function together as one.

Steinbeck viewed man as a species driven by the same biological instinct as everything on the planet.  A man in a mob may behave totally differently than that same man outside a mob because he becomes--for better or worse--part of something that collectively is greater than the sum of its parts.  This would suggest that Steinbeck didn't really believe in the individual and in free will.  If we are but cells in something greater than ourselves playing specialized roles for the good of the group, how are we also individuals with free will?   Fish in a school operate as one, not as individuals with free will.  Yet Steinbeck made it very clear that above all else he was champion of the dignity of the individual, worded succinctly in East of Eden:

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

Steinbeck believed it is precisely through our individuality and our personal choice we approach the divine, as he lays out in East of Eden:

...this was the gold from our mining: 'Thou mayest.' The American Standard translation orders men to triumph over sin (and you can call sin ignorance). The King James translation makes a promise in 'Thou shalt,' meaning that men will surely triumph over sin. But the Hebrew word timshel—'Thou mayest'—that gives a choice. For if 'Thou mayest'—it is also true that 'Thou mayest not.' That makes a man great and that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.

Clearly, believing we function as units in something bigger than ourselves seems to contradict the idea of individual free will.  Yet, Steinbeck believed passionately in both, and he isn't the only one.  Eastern philosophy has always embraced both, as well as many contemporary thinkers, such as Wayne Dyer.  

When I started this book, I intended it to be a travelogue that explores the work of John Steinbeck, especially with regards to the environment.  I conceived it as something of a warning, thus titling it The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland.  I felt that in so many ways we were living Steinbeck's times again, and that we were ignoring the lessons he taught, especially in The Grapes of Wrath.  I still feel all of that is true.  But my writing journey did not go as planned.  My book became much more introspective, and the focus moved from changing society to changing myself.  And as much as I kept trying to focus on Steinbeck, I increasingly found myself reading and listening to Wayne Dyer.  For a while I felt I was losing my focus.  But I no longer think that.  I've been astonished to find how closely Steinbeck's vision of one and Wayne Dyer's vision of one align even though Steinbeck was a scientist focused on the material world open to something divine connecting it all and Dyer was a spiritualist focused on the unseen world open to science.  

Furthermore, both men deal with the paradox:  a deep belief in free will and a belief that we are all so interconnected that we are one.  What an individual does affects everyone.  If that is so, if we are always being affected by the actions of others, something out of our control, how can we actually have free will?  Dyer puts this on a spiritual plane.  He says we are all spiritual beings having a human experience.  He envisions life a school and we as spirits driving our bodies and minds around sort of as cars.  Our higher selves select the human experiences we have and everything we've each done up to his point, our higher selves chose to get us to this point.  He says that rather than doing, we are actually being done by our higher self.  Awakening, then occurs when we realize there is no separation between our spiritual selves, our physical selves, and everything else.  Those together are the one.  And yet Wayne Dyer is all about free will and self-actualization.  He is marketed as a self-help guru, and all of his work is focused around choosing for yourself the life you wish to live while empowering other people to do the same.

However, unlike Steinbeck, I think Wayne Dyer came up with a way to actually make that paradox between free-choice and the interconnected web of life actually work.  It would basically be this.  We have always had free choice, and the choices we freely made up to this point, which included where we were born and who are parents are, our socioeconomic status, etc., were chosen by our soul as the curriculum to wake us up to the fact we are all interconnected and that essentially we are all one with the God, the source of creation.  Awaking is that realization.  Ego is the denial of that, and life is the curriculum we chose to abolish the ego.  

Although I have a different conceptualization of God than Dyer does, that sits very well with me.  It feels true.  Somehow, I have a sense everything I've experienced in this life, I've ultimately chose, and that it has all served to make me a better man.  In the midst of things, it feels like chaos.  In hindsight, it feels like education.  The more I realize that, the more everything opens up in endless options within the restrictions placed on me by my current circumstances.  Choices are not physical things.  They do not occupy space.  You can have an infinite number of choices while physically being very restricted.  Awaking is the realization that I am part of the fabric of life and have infinite choices because of that, not despite it.  After one realizes that one starts working with life rather than against life. 

Awakening, of course, usually comes with practice, moment by moment.  But it doesn't have to.  As long as one is in that infinite space that is I and everything else together as one a person is awake to reality.  That can come all at once, as with Buddha, or it can come moment by moment, piece by piece.

But when it comes, everything changes.  It has to.  Everything is different because the lens actually lets in enough light to perceive the fundamental truth of reality:  we are one.

Individuals throughout America and individuals throughout the world right now are sick with a sense of superiority and separation from each other, who, in a desperate need to find connection, gather in clicks and clans of similar thinking individuals, which then come together as unified groups or parties, but acting extremely separate from all others.  Just like in Steinbeck's time, if we don't change our paradigm, it will end in disaster, causing pain and extreme suffering for millions and millions because it is based on a lie:  that we can somehow get by without each other.  We can't.  It's impossible.  Together, we collectively make up the world.  It's like if the cells in our body decided to separate from each other and declare independence and superiority and rid themselves forever from the ties that unify and make us whole.  You, I--we are each the cells that either keep humanity whole as one, or we explode humanity apart in bloody bits for nothing.  And it will be for nothing.  Because that separateness is an illusion.  It can't happen.  We are one earth.  Period.  Anything else is an absolute lie.  

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 62: Everything Glitters God

Lemon Cove, California, Steve Brown 2022

After Lake Kaweah, we headed out into the Central Valley, staying along the eastern edge most of the way, near the dry, bleached grassy foothills of the Sierra, and then slowly angling our way out to McFarland.  I wish I'd stopped more.  I kept wanting to go back and get to know the many mostly Hispanic towns that support America's industrial agricultural heartland to better write this part of the book. I wanted to read The King of California:  J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire.  Yet, time rushed on, and the focus of this book shifted.   I started out wanting to understand how the lessons The Grapes of Wrath have been largely forgotten to the point that California and America look and feel eerily like they did in the 1930s.  Someone still needs to write that book, perhaps me.  However, the focus of this book shifted to Steinbeck's ecological and mystical visions of the interconnections of life that unify us into one.  Unconsciously, I must have known that was the way it was going to go from the very start, for as early as the second chapter, I'd declared that the guiding theme would be:  We are all connected, and what we choose to do now will impact our individual and shared realities through the eternities.  However, I think at that point, I still envisioned the book as a study of the relationship between California and the United States as a whole, as one more warning about the environmental catastrophe that will occur if we don't heed the lessons of John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets.

Instead, writing this book has become a personal spiritual journey--a record of developing my own happiness through observing the interconnectedness of everything through the specific lens of now--whether that instant be a snapshot of April of 2022, when Marci and I made the trip to California, or whether that be a slice of time closer to right now as I write this chapter.  I came to sense that my own personal liberation was deeply tied to acutely observing my connection with the one, moment to moment, day to day, while letting go of the ego and the fear that drives it.  I set out to better understand a state and a nation and instead focused on better understanding myself.

Happiness, I think, cannot truly be found until one embraces everything.  Intellectually, I understood that when I saw the movie Gandhi in ninth grade.  I knew at that early age that we are all one, and that fighting for individual interests under the illusion of scarcity can only bring human misery.  However, there is a difference between knowing something in the mind and knowing something in the soul.  Somehow, writing this book has opened up my soul to the point I've recognized that the knowledge was always there.  It's not a learning, but a remembering.  Before the 2022 trip to California, I was a spiritual seeker.   Through writing this book, I have become a spiritual practitioner.  I was religious before, and I am religious now.  Most times I'm happy.  Occasionally, I make myself quite miserable.  That was true before the trip, and that is true now.  However, I have completely changed in the process of writing this book because I used to put the lens of one on my camera once in a while when I heard the right song, like "Imagine" by John Lennon, or saw the right movie, like Gandhi, or read the right book, like Cannery Row, but it took the right piece of art to get me to a moment of transcending my ego.  Since writing this book, the lens of one never comes off.  Sometimes it gets so fogged up I can't see.  But my vision of life has been permanently altered.  I may swear and curse at being in the tide pool, but I can no longer view myself as separate or superior from it.  I may still battle with my ego, but I no longer battle with reality.  There is no me separate from everyone and everything.  There can't be.  Whether you look through the lens of science or religion, everything is still part of one cosmos.  We are all living cells of God's infinite ocean.  Or if you prefer, we are particles of the godless universe.  Either way, the source is one.  Once that really sinks in, you can never be the same.  Anger is still possible in moments when you're at your worse, but once you truly absorb the interconnectedness of all things, hate really is no longer an option. Hate is fueled by the illusion of separation, of other.  No other, no hate.  Only God--even if you believe that divinity is simply the entirety of the universe.  

I don't believe in that godless Universe.  I believe in a very personal God who knows each of us by name.  In fact, I don't believe it, I know it.  However, more important than believing in God is the recognition we are all one because with that recognition comes alignment with God and each other.  When you finally recognize that deep in your soul, you no longer need someone to believe like you in order to be one with you.  Once there is no illusion of I separate from source there is no me left to protect.  I retain my individuality, but my eyes no longer look out on the tidepool; my eyes are the tide pool.  One floats around in this magnificent tidepool of diversity, where there are still darkness and light, still wrong and right, but where everyone and everything are perfect in their own stage of development. You finally see. Everything glitters God.

I had not yet put on this permanent lens of oneness driving through corporate expanses of orchards, vineyards, and cropland around MacFarland, USA, but the endless flat grid of growth was sort of awe-inspiring like laying on one's back and looking up into the stars.  It truly seemed endless, until it would all of the sudden end, and we'd find ourselves on a dry hill, just high enough to see the desert beyond the illusion of endless fertile geometric fecundity.   And then we'd drop back down into that flatness and drive by some expansive orange grove, sunlight glistening of waxy leaves off rows and rows of squat, bulky, loaded trees.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland 61: Goodbye Fear

Fear Leaving (Ghost Rider by Albert Szukalski, Rhyolite, Nevada), Steve Brown 2022

Except for those spectacular moments when I was in the now, focused on the beauty of the physical world, I have lived most of my life in fear.  I called it shyness to remove it from what it was.  However, that label is inaccurate.  I definitely felt anxiety in social situations, but I felt anxiety almost constantly.  The degree to which I have felt that is probably more intense than it is for others, but I'm certain it's not unique.  Most people just are not to a place where they can admit they are terrified most of the time.  But they are.  You don't second guess what clothes you put on or think things inside your head that you're not willing to put out there in the real world except when fear is riding your back.  I'm not there yet, but I'm pretty sure you don't even get offended once fear is no longer present.  Hate, jealousy, hesitation, second guessing, not letting go, arguing, temper tantrums, shyness, timidness, boasting, keeping up appearances, classism, judgement: these are all symptoms of fear.  And I don't know about everybody else, but I'm absolutely exhausted from carrying around fear all of the time.  So, I'm walking away from it.  I don't know if it will be easy or difficult.  However, I have the sneaky suspicion that now that I've named it for what it is--absolute terror at losing everything brutally and unpredictably--leaving that old miserable friend Fear behind will be much easier than I think.  

We'll see.  

But easy or difficult, I'm doing it because spending most of my life in fear was absolutely insane.  Ants, aardvarks, beetles, birds, butterflies, and on down the alphabet soup of creation, including humans--each living thing survives until it doesn't, and I'm profoundly convinced from reading and listening to hundreds of near-death experiences, that even death is just another move from one neighborhood to next.  So, what good does fear do for anyone beyond helping them have the good sense not to step off a cliff?  I'm done.  Damnit.  Done.  Not with life.  I'm going to open up spectacularly to that.  But Fear--  Bye-bye.  Take a hike.  

I could look back at my life and try and find the source of that fear.  But why?  I could look back and count all of the experiences and opportunities I let fear steal from me.  But why?  I could believe that because fear has always been with me, it will continue to be for some time, that it will be extremely difficult to shake off.  But why?

So, this is probably going to be the shortest, most profound chapter of this book.  And I'm certain it will be life-altering.  If only for me.   And that's fine.  All kindness begins with kindness to oneself.  I am going to be kind enough to my self--this creation of God, along with mold and orangutangs--to no longer let fear suck joy from my days.

I may do it quietly, unnoticed.  I may do it loudly, wearing bright colors.  I may do it in a straight line and with even momentum.  Or I may zig-zig, gun the gas, and slam on the breaks.  Or all of the above, depending on the day.  But, however I do it, I'm doing it to the best of my ability moving forward.  Living in fear is an absolutely stupid way to spend even one day.  Letting it consume your life is crazy beyond measure.