And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual.

Human Rights Rally and March, Utah State Capitol, February 8, 2025, Steve Brown

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.

John Steinbeck, East of Eden 1952

Although now is the focus of this book, I am completely ill-equipped to understand today.  The United States has changed so drastically in the short time since Trump took office again through acts that are blatantly antidemocratic, blatantly anti-Christian, and blatantly inhumane, and also appear to be incredibly stupid, causing harm to not only his country but perhaps also to Trump himself, as resistance builds, including the following:

• Trying to remove birthright citizenship.
• Deporting illegal immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, which is not an official U.S. territory, where occupants can be denied the basic rights the U.S. constitution provides to everyone within its borders, citizens or not.
• Threatening to incorporate Canada, Gaza, Greenland, Mexico and Panama into the U.S.
• Bizarrely claiming Ukraine, not Russia, was the aggressor, and that President Zelenskyy rather than Putin is a dictator.
• Cutting off USAID money to those who most need it.
• Trying to shut down all media who factcheck Trump.
• Gutting the Department of Justice of any independence from the president.  

As much as I attempt to understand the many good Christian people who support Trump, I cannot possibly wrap my brain around how any of the above proposed or literal actions fit into the basic principles of Christianity based on who Christ is as depicted in the New Testament.

More broadly, I can't wrap my mind around how America First itself is a Christian principle.  Since when did Christ teach that the way to freedom is through putting yourself first?  We are going through an era of extreme collective egoism that pits us as a country against the world, and I don't see how that can bring collective happiness any more than personal pride and avarice does.  Christ teaches that the personal path to freedom and happiness is by forgetting yourself in the service of humanity.  The more you seek personal gratification, the less you find happiness.  The more you forget about yourself and serve those around you, the more peace and joy you find, which is exactly what Mother Theresa understood.  Happiness comes from demolishing the ego and entering now in the service of others--not what you obtain materially or through honors.  It's totally illogical that the means to collective good would be any different than the means to individual worth.  The only America I can believe in is the America that is in the service of mankind, an America that gives aid to Ukraine not to get something in return but out of love and empathy and dedication to the principles of democracy and respect for the borders of sovereign nations.

However, I know absolutely no argument I make here will convince all those good, Christian Trump supporters of the errors of their thinking.  If anything, it will just cause them to dig into their position.  Who likes to be wrong?  I know I don't. 

Rather, feeble as it may be, this is an attempt to understand our times, which I've got to admit, I find completely baffling.

Which is okay.  It has to be okay.  Because it is.  Reality exists whether I like it or not.  If you live in an era of legalized slavery, you have to on some level accept slavery as the reality, whether as the slave or the slave owner, whether you like it or not, or believe in it or support it in any way.  Because for the time, at least, it is.  The slave has no real tangible means of not-being the slave in such times, and though in hindsight, it seems like it would be easy for the moral slave-owner to simply free his slaves, at the time that would have seemed almost impossible because of the extreme social pressure not to do so.  Afterall, if you let your slaves go, what ideas are you planting in the minds of your neighbor's slaves?  It is easy to make moral judgement on people outside your time period while it can be incredibly difficult to be moral now in your current reality.  Slavery is perceived as moral in a slave society.  Lynching is perceived as moral in a society where it's accepted.  Segregation is perceived as moral in a segregated society.  This is as it is meant to be:  societies are designed to make it easy to continue as things are.  You are meant to feel comfortable and at ease when you join in with the status-quo.  You are meant to feel uneasy and radical when you decide you believe in something superior to what is.

Because we live in an ego-driven world, Christianity, which calls on us to abandon our egos, is never a comfortable religion to live unless you develop two minds that don't talk to each other, which is exactly what happens.  The slave owner is a moral person.  He goes to church, he raises a family, he gives generously to local clubs and organizations.  But because slavery is inherently evil, he must beat and vilify the enslaved to justify his continued practice.  And if, by chance, his two brains do accidently talk to each other, society is there to put on the social pressure to keep him living the status-quo.  The great minds of the times develop theories about how blacks are cursed by God and genetically inferior to whites.  They reinforce the idea that the slave owner is in fact a good man, reminding him of his generous offerings to the community and how much economic good his plantation does.  But, if he doesn't listen, he himself is vilified and rooted out, so that slavery can continue.

But none of that changes the fact that slavery cannot possibly be a Christian institution.  Good people can and did participate in it, but slavery itself could never be Christian because Christ was incredibly concise and articulate about what He knew was the path to personal and collective freedom.  You can create whatever ideology you want to justify slavery as an institution, but the minute you open the New Testament and read the words attributed to Christ, slavery is abolished immediately in principle if not in practice because the Word is perfect.  It is above argumentation.  We instinctively know the principles of Christianity are true.  We are designed to love.  We are designed to care.  We are meant to lose ourselves in the service of mankind.  Nothing can make those beliefs untrue because they are who we are at our core.  

Hate has to be fueled constantly by drumming up fear, separateness, distain for others--driven by the ego in a society of competition.  Love is automatic.  It is our survival instinct.  Two people alone on an island will not kill each other.  In fact, I'm almost positive they will fall in love.  We need that human connection.  Take a free man and a slave place them together alone on an island and you will have ended slavery--at least until a third person is added.  Slavery needs society.  Wickedness needs society.  Wickedness is just another name for fear.  Jealousy is just another name for fear.  We do bad when we fear.  Intelligent, insecure men use our fear to motivate us to do things we would not otherwise do.  The slave owner enslaves another because he fears resources are limited, that if he doesn't participate in the economic system he is given, he will lose his position and the respect of his peers, and so he retains his slaves and continues to go to church and worship Christ, and because part of his brain registers the disconnect, he grows to hate his slaves.  They seem vile to him, almost inhuman.  He wants to beat them to death even though that makes no economic sense.  A healthy, happy slave is bound to produce more than one that's been whipped almost to the point of death.  But at this point the slave owner is no longer rational.  He just has to find a way to justify his enslavement of another.  Hate blots out his natural love and connection to his slave.  But if you removed all other pathways for his love--took away his family and his society--he would soon love his slave.  It is impossible not to.  We are built to love.  

There are exceptions, of course.  There are sociopaths.  There are tyrants who are sociopaths.  But there are not societies of sociopaths.  There have been societies of good people who support slavery though.  Many societies and many good people who called themselves Christian have supported incredible evil throughout history.  The same in Nazi Germany.  All those millions of Jews were killed by the support of good people.  It could not have happened without them.  However, it also could have been stopped by them.

I believe Trump is a sociopath, that everything he does is the opposite of what Christ would do, and I am making a choice to do everything peaceful in my power (which admittedly is next to nil) to change the trajectory of this nation, which I still love, despite what is now going on.  I will be at every rally I can attend against him.  I will be boycotting any company that doesn't support diversity, equity and inclusion policies, because I believe in those things, and I will give as much support as possible to fund opposition to Trump, mainly through the Democratic party, because that's where the most resources exist to fight him.  

However, those are my beliefs, and although I personally cannot fathom how Trump supports Christian values in any shape, way, or form, I do not need others to believe the same as I believe to be okay with them.  I personally know many loving people who support Trump.  They are good.  They are intelligent.  Many of them are even well-informed.  I wish I could somehow convince them that we are at the same point in history that Germany was when Hitler came to power because that is what I know to be true.  I can't even begin to understand how they can support a man who claimed Ukraine was the aggressor against Russia when we saw Russia attack Ukraine in real time.  But I don't need to understand all things, and I don't need to agree with someone to love them, to see them as equally human, as equally intelligent, or as equally divine sons and daughters of God.

I hope my Trump-supporting friends, family and acquaintances feel the same way and can accept my choice to stand up to what I see as tyranny.  But I'm good if they don't.  At some point the man who wants to be free from a society that believes in slavery has to be willing to let go of all that binds him--whether he be the slave or the slave holder.

At some point I have to be willing to let go of an America that believes all its problems are caused by diversity, equity, and inclusion--because I love diversity, equity and inclusion.  I hear DEI and I don't feel fear--I feel love, protection, and the possibility of a better world.

Therefore, I will be marching in love for the right of everyone to celebrate their diverse heritages, cultures, religions, and beliefs.  I'll be marching in love for the right of everyone to have equal treatment under the law.  I will be marching in love in hopes of an America that is includes everyone--gays, lesbians, minorities, immigrants (legal or not).  I will be marching because I've already done it once, and it felt great.  And I will be marching because my soul knows that's what Christ would also do.  And no matter how flawed I may be as a person, I know that doing right feels damn good, and that when I hate, it is my fear and ego talking.  So, I'm telling my ego to take a hike and gladly holding up the banner Snowflake no matter what the consequences are.  At some point someone has to step out of a society gone-wrong and say, "I still love you, but I cannot in good conscience go along with this".  Otherwise, Nazi Germany is bound to repeat itself under other names and in different places.  I will not be a part of hate. 

Illegal immigrants are not animals.  They are simply people, like you and I, doing the best they can to get by in a difficult world.  Their status as citizens means nothing to me.  Their status as humans means everything.  The Christ I believe is Christ of creation, and I believe His love knows no boundaries.  I don't believe any other Christ is worth worshiping.  I only believe in Him because I know the words attributed to Him in the New Testament are perfect.  I believe in that perfection, no matter how far I may currently fall from it.

Trumps America does not represent those words, that love, any more than Slavery-America or Segregation-America did.  But the America promised in the Declaration of Independence and established in the Constitution at least in word do.

That is the America I pledge allegiance to.  And I will support no other version of America ever--no matter what America those around me choose to give their allegiance to instead.  

My goal in life is to be happy and happiness cannot be built on lies.  Trump is one great big lie.  The lie is that happiness is found by placing yourself first in the world and making those around you kneel in subjugation.   America First is a one-way collective ego-trip towards misery.  I'm not going to ride that train.  Instead, I'm hitchhiking across DEI America as long as I possibly can, the hippy I was born to be, a vagabond snowflake, a rallying rolling stone, out for good music, good vibrations, God-intentions and love.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--44. Cannery Row

The Empty Lot in Steinbeck's Cannery Row as Depicted in a Model
at the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas, Steve Brown 2022

1.  Steinbeck's Cannery Row

Steinbeck's Cannery Row is a revolutionary book.  Most works of fiction are built on a formula, one every college creative writing and literature major is taught deeply, and one every high school student is at least exposed to:  the plot of a narrative is driven by the writer creating a protagonist with a goal and something that keeps them from immediately reaching it.  Then, the hero either overcomes the obstacles or is transformed in some way through the struggle, or both.  It is quite possible to see Cannery Row this way. Doc can be viewed as the main character.  If that is the case, his goal is to be left alone to work.  That suffices.  If one looks into the tide pool using the exact same paradigm as everyone always has, one is likely to see what has always been seen.

However, from the very beginning of the book, Steinbeck provides us the lens through which he wants us to view 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 the scattered, tin and iron, 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 Labatories 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.

In that paragraph Steinbeck defines the paradigm he would like us to use when reading Cannery Row.  This is not a book about a single character.  Rather, it is a book where the place is the protagonist.  The characters are not to be studied individually but rather how they function together in the tidepool that was Ocean View Avenue at the time.  

The book is not a study of Ed Rickets, the inspiration for Doc, but rather a study of Ed Ricket's role in the greater stink, grating noise, quality of light, tone, habit, nostalgia, and dream that is Cannery Row.  Doc is an essential cell in that organism, the type of person Malcolm Gladwell would much later label a "connector" in The Tipping Point.  Doc is the cell that if removed would cause the character Cannery Row to wither and die, but the protagonist is not Doc, but rather community as a whole.  That was and is still revolutionary for a novel.  

Just as Monterey Bay Aquarium would later be among the first aquariums in the world to try to share communities of sea life working together as they do in the real world rather than simply spotlighting individual species floating around in isolation from their community, Cannery Row makes the whole cast of Cannery Row the exhibit rather than one dominating character.    

In Steinbeck's hand and mind everyone is equally human ("whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches") and equally godly ("saints and angels and martyrs and holy men") because Cannery Row is not only about the individuals, but it also about the sublime whole.  The book is a study of human ecology, and Cannery Row is the tidepool into which we are looking at humanity.  It is a case-study in human condition--the general known through the particular.

Of course, John also wrote the book as a tribute to Ed Rickets, so there is nothing wrong with reading it as a traditional protagonist-centered story with a traditional goal-driven plot.  It definitely can be read on that level.  However, in writing about The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck said, "There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won't find more than he has in himself." 

Steinbeck wrote in layers, and one layer he always wanted us to see is that we are all connected.  Everything we do impacts those around us, and in Cannery Row everyone equally fills their role as a human--from vagrant, to prostitute, to unfocused artist, to Chinese shopkeeper, to marine biologist and social connector.  All are equally important to the tidepool that is Cannery Row.  Steinbeck is a classless writer.  He writes about how destructive classes can be, especially in The Grapes of Wrath, but he doesn't see people in levels.  He doesn't ignore the social class.  He sees things as they are.  However, the quality of the person has nothing to do with their rank or occupation.  In fact, in Cannery Row, he doesn't even rank people according to goodness or badness of character.  They just are.  The saint and the sinner are one; it just depends how and when you are looking.  Steinbeck views the world with love even as he is angry about the social injustice all around him.

2.

Cannery Row today no longer resembles the one captured in the book.  When I first visited in 1997, I was deeply disappointed by that even though I knew that would be the case.  Although I loved the aquarium, Cannery Row itself did little for me.  It could be the West End of Dallas or any other restored warehouse district in any city in America.  They are all the same.  Somehow, even with that foreknowledge, I was still sorely disappointed to find a neighborhood that doesn't resemble what's in the novel at all.

However, this time, although we didn't spend much time there, I felt completely different about the place.  For one thing, I love old, refurbished warehouses and factories.  Sure, they are no longer what they used to be, but would we really want them to be that?  Those areas never were generally kind to either the environment or the people that lived and worked there.  They were exploitation zones--lively, nasty places teaming with humanity.  That's partially what drew Steinbeck there in the first place: it was a microcosm of humanity.  In the case of Cannery Row, if it was still the same, it would still be pillaging sea life from the Monterey Bay at an unsustainable rate, which of course is impossible, which is why all of the canneries shut down in the first place.

The Cannery Row that Steinbeck knew was unsustainable, which he knew.  The novel captures a place right before ecological collapse and local extinction of a place he loved dearly.  The tidepool would be forever changed by outside forces greater than the lives within it.  Similar characters of Steinbeck's Cannery Row can still be found, but in different places.  That Ocean View Avenue would evolve into something else was inevitable.

However, if it was not for Steinbeck and his wonderful little book, most of the canneries probably would have been torn down.  Walmart's and strip malls would most likely now occupy their place.  

So, although one can't get a living picture into Steinbeck's world by visiting Cannery Row, one can visit a monument to a man, a book, and most importantly an idea: we are all interconnected, and the story of one protagonist, no matter how unique and special that man or woman may be, can't be accurately told without also telling the story of everyone else in the community.  Everything we do impacts each other for better or worse.

Likewise, no matter how unique mankind is as a species, we are part of the tidepool that is earth.  In order to survive we need to understand those connections.

Ultimately, empathy is understanding your connection to the whole.  Our world needs that more now than ever.

Cannery Row in Monterey California is a monument to two great men who aimed to see the whole, the beauty and elegance of everything woven together.  And for that, even with all its commercialization, it is worth visiting a place dedicated to the idea we are all one.

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--43. Being Here Now Noticing the Light

Red Skies - Pahvant Butte, Steve Brown 2025

It has occurred to me that we may be so confused about the present that we avoid it because it is not clear to us.  But why should that be a deterrent?  If this is a time of confusion, then it should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time.

--John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, 1954

Two years, seven months, and eleven days ago, I started this book with above quotation.  I had been diagnosed with kidney disease, and although at the time of writing the first chapter, I had received the good news that my particular kidney disease is treatable and sometimes even curable, I was still making frequent trips to the lab to get blood drawn, and because our deductible was so high, wondering how we would pay for it all.  And of course, there was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  Not only did the injustice of that impact me, but I thought I might well be writing this book into World War III.

But then I wrote, and as I wrote, my confusion seemed to dissipate.  The world didn’t get any less confusing.  For us, here, in the United States, the devastation in Ukraine grew more and more distant as the news covered it less and less as it became clear that at least for the time being the world would not explode into war.  But that’s not what created the shift.  As I wrote, I began to perceive I could be steady and stable, even happy, regardless of what was happening outside me.  I had started writing the book as a means to bear witness to our times, to sort through the confusion and try to make some semblance out of it.  I wanted to write something akin to The Grapes of Wrath.  It seemed history was repeating itself, that we hadn’t learned the lessons Steinbeck worked so hard to teach us, and that we were headed down the same old shitty path of inhumanity and war.  None of that changed in the course of almost three years of writing.  But my focus did.  

Writing the book became less and less a record of our times and more and more a record of my quest to find happiness.  If we are alive, we should feel good about it.  Not that I felt bad.  I didn’t.  I’ve basically been a happy man ever since I met Marci back 1997.  But, on a daily basis, happiness seemed so fleeting, at the whims of my ego and whatever trend of thoughts I had running through my head.

Then, while writing at my desk, facing out a sliding glass door onto the garden on September 14, 2023, I had a realization that has changed me.  Here it is again:    

I sit at my drafting table and look out my open sliding glass door into my garden.  It's late afternoon. Up front, the rose bush and peach tree are heavy with shadow.  There is an old wooden chair with chipped red paint.  Yellow black-eyed Susans and violet cosmos beyond sway gently.  All of this is muted softly by the shade.  Then, just as the garden beds meet the gravel pathway, a cluster of sunflowers catches the evening light, isolated again by heavy shadow thrown behind.  Distant dogs bark.  Outside, the fountain gurgles.  Inside, the fridge hums.  Two worlds mingle.

I have lived my entire life in moments like this.   I've existed during a lot of other times as well.  But I have only truly lived in these jeweled vignettes.  When I look back on my life, these are the images and sounds I remember.  From the time I was five, I have known light and shadow is all I really needed.  This is my purpose.  Of that, I had no doubt.  I couldn't have expressed it.  But I knew it.  Being is its own reason to exist.  Moments are everything.  

I had the sudden realization that for small slices of time I had always been happy, even during a time in my life when I was overall extremely dissatisfied with myself, my life, and my God—who I claimed to not believe in even as I cursed him, occasionally fervently.  Furthermore, these small slices of happiness all had something in common:  they were all moments when I was fully in the now.  In short, my unhappiness was all in my head.  Not that there weren’t real things to be unhappy about.  There are.  Always.  Life is brutal.  Unjust.  Bullies exist.  Invasions.  War.  Rape.  Starvation.  Petty arguments.  Pipes that break.  Sewers that back up.  Car batteries that die.  These are real.  But, at least for me, that is not my personal source of dissatisfaction that keeps joy away.  Thinking is.  A particular type of thinking.  Ego-driven thinking.  The type of thoughts that try to figure out my place in the world, how things at any given moment will turn out for me, and will I be safe or not.

But whenever I was just there, in a moment, noticing light, all seemed to be well.  I seemed not to be me.  I seemed to be one thing and everything at once.  So, I started testing my thesis, to see if, at least for me, happiness is always contained in the moment, whatever that is, and that the ego is always trying to keep us from that natural bliss by constantly throwing us into hypotheticals that either aggrandize us or place us in doomsday scenarios where we will either be scorned and ridiculed, obliterated, or at least doomed in some significant way.  One moment we've got the idea that's going to change the word, and the next we're going to lose our job because we spoke our mind a bit too forcibly at the last meeting--and all of that occurs nowhere outside the sinews of the brain.

I have found my premise to basically be true.  If my head is running wild on the way home from work, and I can focus on the electrical poles running towards the horizon, and how majestic the shoe-shaped island cinder cone of Pahvant Butte looks against the marmalade sky, the riots in my head quickly subside and I realize that along with everything else, I am, and what's outside my window seems sufficient enough reason to be glad to be alive.  Nothing more is required.  Whatever happened at work doesn't disappear; it simply becomes insignificant before creation.   

However, I have to admit we as humans are certainly making the restoring-power of nature murkier all of the time.  There are quite a few ugly days now, even in this remote valley, because of smog and smoky skies.  We are literally setting our collective home on fire through our addictions to fossil fuel.  

However, light, even when bent and blurred and brutalized by industrial pollutants, is still light, and as long as we don't blot out the sun completely, I do believe one can still get to that bliss anywhere.  Light is God's visual language the way love is his spiritual communication.  So, one can tap into that anywhere, but of course it's going to be easier doing that holding hands with your loved one looking out at sunlit Half Dome than looking at your dead uncle on the cratered streets of Gaza with your home a heap of concrete and rebar in the background.  

Somehow, even though I haven't experienced anything remotely like that and assume that I most likely will never achieve such a state of pure knowledge and assurance that mortality works, I absolutely know it is possible to arrive at that place of peace in places like Gaza even if I struggle to keep my cool while in the midst of losing a game of Uno.

Part of me thinks there are times that justify righteous anger, that there are times when happiness is actually not the moral course.  Afterall, even Jesus Christ lost his cool when he saw the money changers violating the temple.  Surely such times as ours, when democracy seems to be being shredded right before our eyes and our president is making all the same moves as Adolf Hitler, a little doom and gloom might just be the moral emotion.  

However, part of me knows it's not.  Darkness is never light.  Evil is never good.  The air may be dense with razor-sharp shards of hate floating everywhere, but whatever light we can omit through the dense dusty chemical-filled fog is better than no light at all.  The man who can see beauty in the obliterated humanity littering the streets of Gaza is the same man who can hold his eye steady and fearless before the perpetrator and begin to melt the enemy's resolve to hate.

And so, as lousy as I am at it, my only goal in life is to enter now so totally present my joy isn't dependent on what is happening around me.  To me, it seems to be the key to real love--the type that comes with no expectations because one is so sure of the human experience as a whole one can absorb the present ugliness into the grandness of the entirety with loving compassion.  

We all have access to that surrender and sureness when we silent the mind and just be.

Confusion is a product of ego-driven thinking.  Knowing is a product of witnessing what is silently, objectively.  Now is that portal to the infinite, where light and love merge into the divine answer always.  Everything else, no matter how solid and real it may appear in the mind, is nothing more than dust in the wind.

… Ah, people asking questions
Lost in confusion
Well, I tell them there's no problem
Only solutions
Well, they shake their heads and they look at me, as if I've lost my mind
I tell them there's no hurry, I'm just sitting here doing time

--John Lennon, "Watching the Wheels" 1980

The Ghost of Tom Joad Knocking at the Door: A Pilgrim's Journey into the CaliforniAmerican Heartland--42. To Be in the Monterey Bay Aquarium

Observing, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Steve Brown 2022

When Marci and I made our honeymoon trip to Cannery Row twenty-five years earlier, seven hundred dollars was all we had to our names combined.  Looking back, I wonder why, given our financial situation, we would have opted to include going to the Monterey Bay Aquarium in our itinerary as it was quite expensive even then.  Twenty-five years later, I still found it difficult to hand over that entrance fee even though it was a much smaller percentage of our wealth than before.  

It is mind-boggling how much trust we have in life and love when we are young.  You find the person you want to be with, and you just do it, having almost nothing financially.  And in our case, Marci already had two children to her name, and yet we still took that leap of faith.  We not only chose to get married, but we also chose to spend everything we had on our honeymoon and trust that the pay checks we'd receive after working a couple weeks when we returned home, along with the welfare and W.I.C. Marci was thankfully receiving, would sustain us until the next pay period came.  There were no extra funds if the car broke down.  We just hit the road and didn't worry about it.  Well, at least not until the drive home.  And even then, only I worried about it.  Marci hadn't a care in the world which led to our first fight.  

There is something glorious in that trust in life.  And I'm glad we were foolish enough to include a day at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in our first real journey together.  It is an amazing place, and our honeymoon would not have been the same without it.  And the money did come, as did the degrees, and some semblance of security.  But a little bit of wisdom could have kept that trip to the aquarium forever out of our memories.  I'm glad we didn't let prudence cheat us out of that experience.  It is indeed a glorious one.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium is different from most aquariums in that it is not just a collection of fish.  Although it includes aquatic life from all over, its main purpose is to share the biological diversity of Monterey Bay itself.  It is a lens on the life under the sea right out its windows.  Julie Packard, daughter of David Packard, who with his children founded and funded the project, puts it this way in Monterey Bay Aquarium:  The First 35 Years:

From the start, the idea to create an aquarium all about Monterey Bay met with a good deal of skepticism from those outside of our planning group. To outsiders it sounded limiting. To us it sounded boundless. We wanted to go deep, and for the first time show people what the ocean is really like. Monterey Bay was our inspiration. We were singularly focused on telling its story. And what a story it was—a diverse and abundant ecosystem thriving with life, enriched by the seasonal upwelling of nutrient-rich water along the Pacific Coast. Best of all, unlike nearly every other aquarium, we had the real thing right outside our doors. 

There are two ends of the spectrum on how to live life--with arms wide-open to now or by putting off immediate impulses for a more secure tomorrow.   And of course, there is a balance, a middle way.  However, given the short time we are here on earth, I cannot help but wonder how much time is lost to being sensible.  For example, with the Monterey Bay Aquarium, although the founders proceeded sensibly, that initial impulse to center the aquarium's story about life under the sea so locally was a radical departure of what it meant to be an aquarium.  It certainly was not the safest route to success.  Again, Julie Packard puts it this way:

Our vision differed from most existing aquariums at the time. The typical aquarium displayed fish in mostly individual tanks and focused on exotic and colorful species from around the world. Our approach aimed to showcase the communities of fishes, plants, invertebrates and birds as you would find them in nature. The influence of our backgrounds cannot be underestimated—not one of us was a fish specialist. What got us excited were the small, squishy and slimy plants and animals, the bizarre and beautiful, the comical and complicated. 

In the beginning, we knew very little about how to pull off this focus on communities. No one had ever tackled the complex challenges of displaying a living kelp forest community before. We needed unfiltered seawater to bring in plankton to nourish the filter-feeding invertebrate animals, as well as larvae and spores of organisms to create a natural community of plants and animals on the rockwork. Unfortunately, this rich unfiltered water makes for poor visibility— like a typical day diving in Monterey Bay—and we needed to filter the water during opening hours so people could see into the exhibit. The kelp needed 6 hours of ample sunlight, requiring proper positioning in the building, and water motion.

 

Because the family was tackling things that had never been done before in an aquarium, it was very-much a let's try it and see if it works approach.  The architect remembers his first meeting with David Packard this way:

“Well, Chuck, the kids and everybody have this idea about doing an aquarium... I don’t know whether it’s worth a damn or not. So, my deal with you is I’m going to be there every Friday, I’m going to come and look at what you’ve done and if I like what you’ve done, we’ll go on for another week. If I don’t like it, I’ll pay you off and send you home. Is that a deal?” 

When we're in our twenties, most of us have this approach to most things in life.  We take a job, and our attitude is If I like this, I'll go another week and see how I feel.  If I don't, I'll put in my two weeks and make sure I leave on good terms and try something else.  As we get older, and the stakes get higher, we lose our trust in our ability to follow the music of life, and instead of dancing freely to its rhythms, we slavishly fall into mechanical steps, terrified we'll lose pace and won't be able to catch up if we step out of line.  All improvisation ends.  What started as an adventure slowly turns into enslavement to our material desires that we mistake as needs.

It would probably do most of us good, especially as we cling more closely to being secure with each advancing year, to occasionally do something joyous and good and erratic--something that requires us to trust in each other and in life.  Fear of the unknown can snuff out a lot of possibilities in life--from vacations that never seemed feasible to hobbies never acquired, or even things thought but never said.  And though isolated, those small subtractions from this experience we call mortality, add up over a lifetime.   I believe that they can greatly reduce our mortal experience.  I know I spend way too much time not creating.  I begin to believe it's pointless, that my book has grown beyond what I can control, that I'll never get it published, that others will never read it.

All that may be true, but...

When I write I know who I am and what my purpose is.  When I put writing on the back burner, I begin to listen to other voices, and those voices tell me to believe in things that I can never believe in, namely committing my life to work and a paycheck.  I don't mind those things.  I'm not anti-security.  I worry way too much to live life precariously.  I love stability.  But my reason to be here is to see and create.  If I'm focused on those two things I know who I am.  If I'm not, I feel disconnected and lost, and I soon begin to believe life is pointless--because to me, the job and the paycheck are pointless.  Rather, life happens around the edges of responsibility, in the stolen glances at magic light, and time getting that down somehow--through a quick snapshot on the phone or a hastily written paragraph.

Life for me is about seeing lime green.  Or orange, or purple.  Is there anything anymore magical?  Does there need to be another reason to live?  If I'm focused on color, or texture, or light, I never question why I exist.  If I focus on work and finances and accomplishing something, it soon all begins to feel pointless.  I have the sneaky suspicion that's because it is.  Not all of it.  Just the stuff we do to establish ourselves in the world.  Real life takes place in stolen glances at life abundant outside what we've established as our life.  And that's okay.  In fact, it probably makes it more meaningful to participate in a game one knows has no meaning other than to get you to experience everything outside the gameboard itself.  I have no idea how much impact I have as a teacher, but I do know my commute is glorious and that my students are marvelously entertaining--and that both those are made more meaningful by the fact that I'm supposed to teach something in the process.  It limits that drive.  I just can't drive on forever, which I would definitely try to do given total freedom.  I've got just forty-five minutes to take in everything I can on that drive each way.  And the fact that I have teaching objectives forces just enough conflict in the relationship I have with my students to make things interesting.  Each day their job is to learn as little as possible.  Each day my role is to get them to learn as much as possible.  We each have our roles, and because I know the rules, and most of all that it is a game, I usually enjoy teaching immensely.  And when I don't, it's because I'm no longer centered in the now as an observer.  I forget our roles and focus so much on the teaching that it feels pointless.  That's because it is.  

The meaning of life isn't in what we're doing.  It's not about adding up numbers, writing out sentences, packing cans and boxes of macaroni and cheese in plastic bags, or even getting on stage and singing your heart out to thousands and thousands of fans who love you even though they don't know you, and you can't even see their faces beyond the first couple of rows.  It's none of that.  The meaning is simply in being thrown out there in life somehow to take it all in and learn whatever you need to learn from all of it, which for most of us is just this: we are not the center, and true joy only comes in those moments when we finally take in being part of something we cannot even begin to comprehend that includes galaxies and grains of sand, grocery stores and mudslides, fungi and parakeets, clocks and sunlit waves, beaches and dumb people who believe Biden, not the global pandemic, is the reason that a can of Cambell's Tomato Soup costs 25% more than it used to.   

What was so magical to me on our first visit to the Monterey Bay Aquarium was just that: Damn, it's beautiful under the sea, and here I am with the one I love, looking right in at it.  And on our return trip, all that remained exactly the same.

Here I am, it's beautiful looking under the sea at all that is clearly not me, and yet, here we are staring at each other through eyes and walls of glass.  And at this moment, that is all there is: us taking in each other the best we can--baffled by our differences, one in our extreme separateness, connected in ways I will never understand.

In such moments, meaning never comes into question.  Experience is all there is.   Joy is all-encompassing.

I survive everything else, knowing the ridiculous routines and absurd situations are just divine games to get us to moments of surrendering our egos and glimpsing the fecundity of life we cannot begin to understand.  For me, that oddly feels the same as understanding everything.

To surrender is to be.