The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--32. Big Sur Life

Fog, Big Sur, April 2022, Steve Brown

The weather changes constantly along California 1 north of Morro Bay, so frequently in fact, that it is steady and stable, like the rhythm of a song.  Except on very rare occasions, you know that on your journey, you will wind your way through the constant interplay of sunshine and fog that may or may not include brief intense downpours of rain, the clouds rolling in, echoing the rhythm of the sea.

I can never decide what I love more on that drive, a wall of fog or a burst of sunshine, because the glory is not in one or the other but in the landscape constantly changing, as the clouds form, move, and disperse, over and over again.

I cannot help but wonder if our lives are like that, and yet we miss the grand sweeping views of the interplay of gray and light because we only want the sunshine.  How many glorious moments of thundering waves and cool, thick whisps of blindingly dense uncertainty do we resent in our own lives because we are addicted to sunshine and seek storm-free lives even though that is an impossibility.  What would we feel and learn if we could just sit in that cold gray mist and watch the changing light as a storm moves through our lives and then passes?  Sure, there are times to run for cover and pray for sunshine.  Instinct is important.  There are definitely times we need to seek refuge from the storms.  Some things, like the death of a loved one or a marriage that refuses to survive, can feel overwhelming.  But most of us never want any level of storms in our lives at any time because we are addicted to sunshine.  And because we don't practice sitting in hard moments, when the big ones come, they feel devastating, or worse, we just go numb.  

I think there may be a way of actually sitting in the small problems and enjoying them immensely--the simple joy in watching our ego react to the most-recent cloud coming our way--the picnic we learn to absolutely love precisely because we got rain instead of sunshine.  I don't know if I can get there.  But I think it's possible because I love the loss off sunshine along the California coast even though my skin always yearns for that glorious return of the sun.  I love feeling that fog bank move in, at first everything filtered by a sodium light that softens the landscape while still letting in some warm rays, and then watching and feeling how that thin film thickens to clumpy gray while shadows vanish before the diminished light as the clouds crash into the mountainside and spew upward over the ridges.  I can sit there and enjoy that cold, brutally moist wind because I have full confidence that if I sit there--sure some cold pelting rain may hit briefly--but a moment of warm golden light is guaranteed to return.

I want to learn to live life like I drive California 1--open to the everchanging reality before me in all its glory, enthralled by the shifting clouds and the play of light and shadow, rather than limiting my moments of joy to the brief bursts of sunshine and feeling dread each time another cloud approaches.

I believe there are a few rare people who have stopped seeking storm-free lives on the cellular level, the only place it really counts, and enjoy the rained-on picnic as much, if not more than the perfect one, who enjoy the flat tire as part of the trip (a chance to get down in the gravel and see the world from something close to a crawling-critter perspective), and I want to learn to become one of them because what good does it do you to desire only sunshine when you live in a landscape where clouds will surely come?  

We all live in landscapes where clouds will surely come.  Our addiction to sunshine keeps us from enjoying this moment, whatever it be.  But I don't think it needs to be that way, and I am determined to find out if there isn't a better way of living--a way where my happiness isn't dependent on the weather being favorable to my plans for the day.  I want to discover a way of being where my happiness isn't even necessarily tied to joy.  I love a rainy day, but I can't say that a rainy day makes me happy.  It makes me depressed, but it's a good depression, a wonderful melancholy that makes you want to read a good book, a depression that I cannot only live with, but one that I can savor, for I can name the source of that feeling--the diminished light--and I have full confidence, based on experience, that the storm will eventually pass, and that the sunlight will return in all its glory.  Why do we struggle so to have that same recognition in our broader lives when experience should clearly teach us everything is changing, always?  We might as well enjoy all of the ride--not just the most comfortable parts.  A life focused on all moments is a life lived fully.  A life focused only on sunshine is diminished greatly by denying what life actually is--constant change, change so constant that if one gets into the groove and goes with the beat, one finds one can sway to the music.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--31. Focus Is the Difference Between Seeing the World in a Grain of Sand and Just Quickly Swooshing Away a Speck of Dirt

Dry Creek Holding Pond, One Moment, 4.24.24, Steve Brown 

I knew when I started writing this book that I would not be able to keep up with the changes in the world.  The world moves much too fast these days.  None-the-less, I initially intended to weave glimpses of our current shared reality into the narrative by beginning each chapter with one moment somewhere around the world.  I had in mind something similar to the Newsreel chapters in the novel 1919 by Jon Dos Pasos.  I thought that by combining Marci's and my journey to Cannery Row and back, current news events, and some in between chapters recording my thought processes (like this one), along with an in-depth study of the philosophy of Ed Rickets and John Steinbeck, I might be able to arrive at some semblance of what it means to live in our times, which in so many ways mirror Steinbeck's times.  I felt then, and still feel now, that his writing is more relevant now than ever before.  

It was an intuitive structure, but one that I felt I could generally keep.  To some extent I have.  But something changed on Thursday, September 24, 2023.  As I sat at my desk and looked out on a single sunflower lit up in my garden by the last warm rays of the day, I became acutely aware that I have never been unhappy when I was fully in a moment.  In my teenage and college years I was dissatisfied most of the time but never when I was completely present.  All my unhappiness happened in my head.   In an instant, I realized one could choose to stay in the moment or one could not-choose, and in the process, unconsciously follow whatever train of thought and emotions rose in the mind, usually triggered by whatever circumstance presented itself at the time.   The journey is usually glorious until you have a flat tire.  

I also realized that I usually react defensively in response to living.   This occurs in two polar-opposite mental states--a place of fear and self-doubt or a place of judgment and self-aggrandization--but that both are equally defensive in protecting some sense of a stable I.  The self-doubt keeps me from believing I can change, and the self-aggrandization keeps me from believing I need to change.  It seemed to me that the mind left on its own will always goes to a place of defense except when one chooses to intentionally sit in a moment as an objective, transparent observer.

Of course, I hadn't discovered anything new.   Buddhist monks have known and written about this phenomenon for centuries.  Meditation is one means to get there.  And I'd spent years reading books by Buddhist authors, so it was something I knew about already intellectually, but at that moment, I realized not only had I lived that bliss many times before, but that with practice, I might learn to live some sort of joy always, even in moments of great fear and sorrow.  I'm still not sure I personally can accomplish my goal, but at that moment I knew in an instant happiness does not depend on circumstances.  It is a choice.  It is a choice between sitting fearlessly in the moment, whatever that moment is, and intentionally observing it for what it is, or it is not-choosing that, and by not consciously choosing that, letting your mind take over--which, with the ego in control, always goes to a place that pits you against reality where everything, absolutely everything, is about seeking protection and establishing a position of superiority.  It does not, and cannot, lead to happiness.  By trying to keep us safe from the tiger outside, the ego has become the tiger inside.   Unchecked by reality, it will eat a person from within and drive them to insanity without them knowing it.  

Since that moment of realization, the subject of this book has clearly become now, although the vehicle to explore it remains the works of John Steinbeck and Marci's and my journey to Cannery Row in 2022.   

And now it is time to stop writing this chapter and do the dishes.  They've been stacking up for three days because Friday and Saturday were days to work in the yard and yesterday was a day to go up north to be with family.

Now, the sky is turquoise above the juniper-jagged ridge outside my living room window, each tree seeming to lumber along the top, individually together like a line of enormous elephants.  I could sit here in this moment and watch the sky lighten but now is the time to wash dishes, and if I'm fully present, it too will be a moment of miracles because one cannot fully enter a moment and not have it count for something.  I'm absolutely positive of that.  All moments matter immensely, especially the mundane ones, because those are moments where we spend most of our lives.  If we live them grandly, fully satisfied with whatever task is at hand, we will never look back at our life and think what was it all for?   We will know because we spent each waking moment intimately having a dialogue with it.

To be or not to be is not so much a question as to live or die; rather it is more a question as to whether to be present or not, and that has far less to do with what you are doing at the moment and far more with how are going about doing it.

Focus is the difference between seeing the world in a grain of sand and just quickly swooshing away a speck of dirt, oblivious to the infinity contained in that moment.  That wildflower off to the side of the bottom step contains no heaven for neither the eye blinded by the mind resenting having to sweep the porch nor the mind nagging to get some sort of recognition for having done so.  Eternity exists only for those present in the moment.  Hell may simply be a state of being so consumed by the nagging of the ego that one is totally unaware God is standing next to you, patiently waiting for you to notice heaven is all around you if you will simply stop, breathe, and observe the intricacies of life abundantly accessible now and into the eternities.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--30. California 1. Mist and sun

 

California 1, Mist and Sun, Steve Brown 2022

California 1.  Mist and sun.  Sodium-light softened hills that seem to roll out of the surf of the sea along with the clouds--everything slowly moving east always--wave after wave.  Blues, whites, greens, all glorious together as one everchanging, eternally-the-same landscape--grey, cold and moody one moment, and then, popping out in brilliantly bright detail the next.

There is no feeling on earth like getting out of the car again and again, viewpoint after viewpoint, along California 1.  It is the drive of all drives.  It blows my mind, there are those who have to drive that highway just to get around, to go into Cambria to get a box of cereal and a gallon of milk or go to the post office.  A man can be in the moment anywhere, but there are some places that demand our presence more than others.  What makes California 1 so magical is that it demands you be there, fully.  The moment you step out of that car, feel that mist, hear those waves thunder, and take in those brief but glorious encounters with direct sunlight, you are 100% in one moment and one place.   It's impossible not to be.  Life becomes nothing more than watching a Monarch butterfly warm its wings on a purple flower on a hillside above the sea.  You are constantly wanting to jump out of your skin, leave your mortality far behind, and glide over the hills, wild and free.

And so, that's what Marci and I did, April 11, 2022.  We drove.  We stopped.  Sometimes we walked a bit.  Then we stood all amazed and looked at the waves.  They are always the first thing, each and every time.  They grab you.  But then there are the smaller things.  The seagull sitting on a fence post, the squirrel popping its head out from under the ground cover, a butterfly gently landing.   And oh, how glorious a moment of sun feels igniting your chilled skin.  And then mist is back, and you zip up that hoodie, and pull it tight around you, waiting for that next brief burst of sun.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--29. One Moment Reading the First Paragraph of Cannery Row

Cannery Row, April 12, 2022, Steve Brown

For me the most perfect paragraph ever written is the one that starts Cannery Row.

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.  Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.  Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches, by which he meant Everybody.  Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men," and he would have meant the same thing.

If that paragraph was the only paragraph John Steinbeck ever composed, in my mind he would remain forever the preeminent chronicler of Americana and one of the world's most profound philosophers.

When I read Cannery Row for the first time, it felt like it would change my life forever.  I'm not sure it did, but it should have.  It definitely changed moments, but I think I am now beginning to really comprehend that jewel at the cellular level, like sunlight, where it counts.

Like he so often did so well, Steinbeck captured the universal through the particular.  Cannery Row is both a specific place at a specific moment in history, and it is also everywhere at all times.  It is stepping into a moment and place completely unfiltered by bias and preconceptions and enjoying whatever that quality is on its own terms.  It is becoming the transparent eyeball Emerson talks about; it is Buddha sitting under the fig tree, and then standing up an enlightened being, no longer that man who sat down.

Cannery Row is not just a study of a particular place and time; it's not just a juicy, dripping, generous slice of life, although it clearly is that.  Ultimately, it's an essay on how to live life--not so much through the examples of characters, although they do get a lot of things profoundly right, even in their drunken states.  Rather, through the open, loving, compassionate way Steinbeck films that little neighborhood in his mind's eye, he shows us how to view the world around us through the lens of love.  Steinbeck sees Cannery Row the way God must see Cannery Row.  Steinbeck would never word it that way himself.  He was far more atheist than believer, and he was far too humble to ever associate his view of the world as godly.  Still, Steinbeck saw the world through Christ-like eyes, and he did that by entering a moment fully, on its own terms, open, and unbiased by preconceptions, studying it objectively like a scientist.  Oddly, doing so, aligns you more with all the qualities of Christ--compassion, understanding, wisdom, letting-go--more than does narrowing your vision to the holy, and then frothing and foaming at the mouth, razor-back hair on your head, growling at all the evil you encounter around you.  The reason most Christians, including myself, aren't very Christian is because we can't get out of ourselves.  Everything is an ego-driven comparison, a judgement that places us above the world we are viewing, a disdainful eye towards humanity, and thus all of creation.  All vision stems from a selfish need to be better than everyone else.  In that state, pity passes for compassion, and self-indulgent "understanding" for love, which is why the world judges Christians so harshly.  The hate we often get back is an opposite force in equal reaction to the distain the world receives from us.

Obviously, especially in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck did make judgement, and he certainly was angered by what he saw.  I would say the same is true of Christ as depicted in the New Testament.  Both were incredibly angered by social systems of injustice that stifle the individual's capacity to grow and become all they can be.  They were angered by the caste systems that those in power designed to keep the game unfair and the advantaged always advantaged.  But that anger grew out of compassionate eyes that saw all of humanity as equally human rather than from self-centered eyes that needed somehow to see themselves as better than those around them.  Ultimately, Christ only judges one type of person--he who judges others, especially the displaced and the de-privileged.  Everyone else is given grace once they have repented.  His only intolerance is of self-righteousness and self-centeredness.  I think the same can be said of Steinbeck.  By entering a moment, a place, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, objectively and completely, he is able to understand the motivations of its inhabitants, and that understanding builds compassion which fosters love, to where the "whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches" are transformed into "Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men":  

Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces.  In a world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row.   What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostrate, and bifocals?  Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums.  Our Father who art in Nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, Mack and the boys.  Virtuess and graces and laziness and zest.  Our Father who art in nature.

Because Steinbeck understands Mack and the boys completely, and sees how they fill a niche in society, he also loves them completely.   His objective observations create that love.  When you view a situation intensely enough, objectively enough, you become one with it.  You are no longer separated by your ego.  That's what Emerson felt as a transparent eyeball.  That's what Sidhartha found when he sat under the fig tree.  When we lose ourselves--whether that be through observation or service to others--we find ourselves.  The ego sets up false walls--ungodly walls of separation between us and the world around us.  That is counter to the two great commandments:  to love God, the creator of all, with all your heart, and to love others even as yourself.  Even in his insistence that Nature is the only god, Steinbeck comes closer to the core of Christianity than most Christians do because he sees each individual as part of the fabric of whole through an empathetic eye that understands how they became that way, and what they contribute the world by simply trying to survive.  So, the villains in The Grapes of Wrath are not individuals, but rather a Satanic system of injustice that unnaturally keeps people in castes and castrates their natural talents and abilities and makes them unnaturally impotent in the world.  It's the system that turns free agency into an illusion for those at the bottom that is evil, not the various individuals on different rungs of the ladder.  The Grapes of Wrath is ultimately an inditement of the American caste system.  

Being in a moment, sitting completely under that tree and just being, walking through those woods and becoming all eye, transparent in your surroundings, forces a confrontation with that false wall of separateness and superiority, and breaking through that sets the soul free, if only for a moment.  But once that illusion has been fully observed for what it is, an illusion, one can never fully retreat back to a place of hate and distain for the world around you.  That ego-driven sense of superiority is forever damaged, and with it, your fear--and then, one begins to, for the first time ever, to actually be cable of love.

This is what we need so desperately now.  The ability to enter a moment completely and see it objectively on its own terms, unbiased, undistorted by the ego erecting scaffolding to hold the observer high on a tower of distain.  And this is what Steinbeck teaches us.  We are part of the tidepool, and the tidepool is whatever we make of it.  The better we understand it, the less likely we will unwittingly do permanent harm.  We are at a place in history where we definitely need to learn to do less harm.  The tidepool has been pushed to its limits.  We either learn to live together, or we learn to vanish together (at least in this realm).  It is time to enter the moment and at least attempt to understand it before it's too late.  Anyone who preaches separateness, division, and hate is a false-prophet--petroleum to our shared water, Earth.  We are far too connected now to ever make it alone on our own.  There is no us against the world.  The world is crammed full of only us--not only us humans, but us, everything.  We are either here all together, or we will soon be all together not at all.   It's so simple, so real, so scary--which is why the world is seeking desperately anything but this moment.  There is a reason almost every big movie in the last twenty years is a comic strip or a fantasy.  There is a reason we are glued to our computers, our phones, our virtual "lives".  We are a species that thinks we can survive by feasting on denial.  Although we can't, of course.  We can't.  Sooner or later, we will be forced to engage in the moment and the world we collectively created, and together we will reap what we've sown.  And the judgement will be our own because denial always has its end.  When that hits with force, it's a brutal blow.   

However, when we cultivate being in the moment, on our own, and see those ties that unite and bond us together in a shared fabric and future, there is a transcendent release of the I, that selfish iron grip of the ego that proclaims that we are separate and superior to those around us, ant that release in turn allows us to empathize, and through that empathy perhaps create common solutions, which, because of our numbers, are the only options at this point that have a chance of working.  And we need those options to work.  Oh, how we need them to work.  Like never before.

Steinbeck doesn't necessarily provide the solutions, but he does give us the tools to start earnestly looking, which starts with entering a moment completely, and simply observing a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream objectively and compassionately as is possible.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--28. Morro Strand Beach

Morro Rock from Morro Strand Beach, Steve Brown 2022

1.  Arrival

Marci and I pulled up to Morrow Strand Beach in the dark.  The campground is little more than a parking lot with tent sites just off the pavement, in the sand, before some low trees that shelter you somewhat from that constant wind and sound of the thundering sea.  Anywhere else, I'd snub my nose at such a campground.  But here, it is complete because all you need is the sand and the sea.

We set up camp in the dark, working mostly by the light of our neighbor's fire and lantern (which were quite near), and a couple of our own flashlights.  The sites were close enough together that I felt the obligation a couple of times to go over and apologize for opening and closing the trunk of the car so frequently, but each time the urge quickly fell away as the sounds of clanking dishes and laughter as our neighbors made dinner sounded so warm and unperturbed.  I decided they were having way too much fun to be annoyed by the closing of a trunk, no matter how close and often it was.

Still, I was filled with anxious anticipation, waiting for that moment when I could leave camp behind and walk out and meet that magical moonlit sea!

After I made a quick dinner and washed the dishes, I did eventually get that chance.  It was brief.  The wind was strong and cold, and I was incredibly tired, so I didn't stay long.  I can't remember if Marci walked out with me or if I was all alone.

I just remember seeing the moon and the distant grey whitecaps, which appeared large even that far away, although if I remember right, the tide was actually pulling out, and there was more wet sand than there usually is along a beach.  I don't know how much of this is true.  I just know it is accurate to what I see in my mind now.

What I do know for certain is that I was cold, I was tired, and so I didn't stay long.  I came back to camp, and Marci and I walked over to the restroom together, and as soon as we got back, we went to bed.

By then the neighbors were in bed also, and I was able to fall to sleep to nothing but the sound of the sea.  It was a distant drum, a low rumble, constant and soothing, but not threatening.  I soon slid into a deep sleep, and whether I dreamed of fishing boats, and storms, and of a Savior walking on water, I don't know.  I just know that as soon as I awoke, even though it was cold, all I wanted to do was get out of that tent and witness that great ocean once again.

2.  A Morning Walk Along the Beach

Normally, the first thing I do when I exit the tent in morning is make a mad dash to the restroom.  The second thing I do is light the stove and put on a pot of water to boil.  I warm my hands by the flame for few minutes, and then I gather wood and start a fire.  Everything is about getting heat first.  Taking in whatever stunning landscape surrounds me waits until I'm reasonably warm.  But because the California coast is not just another grand landscape, and because it was warmer than I expected, although still chilly, I skipped the whole getting warm bit and hit the beach as soon as my bladder was empty.

And was it stunning.  I've seen a lot of rocks off the west coast, but I've never seen anything remotely as majestic as Morro Rock rise out of the water.  I'd done my research, watched many videos about the area, but nothing prepared me for the real thing.  Seeing it out there, seemingly surrounded by waves, is astonishing.  I was totally unprepared for it.

Joy!  That is what the west coast is to me.  Walking along the sands, hearing the rhythm of the surf, taking in that sodium sunlight, everything constantly filtered by a mist that hovers along shore and thickens and thins and thickens again.  Everything rocking, waving, in and out of focus--the coastline constantly changes--a ridge once blotted now stands out in vivid clarity.

I was back to where I always belong.  By the sea!  I cannot describe how good it felt to soak in that weak, warm filtered sunlight and just be.

I rushed back to camp to make breakfast, wake Marci, so I could share how glorious it is to walk by the ocean and witness that rock shimmering even as it is softened around the edges by that magical mist that constantly moves along the coastline.  

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--27. Whatever an Apple Is, It Is Somehow Connected to Being an Apple

Spring Puddle, Steve Brown 2024

Pregnant spring clouds move behind the juniper ridge out the front window as the sky turns from gray to blue with the coming of the night.  Soon the reflected interior of the house will mingle with the outside for a brief magical time until the interior eventually takes over and the windows are reduced to mirrors.  

The natural world blotted out by artificial light.  Perhaps that is a metaphor for our times.   The observable universe has expanded greatly both telescopically and microscopically due to advances in technology, but the amount of time the average person encounters the natural world observable to the human eye has plummeted because the projected reality on the glass devices before us has replaced our direct interaction with nature.  We have access to almost everything, and yet we ignore our personal connection to life.  

This is also somewhat true for me.  I live on ninety acres of land with two creeks and the forest a very short walk away, and for much of the year, deer within a stone's throw from either my front or back door.  Yet, a hundred years ago, it is very likely I would have had more connection to the earth living in the center of town, even a fairly big town, because much of my food would have been grown in my garden, no matter how small, and sweltering summer nights would have been spent on the porch swing listening to the crickets sing instead of watching TV or clicking on an endless supply of videos on my phone.  I would most likely walk or ride a horse more than I commute by rail.  Travel would be slow and methodical--time for reflection on something big and grand, like God, or next to nothing, like that one tree on that otherwise bald hill before me, both equally important to knowing one's place in the universe the only way it counts--personal, unnamed, in the fabric of your soul.

Now, even the machines have intelligence, but man never really understands anything because most of his interactions with the world are done remotely with a screen between him and reality.  Spiritually, we are not meant to know the world this way.  It's damaging.  To understand how a tumbleweed takes seed, sprouts and grows and tumbles its posterity across a turned field through a time-lapse video is not to know a tumble weed.  It is facsimile reality.  To know a tumbleweed is to watch it slowly turn from green to dark red to dark brown to beige as one passes it each day as late summer slides slowly into fall and the last crop of alfalfa is cut, or you get the tumbleweed's nasty barbs in your skin, even with gloves, as you pull masses of them from the wire fence around the chicken run.  

It is only through direct, tangible connections to the world around us that we gain a sense of place, and a sense of who we are in relation to that place.  And yet we now spend hours daily in front of screens.  No wonder we are no longer sure about who we are.  Whatever meaning life has, it is impossible to think it is not somehow directly connected to life.  I know that seems obvious, like saying whatever an apple is, it is somehow connected to being an apple.  But we live as if we weren't people with an origin--rooted to the earth and sky.  What does a person made of flesh and bone have to do with a glass screen?  What in our cells would have any connection whatsoever to the pixels of light on our computer, let alone the plastics around it?  What unnamed dialog could possibly take place between the two at a cellular-memory level, where things really matter?  

But a cricket--that is quite a different thing.  How many generations have our ancestors heard their songs and passed some memory of that music onto us through our genetic memory?  

We are setting ourselves up for spiritual isolation on a mindboggling scale because all human origin narratives go back in time to a place where God moved upon the face of the deep.  That tangible unknown is glimpsed in flashes by staring up at the seemingly countless stars, or comprehended in the very cells of our skin as the smoothness of the inside of a conch shell glides along one's fingertip and speaks of universal unity stored deep down inside forever but not named in your mind until that mind-boggling ah-ha moment:  I and this conche shell are of one great design.   As good as Cosmos or any other show might be--it cannot get you there.  Only looking directly at those stars and personally feeling that shell can place you in that moment of direct instruction:  This is what it is to be human, here, now.

We are creating a world of constant stimulation and almost zero direct connection, and frankly, that's more frightening to me than even artificial intelligence.  The Metaverse can only lead to an ever-increasing sense of purposelessness because our purpose, like the purpose of all living things, is simply to exist between the dirt beneath our feet and below the sun and clouds in the sky and grow in that space the best we can amongst all other living things.  There is no man without the garden because the garden is the origin, that magic moment and place where God granted us life, and we were raised from the dust to be.  That type of knowing can't be comprehended before a screen.  A genuine sense of purpose cannot be learned, only experienced.  God is in the details because God is the details in a very real sense.  He is directly tangible everywhere through direct engagement of the senses, but He is tangible nowhere without some connection to what actually is.  We are creating a reality where we only experience the universe through projections of life, simulations of being replacing actually being.

Nothing could make Satan happier.  A spiritually displaced people can be led in any direction.

Getting to know this moment well enough to see it, taste it, and hear it breathe--that may well be the antivenom to serpent's final attempt to slither into the sinews of our being and sever us once and for all from the garden and any memory of who we are:  Sons and Daughters of God.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--26. Toes of the Sierra Nevada, No. 2

 

Marci and her Pinecone, Steve Brown 2022

One of the problems with writing a travelogue is that it takes time.   By the time you've finished writing the book you are very far removed in time from the actual trip.  Most of what I've seen is never lost to me.  I was reading from Steinbeck's The Red Pony this morning, and I was transported to a specific moment from my childhood.  It was a warm spring day, perhaps third grade.  The snow had melted off the basketball courts east of the old yellow brick school, and steam was rising off of the wet, black pavement in lemon whisps.   I could hear the sound of basketballs hitting the shallow puddles, hear the sound of the girls playing jump rope games, and my eyes were focused on the wonder of all that steam.  I pretended I was flying over clouds as I walked around in wonder.  

It was like no time had passed at all.  But here's the thing.  I did not sit down determined to get back to that moment.  Something about these words by Steinbeck tapped a memory:

He went on to the sagebrush line where the cold spring ran out of its pipe and fell into a round wooden tub.  He leaned over and drank close to the green mossy wood where the water tasted best.  Then he turned and looked back on the ranch, on the low, whitewashed house girded with red geraniums, and on the long bunkhouse by the cypress tree...

I lived on a ranch when I was in first grade.  It would have been logical for that paragraph above to tap into memories of days on the ranch.  But that's not how the mind works.  It's not organized by claims, supporting claims, and evidence.  It operates through connections we don't necessarily understand.  Perhaps my mind saw a light in that passage that was reminiscent of the light on the playground that spring day.   Maybe I saw a gold light on the water that flowed from the pipe that reminded me of the light reflected of that slick obsidian playground.  Or maybe I sensed a similar warmth in the air.  Who knows?  

So, the problem in writing about a trip now two years in the past isn't that I've forgotten the details.  I know from experience that they are still there somewhere in great precision.  It's more about figuring out how to trick the mind into experiencing it as if it were now.  What makes a daydream magical is not what you are remembering, but rather, that you are experiencing that moment as if it were now.   How to do that though on command is the question.  I've been training my mind to get into the current moment with some success.  The next trick is to learn to get the mind back to a specific now from the past on command.  That is a useful skill for a writer, and it is not the same as just remembering the narrative.  Telling your reader what happened is completely different than placing them in the event.

I am learning a lot about the philosophies that moved Steinbeck to write.  I enjoy that.  I think we are living a repeat of his times in many ways, and that his massages were never more important than they are today.   But what makes Steinbeck profoundly memorable is his ability to put a reader in a moment.  All I can do here is to try to do the same.

I remember being tired.  I remember the light moving towards afternoon.  I remember the sky being a warm mixture of white and blue, of grasses along the road long and gold, of the warm smell of pine, of the Kern River far down below pooled in bowls carved into granite.  I remember wanting to stop often, and doing so, but not nearly as much as I wanted to, because pullouts seem to be gone as soon as you see them, as the road twists this way, and then that way, monotonously for eternity--all this adding to the sleepiness and the desire to slip into eternal slumber--forcing the eyes wide open and saying to myself, It's way too early to be feeling that way now.

I remember thinking this is way too good to miss, remembering just enough of the Kern River from our honeymoon, that trip so long ago, to know I would regret it if I just went on through in some sort of dazed dream and did not stop again as much as I liked the slow methodical rhythm of the repeated sway from side to side as the car hugged the curves in the road, the light pouring through the pines and hitting the eyes with flashes of wonder and bewilderment, the eyes adjusting always to see between the dark and the light.  

So, I pull over.  We get out.  The river is quite far below, but the pools are magical, dark and deep in shadow.  The sound is loud for the distance.  Water pouring over stone.  I decide to climb down.

It reminds me of rivers from my childhood, the rivers north of here.  I am child again playing in the magic of water in the late afternoon, light dancing everywhere, blue dragonflies dazzling and darting.  Long, thick green grasses along the river's edge glistening, always the hard drops of shadow thrown by great pine interrupting that glorious light, and in the process, seeming to increase its intensity.

I don't know how long I am lost in the past down there.   But when I come up, I find Marci in warm light in a tomato red shirt and blue jeans holding a giant pinecone and smiling grandly.  She is amazed. 

  

I tell her, "Oh, that is nothing," and launch into tales of the enormous pinecones that can be found around the edges of a meadow by Eagle Lake.  I'm about to slip away back in time again, but she grabs me.  She knows she has found something magical, and she's not going to let me steal that away from her.  She insists you could not possibly find a grander pinecone than this.  She shoves it towards me to prove her point.

I agree.  Even if that may not be totally factually true--a grand find in this moment is always grander than the great finds of the past, if we will but slow down enough to see them.  For no moment can be as intense as the one here and now if we will but stop and let it be so.

I tell her to stand in the light and pose with her pinecone so that we can honor the glorious find that it is.

That pinecone now sits on the mantle of our fireplace.  It is grand--but not near as grand as the memory of seeing Marci consumed by joy at finding a grand pinecone during one stop as we crawled across the toes of the Sierra on what seemed like an endless journey one afternoon in April of 2022.  So, perhaps this now is not always as glorious as the nows of the past after all.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--25. Now Open to the Pulse

Shell Station Puddle, Fillmore Utah, January 16, 5:17 PM, Steve Brown 

The ability to see, record, or imagine detail is not the same thing as being present in the now.  I have always navigated my way through the world with my eyes.  In introducing my poetry in Sell-Outs Literary Magazine, a magazine a friend and I published while we were still in college, I wrote the following:

I want to write, write well, and maybe say something in the process.  Certainly, a lot needs to be said. But a poem is as much an energy as it is a thing that says something.  A poet doesn't write poems; a poet is receptive to energy--the movement of clouds, wheat being whipped at forty miles an hour, gunfire at the 7-11 down the street, or simply Grandpa flushing the toilet--it's the movement that counts.  When you do say something that needs to be said, it's because the energy is right, not because you feel like saving the world.  The rest of the time you're open to any pulse and you put it down.

It amazes me that I had formed a writing philosophy at such a young age.  What amazes me more is that in all these years, that philosophy hasn't changed.  These are still my guiding principles:  1.  Writing is an energy; it is an act of discovery; when you leave port, you shouldn't already know the route and destination.  Let the winds carry you, and steer as you see what is ahead of you.  2. The fuel is the five senses; everything moves one image at a time.  3.  If you fully know your thesis up front, you might as well not write; the creative act that caused you to form some sort of claim in your head is over; the energy is gone, and the writing will be dead.  4.  Writing is about being open now to the pulse, whatever that might be, which means living each moment fully to keep the energy alive.

What strikes me is that although I knew this well at such a young age, I applied it so poorly.  I wasted enormous amounts of time in my twenties.  And I was incredibly unhappy.  I did wander day after day around the streets of El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico, which is the perfect activity for a single, young writer to be doing to generate ideas.  However, I was seldom in the moment.  Instead, I was unhappily in my head, feeding my fears of being alone, unlovable, while trying to get alcohol to transform me into the extravert I am not.  What's even more astonishing is that even though I absolutely knew writing was my route to happiness, I spent so little time actually doing it.  I was trying to live in my head what I thought a writer should be: a jaded, drunken atheist like Hemingway, drinking my way through a world I didn't believe in the best I could, getting it all down along the way.  Except, I got very little of it down.  What I wrote was good, but my output was 10% of what it should have been given the opportunities I had to write at the time.  Even more tragic is how little time I actually spent in the moment.

Although I understood writing well, I didn't understand living well.  Had I understood then what I understand now, this probably would not be the first book you'd be reading by me.   I would have understood myself well enough to not get in my own way.  That's what we do when we don't feel worthy deep down inside.  We find ways to pretend we're moving forward while actually retreating from our goals.  And we do it so sneakily.   We aren't actually aware we're walking back our contribution to the world before we've even had the courage to state this is who I am, and this is what I can offer the world.   We fear failing most at what we love most.  So, we put our energy into things we're alright at failing at rather than what we are passionate about.   We negotiate our lives away, making compromises with our enemy, fear.  We live our dreams in our head throughout childhood, and then at some point, encouraged by society, we get real, which is a softer way of saying we abandon who we really are.

I partially did that.  I pretty much quit writing for twelve years to focus on being a teacher.  I told myself my love of teaching had replaced my love of writing.  It was a lie.  I'm a good teacher.  I enjoy being around teenagers.  I don't regret going into work each day or my career choice.  My work is meaningful, and I have fun doing it.  But the classroom is not where I'm most alive.  It is either outside, taking in the world, or here, putting down these words.  I've known that for a very long time; I've just been too afraid to give it my all for fear of failure.  I'm not alone.  We give most of our lives to our careers and shave off small amounts for what actually matters most to us--family, friends, and hobbies.  

I am a man who believes in God.  I am also a man who believes in Satan, and I believe that one of Satan's plans is to distract us from the reason we are here on earth and keep us occupied doing everything except what connects us to life, because when we feel that deep connection, when we know this is who I am and this is what I have to contribute to the world, we are completely uninterested in doing evil.  Sin comes from a place feeling hollow, incomplete, lacking, and insufficient.  What looks like pride and arrogance is really deep insecurity.  Every tyrant's fear is that they are really insignificant.  This is true of tyrants of nations, true of tyrants of corporations, or true of tyrants in the home.  A person grasps for power and clings to it most when they know not who they really are.  

A man who feels whole is a dangerous thing to the ways of the world.  He only wants others to feel the same way.  He becomes an agent of generosity, of kindness, of peace and goodness.  Society is fueled by competition, greed, and envy.  Most advertisements, for instance, are aimed at making you feel insignificant and insufficient.  Most politics are aimed at making you feel someone has cheated you out of the life you deserve.   Keep a man from his dreams, keep a man deeply unsatisfied with himself, and he is ready to burn down the world for you if you want him to.  But a satisfied man knows he has what is sufficient for his needs.  He knows who he is, and he knows what he can offer the world.  He can't be manipulated the way an unsatisfied man can.   Satan needs insatiable appetites--hungry, restless, deeply unsatisfied nations of individuals seeking desperately to fill holes they cannot name.  What is more dangerous to his plan than a man who enjoys life on its own terms, whatever that may be, and only wants to do good?  Such a man is a disaster to the society of mammon.

So, we are lured away from being who we really are, lured away from our individual talents, lured into being something we are not--because that is the precise place we will be open to enticement.

I had a notion of this approaching my graduation from college.  The following is from a short chapbook of poetry I wrote for my final creative writing class:

I think of this book as several strands of barbed wire crammed into a thin blue plastic Walmart bag--how they rip on through and dangle, each strand ready to uncoil in its own direction.  What you have read is only what is still contained within the bag.  And even that work reaches out to snag up more poems and form various other collections.

I think this reflects my mood lately.  I feel fragmented, one hell-ride of a semester, always between episodes:  take Mitch to school, drive home, study for an hour, shower, drop Marci off at the university, drive back home, study for a half-hour, take kids to day-care, go to class, pick kids up, home for an hour, pick Marci up, go to work, and so forth, and so on.

And then there is graduation.  I am divided over the issue of the certificate that will say I am now somehow worthy of at least dabbling in the American dream.  Part of me, the husband and father, accepts this as necessary, even desirable.  I want to give my family a nice home and be free from the welfare system.  I want to provide.

But I find it hard to pretend I believe in that dream, where we are defined by who we know, what we own, and what we do to bring home the bread.  I don't really believe in objectives, direction, arrival.  All the happiness in my life has been in glimpses:  sunlight reflected off a tin roof, a thin September snow on the mountains, flies buzzing around a fresh pile of dog poop, lupines shaking in the cold alpine wind, one glorious image after another.

On the other hand, all my misery has risen from my cowardliness--how I have tried to go along with things I cannot believe in, and have failed, because part of me, the better part, said no this is not right, don't ask me what my job is, because I am not my job, janitor or poet.  At thirty-three I still live to float an empty pop can down an irrigation ditch and piss into the wind off Notch Peak.

I believe in these things.  When I drank, I drank because I was not strong enough to make a stand for them, but not weak enough to accept that life is about being a father and having a good job.  I care nothing about my role as a father.  Instead, I love my wife and my children, and how Rio, at age one, already has a phobia of closed doors--isn't that amazing!--where did it come from?  He's too young to have acquired it through experience.  This is the stuff of life: fears; failures; small noticings.  That other thing, The American Dream, is bullshit.

Twenty-four years later, I feel much the same way.  Yet, everything is totally different.  What I didn't understand then that I think I'm beginning to understand now is the sound of one-hand clapping.

It's not one thing or the other; it's all.  The meaning includes the bullshit.   The meaning is the bullshit.  It's more than that, of course.   It's floating an empty pop can down an irrigation ditch or pissing into the wind off Notch Peak, as I always knew.  But it is also rushing to get out the door in the morning, the endless meeting that seems to go nowhere, and yet still somehow leaves everyone with elevated blood pressures defending positions that haven't even been defined yet.  It's everyone tripping over their own egos.  It's the casual conversations in the hall that I still haven't learned to do.  It's that phone call you get that turns your world completely upside down and you know you may never be the same again, and you aren't, and yet you carry on.  It is all this.  And it is all good once we learn to enter a moment willingly, of our own freewill, imbedded fully in the reality before us.  And once we do that well, reality is ours to mold however we wish, both individually and collectively.  

A reality misunderstood is a very rigid thing.  It stands strong supported grandly by misconceptions.

A reality well-understood is completely pliable.  It can be molded into whatever we want it to be because we know both the nature of its resistance and its fluidity.

 The sound of one hand clapping is nothing.  More importantly, it is the sound of everything.

An individual who knows well his personal way of best contributing to world knows well the sound of one hand clapping.  It is all around him, in everything.

And those moments of oneness are so beautiful.  They speak of God, the light and love, at the center of what appears to be chaos.  From there, and only there, fully engaged in now, can one hear the drumbeat of the universe below the chaos.  And when we hear that drumbeat, we know we are safe no matter what because we know we are, and in that mindset, that is sufficient for our needs:  to be here, on this earth, learning, part of something beautifully beyond our comprehension or ability to control.  We let go and we simply are.

 

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--24. Toes of the Sierra Nevada, No. 1

 

Marci & I Stand with the Joshuas, Steve Brown 2022

Sunday, April 10, 2022.

When you crawl across the toes of the Sierra Nevada, the hills seem to go forever.  At first, they are dry and daggered with coarse brush and Joshua trees.  But compared to what's east of them, they feel lush and green.  Owen's Lake sits in an otherwise profoundly sparse place.  It feels Biblical in its hostility towards an easy life.  In contrast, the dry hills feel verdant and alive with possibilities.  So much so, we had to pull over to take a selfie, having made it to the promised land.  Besides, ever since U2 released The Joshua Tree with that iconic album cover, I just have the need to take pictures of people in front of Joshua trees no matter how visually removed my picture is from the original.  Joshua trees have become stars, so why would Marci and I pass up the chance to get a selfie with a couple of them?

As one moves west towards Lake Isabella, the world slowly greens up until it is eventually quite verdant.  And the hills seem to go on forever, the road winding, and going up and down, in and out, and around.  It's a slow, methodical drive--very relaxing--and always reminds me of drives with my dad in northern California in the hills nestled between the Sierra and Cascades, Eagle Lake country.  Oh, how the late afternoon shafts of sunlight thrown across the highway from between ponderosa pines are burned into the retina of my mind.  I ride in that truck once again, now and then, forever.  My dad may have given me his shyness, and he may have me my lack of confidence, my fear of connecting to people, but he also gave me the woods of California, the Sierra and Cascades, and the sea.  I gladly take it all for those memories of standing on a jagged point, misty fog moving all around me, hearing the breakers thunder below, watching the white waves below crash against black rock--the eye moving outward towards a horizon that never materializes as the gray water and the gray sky melt together in a bank of fog.

Although I've never lived there, California is mine.  It is as deep in me as is anything.  And here I am with my woman, the center of my life for twenty-five years, easing our way once again towards all that is mine.  California.  Magical still, magical always--no matter what the haters say.  We are here, now, and for the moment, that fact stands taller than my recent diagnosis of kidney disease and all that comes with it.  This road, these curves, Marci, and the anticipation of seeing the ocean once again--that is all I need.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--23. One Moment, January 3, 2024, 5:01 P.M.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door:
Millard County, Utah, January 2024, Steve Brown

Now.  What an amazing time?--almost always.  I am aware that there are people who have nows they desperately need to leave behind but can't seem to, victims of trauma, who have yesterdays that keep them from engaging in today.  That's another book to be written by another person.  Like everyone, I have had some trauma in my life.  I am a child of divorce, as are many.    I was bullied in high school, as are many.  But looking back, I now realize, I never experienced trauma at a level that sitting in a moment fully and just experiencing that pain would not have been beneficial--a means to not only understand myself better but those who caused me harm, intentionally or unintentionally.  Being present in those painful moments would have allowed me to break down the barriers that made me feel alone, isolated, and victimized.  If I had understood the moments I was bullied well, I would have understood well also that the bullying had absolutely nothing to do with me other than that I was considered as an easy target.

Now.  As an observer, what a great place to be.  Engaged intentionally, allowing oneself to hover above, so to speak, and simultaneously film the movie--I think there is a place for that in life.  A vital place.  But outside of Buddhist monasteries, we are not taught to do it, and because of that, we are missing a lot of life.  No, that's not it.  We are pretty much missing all of life.  Most just aren't aware of it.  A life lived not simultaneously watched by the liver is mostly invisible to them.  It is spent in their head, removed by the ego from reality.  Or it passes by unconsciously to fade into an unmarked past.  Or it is lived in daydreams of a better tomorrow.   More likely, it is a combination of all three, which steals enormous amounts of now that cannot later be recovered.

But a life imbedded in the present stretches both ways--deep into the past, where moments can be savored like candy samples from jars on the glass shelf of the mind, the sampling still available far into the vast, unknown future.   For to be grounded in now is to both know my past and be solid for the future.  I think that's what Christ was saying when he told the adulterer to go and sin no more.  Once solid in the now, she could absorb whatever painful consequences would surely follow from her previous bad choice, and she could also be rock-steady for whatever unsure future would develop as a natural consequence from that choice.  The ability to be completely present prepares you for anything and everything.  It is the ultimate surrender.  I am here, now, whatever may come to pass.  

All we have is now.   When we use it well, everything else becomes unimportant.  People do not commit adultery because they are living in the now.  They commit adultery because they are either trying to escape some unpleasant past or escape some unpleasant present.  They commit adultery because they are seeking escape from their situation instead of encountering reality on its own terms.  

Sitting in the now places you in reality not outside it.  It becomes something like this:  my wife and I no longer communicate the way we used to.  Everything seems to lead to a fight.  How does that make her feel?  How does that make me feel?  Is there something I can do now to make this evening go differently than yesterday?  That is now thinking.  It's watching from above, in the moment, from all angles.  It's seeing the gritty details and being open--letting in all of the light, and also letting in all of the darkness, unfiltered, in as objective as humanly possible, which of course, has its limits.  

And it takes training.  Our mind wants to be anywhere but in the current moment.  But the more one enters each moment well, the more one sees how truly beautiful each moment is--even the cluttered, disorderly, uncontrollable ones.  Lately, I've been practicing.  

Now.  I'm on my way home from work.  It's a cold, gray day.  There is a city of mouse droppings surrounding the plastic case of the live trap on the floor of my car by the passenger seat, and there are two mice in it.  I know that not only from the mousy smell, but also because I checked when I got in.  I hate mice in my car, but I know they are just doing their best to survive and reproduce, and my car happens to provide a grand shelter from the elements, so to intentionally kill them seems wrong.  Only part of me hates them--the part of me that fears hantavirus.  Fear makes me hate them.  Otherwise, they are cute, and even if I thought they were ugly, I would still want them to go about their lives trying their best to survive.  

I am scanning the road, looking for places to set the two critters free.  Part of me wants to dump them anywhere.  They have pooped all over the passenger seat and all over the center consul and in the drink holders.  I had to put my lunch cooler in the backseat to avoid contamination.  I placed my phone very carefully on a small turd-free part of the seat.  I just want to get rid of them.  But I can't.  So, I'm looking off the side of the road for suitable terrain.  It's winter.  It's cold.  I am looking for either lots of wild rye or soft dirt, or preferably both, for food and bedding for my little enemies.  I do not want to release them to die.  I don't mind if they die.  Die, we must.  All of us.  From bristlecone pine to stink bug.  I just don't want to cause my furry mouse-foes deaths unnecessarily.

Finally, I see a place.  The old crumbling pioneer house that I love greatly.  I know there's not much rye there.  That's a minus.  But I also know the earth is soft and powdery, easy to dig into.  And there is still cheat grass and goat heads, probably still enough food and nesting material.  And it is off the highway.  I slow down, turn to the left on a gravel road, and pull in next to the adobe-walled remnants of a house that must be from the 1800s.  I grab the trap and get out.  A cold winter wind blasts me.

I fiddle with the trap.  It stinks.  I can't figure out if I pull or push the top even although I've done it before.  It finally moves when I pull it towards me.  I lower it to the ground and the two mice jump out and scurry away.  The trap is full of droppings half imbedded in peanut butter and half dissolving in piss.  I put the lid back on, place it back on the floor, grab a bottle of hand sanitizer, push the pump, and wash my hands, disgusted.  Then I grab my camera.  

While I'm here in this moment, I might as well get everything out of it.  I aim the camera towards the wood and adobe ruins next to a solitary tree.  I realize with all the dust and sand stirred up, the mountains have dissolved, and the place looks even more isolated than it really is, a dust-bowl-like image.  It is profound in a spooky way.  Especially the dark black dead tree that stubbornly bears witness to the fact that this once was a house with a yard, a family, chickens certainly, and cats, perhaps even a dog.  Lives lived together tightly under great big skies.  Lives huddled inside with wind and dust swirling outside, sneaking through the window seals, crawling through the cracks, mice gnawing their ways into the walls to sleep, eat, begat, scurry and thump around in reality.  Mice running through dreams of that family that once was so present here but is no more.  

To be here, now, is a profound honor.  To be at a place I frequently pass by, never quite ignoring, but certainly not fully absorbing either.  But I am here, now, and at this moment that is all that matters.

I wish my furry little foes, who have already vanished into their own world, well, get back in the car, and head off towards another place, another moment, feeling the ghost of Tom Joad knocking, warning us of nows past that may soon be here again if we don't deal with the realities of climate change.

Meeting the Wall

The Wall of the Sierra, Steve Brown 2022

As the crow flies, Badwater Basin, which has an elevation of 282 feet below sea level, and Mt. Whitney, which has an elevation of 14,505 feet above sea level, are only 85 miles apart.  That's a 14, 787 gain in elevation in 85 miles, or an average of a 174 feet per mile.  But the gain in places is much greater because it isn't one even-slope.  As majestic as the Rockies are, roads crisscross them and go up and down all over the place.  The wall of the Sierra simply refuses to be crossed by anything more than hiking trails.  It is grand, and wild, and when you see it for the first time, it blows your mind.  Here's the kicker, on that same day, you can reach the sea if you want to.

There is no state geographically or climatically like California.  Not only is the highest point in the lower forty-eight and the lowest point in North America only eighty-five miles apart, but the biggest trees on earth and the hottest place on Earth and driest spot in North America are about that same distance apart.  In a one-day drive, you can see the cracked, white flats of Badwater Basin, the giant sequoias, and still have time to reach the Pacific Ocean.  

Cool facts, however, cannot convey the experience.  Pure knowledge is not tangible through the abstract.  It must be observed through the concrete.  That's what Zen is about.  Zen cannot be discussed.  It is the anti-idea truth.  Steinbeck understood zen.   What makes his best works profound is not the ideas behind them, although those too are powerful, but how effectively he puts the reader in that moment of experiential learning.  The Grapes of Wrath changes us not because of what it has to say, but rather because we become one with the Joads.  The critics don't always like Steinbeck because when you read his work, it feels as if there isn't as much to talk about philosophically.  However, The Grapes of Wrath was read in the halls of congress specifically because of that.  The book was too damn real to be relegated to lecture rooms.  We need that blatant realness again.  The world burns, the seas churn from statistically significant storms, and entire neighborhoods are leveled by the retaliation and hate of man, babies bathed in blood--all while entire species of plants and animals quietly slip away from life forever, never to share this planet with us again.  And we don't see it, we don't feel it, we don't react to the hurt the way we ought to because we simply aren't present.

I have no idea what it will take to turn things around, but I do know whatever the solutions will be, they will involve us entering a moment deeply enough to be moved to some sort of empathetic action.

Knowing is being there in front of the mighty wall of the southern Sierra, looking at a basalt ridge with the contours significant enough to be considered mountains back east, and to feel the contrast of that dark, ragged edge against a wall of stone behind that absolutely dwarfs it, the fan alone across the valley rising two or three times higher even with perspective skewing the reality.  Data can't get the brain there.  Only the eyes can.

In order to truly understand something, we must first truly see it.  I am absolutely convinced that if a man could always put himself in a moment as a sort of journalist and just take-in the situation correctly, he would always be moved to do the right thing.  What keeps us from that intimacy and care is our ego-mind always isolating us, trying to protect us by intellectually removing us from the other so that at best we can ignore, and at worst, we can hate what we fear most--that we are all connected.  

The ego is a destructive protective mechanism that keeps us from feeling what we need to feel.  It keeps us from being overloaded.  But it is ultimately harmful.  That sense of separateness and superiority keeps us in a state of inert isolation.  Even in war, nothing changes, because we simply do not feel what it is like to be our enemy.  We revel in our own pain, but because of the workings of the mind, we never glimpse the pain felt on the other side.  The terror in the eyes of children is removed from us in sterile phrases like "unavoidable casualties" and "for the greater good". 

But a man looking into the eye of a child without some cause frothing in the sinews of his brain cannot pull the trigger.  A man trained to know a moment, and know it deeply, cannot NOT care.   One cannot be jaded and enlightened simultaneously.  That is why WOKE has to be made into to an evil word.  Being WOKE, as Christ and Buddha and Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. certainly were, destroys any possibility of operating under the normal rules of the ego.  One truly must be born again.   

Relatively few do not want a world born again, anew, because they profit well from the status-quo.  Most people, however, simply fear reality.   They do not have evil intentions.  Rather, they fear being WOKE because they fear being alive.  They fear that WOKE intensity of feeling will require them to become something new, to drop their addictions, and step into some new light.  

The ego says it is better to just shoot the messenger than to change.  Therefore, someone usually steps up and does that for humanity, keeping Utopia from being anything more than a dream.   Because we fear change, this is exactly what society wants--to worship dead martyrs rather than step into a moment and be fully born again.

So, we end up with these absurd ironies.   The Christian who hates everything WOKE, and yet spends his life waving the banner of Christ, who is the most tangible example of WOKEness to have ever lived.  And on the other side, you have people claiming to be WOKE spending their lives ridiculing Christians--Christ being the perfect symbol of all they hold sacred.  It's absurd.  But it is because it serves a purpose.  The ego-wars, and the psychological distancing keeps us safely separate from each other so that we don't have to enter a very real moment, feel our own hypocrisy, and drop all our tribalism.  There is something in the natural man that fears connection, fluidity, openness, and equality.  The brotherhood of man is relegated to an abstract notion in church house because the ego is too damn terrified to experience brotherhood for real.

It seems to me that it is impossible for us to become who we need to be in order to make the very adult decisions that need to be made to save our planet and ourselves until we can intentionally enter a moment on our own free-will against the demands of the ego.  

That's what Gandhi was doing when urged his followers to bow down and submit to the blows of the British army.  By breaking with the instinctual response to either fight or flee, he was forcing everyone into a moment where everyone could feel each other's pain--where the British officer had to feel what it's like to be beaten and where the Indian protestor had to feel how it hurts to have to beat another person on command.  By removing the ego's natural response to retaliate, Gandhi was forcing emotional proximity between opposing warriors.  He was forcing a brotherhood of man through a moment of intense connection between the beater and beaten.  By dropping to his knees with his fellow protestors and not resisting, he smashed in one moment the normal separateness between occupier and the occupied, creating an undeniable common humanity.  It was intentional, and it was practiced, and it was completely counter to the ego-driven, natural man.  It was Godly.

That is the power of a moment.  I suck at being who I want to be when I get stuck in my ego-mind.  I spend hours, if not days, feeling either victimized, isolated and alone, or instead, justifying and feeling superior about things that don't matter.  And all that time spent in my head over insignificant things makes me miserable.

However, when I'm truly in a moment--just there observing light and shadow, taking in temperature and textures, enjoying people on their own terms (neither seeking their approval nor trying to force my will upon them), I feel a bliss that has absolutely nothing to do with circumstance.

The difficult task is getting there intentionally anywhere and anytime by training the eyes to see on command whatever is before them.  Every day should be as grand as that day you stand on high desert flat and gaze, stunned by the magnificent wall of the Sierra.   Escape always comes to an end.  Deep immersion can, with practice, become one's eternal existence.