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.