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| Lemon Cove, California, Steve Brown 2022 |
After Lake Kaweah, we headed out into the Central Valley, staying along the eastern edge most of the way, near the dry, bleached grassy foothills of the Sierra, and then slowly angling our way out to McFarland. I wish I'd stopped more. I kept wanting to go back and get to know the many mostly Hispanic towns that support America's industrial agricultural heartland to better write this part of the book. I wanted to read The King of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of a Secret American Empire. Yet, time rushed on, and the focus of this book shifted. I started out wanting to understand how the lessons The Grapes of Wrath have been largely forgotten to the point that California and America look and feel eerily like they did in the 1930s. Someone still needs to write that book, perhaps me. However, the focus of this book shifted to Steinbeck's ecological and mystical visions of the interconnections of life that unify us into one. Unconsciously, I must have known that was the way it was going to go from the very start, for as early as the second chapter, I'd declared that the guiding theme would be: We are all connected, and what we choose to do now will impact our individual and shared realities through the eternities. However, I think at that point, I still envisioned the book as study of the relationship between California and the United States as a whole, as one more warning about the environmental catastrophe that will occur if we don't heed the lessons of John Steinbeck and Ed Rickets.
Instead, writing this book has become a personal spiritual journey--a record of developing my own happiness through observing the interconnectedness of everything through the specific lens of now--whether that instant be a snapshot of April of 2022, when Marci and I made the trip to California, or whether that be a slice of time closer to right now as I write this chapter. I came to sense that my own personal liberation was deeply tied to acutely observing my connection with the one, moment to moment, day to day, while letting go of the ego and the fear that drives it. I set out to better understand a state and a nation and instead focused on better understanding myself.
Happiness, I think, cannot truly be found until one embraces everything. Intellectually, I understood that when I saw the movie Gandhi in ninth grade. I knew at that early age that we are all one, and that fighting for individual interests under the illusion of scarcity can only bring human misery. However, there is a difference between knowing something in the mind and knowing something in the soul. Somehow, writing this book has opened up my soul to the point I've recognized that the knowledge was always there. It's not a learning, but a remembering. Before the 2022 trip to California, I was a spiritual seeker. Through writing this book, I have become a spiritual practitioner. I was religious before, and I am religious now. Most times I'm happy. Occasionally, I make myself quite miserable. That was true before the trip, and that is true now. However, I have completely changed in the process of writing this book because I used to put the lens of one on my camera once in a while when I heard the right song, like "Imagine" by John Lennon, or saw the right movie, like Gandhi, or read the right book, like Cannery Row, but it took the right piece of art to get me to a moment of transcending my ego. Since writing this book, the lens of one never comes off. Sometimes it gets so fogged up I can't see. But my vision of life has been permanently altered. I may swear and curse at being in the tide pool, but I can no longer view myself as separate or superior from it. I may still battle with my ego, but I no longer battle with reality. There is no me separate from everyone and everything. There can't be. Whether you look through the lens of science or religion, everything is still part of one cosmos. We are all living cells of God's infinite ocean. Or if you prefer, we are particles of the godless universe. Either way, the source is one. Once that really sinks in, you can never be the same. Anger is still possible in moments when you're at your worse, but once you truly absorb the interconnectedness of all things, hate really is no longer an option. Hate is fueled by the illusion of separation, of other. No other, no hate. Only God--even if you believe that divinity is simply the entirety of the universe.
I don't believe in that godless Universe. I believe in a very personal God who knows each of us by name. In fact, I don't believe it, I know it. However, more important than believing in God is the recognition we are all one because with that recognition comes alignment with God and each other. When you finally recognize that deep in your soul, you no longer need someone to believe like you in order to be one with you. Once there is no illusion of I separate from source there is no me left to protect. I retain my individuality, but my eyes no longer look out on the tidepool; my eyes are the tide pool. One floats around in this magnificent tidepool of diversity, where there are still darkness and light, still wrong and right, but where everyone and everything are perfect in their own stage of development. You finally see. Everything glitters God.
I had not yet put on this permanent lens of oneness driving through corporate expanses of orchards, vineyards, and cropland around MacFarland, USA, but the endless flat grid of growth was sort of awe-inspiring like laying on one's back and looking up into the stars. It truly seemed endless, until it would all of the sudden end, and we'd find ourselves on a dry hill, just high enough to see the desert beyond the illusion of endless fertile geometric fecundity. And then we'd drop back down into that flatness and drive by some expansive orange grove, sunlight glistening of waxy leaves of rows and rows of squat, bulky, loaded trees.
