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| 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
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