Last night, we gathered in the Santa Ynez Valley Botanic Garden for the inaugural concert in a series organized by Grey Bear Erickson to launch a nonprofit organization called MÁS. Its goal is to make music and art more accessible to all. A Chumash blessing reminded us of the sanctity of this place and one another, and Joachim Cooder performed his beautiful songs as afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees, little children played in garden pathways, and friends on chairs and blankets took time out from the woes of the world and remembered enchantment.

It was the culmination of a musical and festive week. The resistance singers had held their morning practice a few days earlier, walking along a back street singing, in preparation for their upcoming participation in our town’s 4th of July parade. At a fair in Lompoc one evening, we watched a show of fledgling young musicians from Certain Sparks, including our 13-year-old neighbor, who played a pink bass guitar. Flags were snapping in the wind, crafts people sold earrings and soap and knitted goods, aromas drifted from taco trucks, and screams emanated from a carnival ride spinning brave passengers high in the air, occasionally upside-down. I guess some folks enjoy being upside-down. I am not one of them.

Which inevitably brings me to the upside-down-ness of our country as we near its birthday celebration. You know what’s going on. And if you don’t, or if you do and it doesn’t bother you, you long ago left the realm of reason.  

I like listening to podcasts and favorite songs when I drive, but a few days ago, I made the mistake of turning on the radio, just in time to hear this pronouncement from Stephen Miller, one of the most grotesque and hateful characters in the shit show: “America’s doors are closed.”

What an ugly and un-American sentiment! It sounds particularly dissonant as we approach the designated birthday of our nation.

Happy birthday, America...you great unfinished symphony...as Lin-Manuel Miranda described it in Hamilton. We have always been deeply flawed, but aspirational and self-correcting over time. The long arc of the moral universe (and our own history) bends towards justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said.

But not without our help.

Now our nation has been highjacked, but we haven't forgotten who we are. We are people from everywhere, and we care about each other. You sent for me. You let me make a difference.

My own immigrant grandfather was a stocky southern Italian who came to this country in 1905 not knowing a word of English. Arriving at Ellis Island on a hot July day, he surely glimpsed the Statue of Liberty lifting her lamp beside the golden door: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…

He worked hard and made a life here, and I travel through my own life with this awareness. It is a legacy that fosters gratitude, humility, and compassion. As in these lyrics by Paul Simon, “I've been given all I wanted, Only three generations off the boat. I've harvested and I've planted. I'm wearing my father's old coat.”

I wear the old coat, and I carry the stories, and all around me, I see hardworking people who have come here for the same reasons. A few days ago, three diligent workers were clearing brush and digging the ground to form a dry creek bed in our yard. It’s a way to prevent erosion and manage stormwater run-off, but in this case, it was also a work of art. While they worked, the air was filled with Mexican music, and the fragrance of freshly cut brush wafted in through my open window, and I cannot describe how much joy it gave me. I don’t speak Spanish, but I went outside and managed a gracias, for their labor and their spirit.

None of this is unusual. We are a symphony of many languages and songs, and we are built with many hands, leaning into one another.

I respect the courage of those who come to our shores with aspirations similar to those of my own forebears, many forced from their homelands by terrible conditions. I cannot understand the default assumption that these are bad people deserving of punishment. I cannot forgive the cruelty and hypocrisy we are witnessing today, nor the brazen corruption, stupidity, and vulgarity.

Meanwhile, programs vital to the health and well-being of all Americans have been slashed to benefit the obscenely rich, and hard-won measures that were put in place to protect our very planet have been overturned. Happy birthday, America.

One of the songs we have been practicing is America the Beautiful, whose lyrics were written by Kathleen Lee Bates in 1895. I am especially intrigued by its ornate, old-fashioned second stanza:

O beautiful for pilgrim feet
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

Those pilgrim feet come from many shores, and I personally relate to the impassioned stress, but the lack of self-control in the upside-down kingdom and the mounting failures of Court and Congress to confirm liberty in law are alarming indeed.

And yet, I am brimming with music and friendship and hope, and I still believe we will get our America back on track. Now that the flaws (to be mended less by God than by our human efforts) are more conspicuous than ever, perhaps we can reinvent a better version, rather than trying to replicate what has been broken or lost.

I believe we can do it, because our forebears bequeathed to us their values, strength, and bravery, and I see good people all around me trying to make things better. I have lived a life of blessings and learned it’s not okay to ignore the suffering of others.

And I hear music in us.

So bring on the fireworks, bring on the singing, bring on the parade. It is this resolve, this unshakeable commitment, that I will be celebrating.

One of my favorite songs that Joachim sang at the concert under the trees was about passing through Fort Smith, Arkansas and glimpsing a young girl there, wondering what thoughts and dreams and secrets were locked in her heart, whether she would someday leave, thinking about his own daughter at home, and what the future holds.

“Daddy’s lost his job, but he’s doing the best he can, /likes to take everyone to the Texas Road House every now and then./Godspeed little children. Soon you’ll be growing up.”

This song touched me deeply. As I have said, I honor the struggles and values of those who came before me, but I also care deeply about the world we will leave behind for future generations. We have to get things right-side-up again.

And we will need each other to achieve this. I have heard it suggested that on the 4th of July we proclaim a Declaration of Interdependence. It’s an idea that makes sense to me. We are nothing in isolation, but we are so powerful together.

We’re here. We are community. There’s music in us.

Godspeed little children.

My week has been so full, I can hardly process it, but this blurry old photo turned up and kicked me back into 1973. God, the world was different then!

Rosemary and Freddy, the couple in the picture, were driving cross-country from Syracuse in a VW Bug, and I was a bewildered young woman trying to extricate myself from a marriage, with no plan in place. They invited me to accompany them, and I said yes. I figured it was as good a diversion as any. I had never been west of Chicago, and I wanted to see what was out there.  

I sat in the back seat next to a large cooler, a backpack, three sleeping bags, and a sack of groceries. We went on a kind of southwest diagonal through Iowa, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, eventually finding ourselves in the red rock lunar landscape of Utah, and it seems to me we went as far as Arizona, but we never made it to California, which was always my fantasy destination. Rosemary and Freddy were bickering a lot, and it was hot, and I looked out the window at the world as we passed through and felt fathomlessly sad. The car was littered with soda cans and candy wrappers, like the inescapable debris of the lives we wished to leave behind.

And oh, the lives I have lived since then! California has been my home for more than forty years, and the girl who sat in the back seat is still bewildered, still evolving, still amazed. My journey has exceeded all expectations, and I have abundant reasons to be grateful, but I am fiercely devoted to the idea that I must try to make things better, or at least not worse, before I exit.

A few weeks ago, I had an encounter with a man who was on a different kind of road trip. He was cruising around our neighborhood in a fancy vehicle looking for a house he might buy for his daughter, who was moving to Florida but needed a California base too. (Honestly.) We chatted a bit and something I said gave him cause to open his phone and proudly show me the screen image, which was a picture of his hero, Trump. I didn’t throw up, but my revulsion was real. The destruction, the lunacy, the cruelty, the corruption, the lies, the vulgarity, the breathtaking stupidity…somehow this gentleman was fine with it all. More than fine. He was utterly lost to it. Despite my better judgement, I ineffectually uttered some sliver of my sentiments, and his smug facade told me all I needed to know. There are millions like him, even now, and it is a waste of time to try to reason with cult members, and I resolved to use this incident as a lesson, and further motivation. I am so tired of the sense of shame and disgust that the huckster and his cronies have brought to our country. I’m so sick of being sick of it.

But that unpleasant exchange was just a glitch. In the days that followed, many beautiful things unfolded.  My friend Alicia made me a quilt of many colors, a multi-hued festival of a quilt with a bright magenta border, a quilt of defiance and celebration.  A dear man named Ron whom I haven’t known for very long pronounced us friends, and I took joy in his openness, his readiness to express his feelings and invite the gift and vulnerability of a friendship, his willingness to say out loud the things our hearts tell us, because there isn’t that much time…is there? One morning, I rode my trusty bicycle with another good friend, Diane. We pedaled along a country road, slow enough to talk, and now and then we were ten years old again.

 I’ve been going to practice sessions of the Resistance Singers, organized by my intrepid buddy Jan. I sat in the backyard of a local coffee shop as America the Beautiful was sung, a song less of celebration than yearning in this moment, a song I had not sung since elementary school. And of course there was a rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land, which always sounds timely. The singing group is just a start, and we don’t really know what we’re doing, but it’s something; we’ll sing these songs at a 4th of July parade, and at protests, as we reclaim our country.

Meanwhile, we’re keeping the food bank stocked, and tending to each other in so many ways. Some of us have decided to focus on getting out the vote. Local musician Bear, a brilliant guitarist, is launching a nonprofit organization called MÁS to make music and art more accessible to all; the first concert in a series will be held in the botanic garden on Sunday.

One afternoon, I went to a party where our hosts handed us pens and paper and we wandered in the backyard, wrote thoughts and poems, and reconvened to share them. It was a kind of sustenance. I also attended the opening of a place called “Third Space”, a community center that can be used for whatever folks imagine: performances, music, art classes, dance, tutoring, fund-raisers, meetings…all in the spirit of democracy, community, and connection.

There were walks, of course, in the sweetly lengthening daylight of summer, and the still-surprising loveliness around us.

Speaking of road trips, my friend Tina had planned the ultimate trip, of roads and planes and boats and trains—a tour of the world. And then she had an epiphany, deciding instead to direct her energy and resources to good causes at home. “I can see the whole world right here,” she announced, and rightly so. There is a kind of infinity in every local moment and micro detail, and actions we take can have a ripple effect far beyond our ability to imagine. I felt proud of my friend. It made me think of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Renascence:

The world stands out on either side

No wider than the heart is wide;

Above the world is stretched the sky,—

No higher than the soul is high.

The heart can push the sea and land

Farther away on either hand;

The soul can split the sky in two,

And let the face of God shine through.

But East and West will pinch the heart

That cannot keep them pushed apart;

And he whose soul is flat—the sky

Will cave in on him by and by.

So, this is the real news, and this is what’s true. Fields were farmed and faulty things were fixed, warm yellow light spilled out of windows, and teachers taught the children. Someone planted trees. Songs were sung and tears were shed and people prayed in all the ways there are to pray. All the moments merge into the symphony of the present.

And it continues. I picture a land, in the words of Jackson Browne:

Where people walk in wonder
And speak to one another
And recognize as brother
The face across the border
Across a sea of differences
Across the drifting sands
The joining of our hands in time

My first sense of the vastness of this country was in 1973, watching it roll by through the back seat window of a VW Bug. Now I know my country is also the here and the now. The shards of my broken heart are sparkling, and I am going to travel as far as I can, standing tall in this very place.

It was a bright night washed in moonbeams to an almost daytime shine. I was tumbled into wakefulness when the rumble of a distant train unleashed the agitated voices of a caucus of coyotes. I closed my eyes and an image came to me of the earth spinning in space, but more than spinning, I could feel it breathing.

And more than breathing, I could feel it pulsating, pulsating with a billion prayers, and many were of thanks, but there were mostly supplications, and they merged into a kind of music that was the yearning of humanity throughout all time, reverberating through the universe.

But I had no desire to be awake and unmoored in the night, even listening to the music of the spheres. These were dangerous waters, I knew. I tried to navigate away from the undertows of fear and avoid the straits that always lead to sadness.

I thought about light: The moon spilling itself into this room. Sunlight in a garden. The blank open brightness of the Southwest. The muffled gray light of Chicago in November. Headlight beams on a lonely road. The warm lamplight seen through the windows of houses I have not entered. Shooting stars. Fireflies.

“All I ever wanted was to paint light on the walls of life,” said Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Me too.

Summer had ended. The previous day I waited at the exit from Gaviota to the 101 for a break in the traffic as a stream of Labor Day travelers drove past, many in recreational vehicles or carrying kayaks or bicycles or ATVs, an endless procession of vacationers returning to their everyday lives.

Now, lying in my bed, hoping for a return to sleep, I remembered a summer from my childhood on Coney Island Avenue, when my sister and I set a towel and a pot of water on the sidewalk and propped up a rain umbrella and sat there pretending we were at the beach. People looked at us and chuckled: such charming little pauper girls, a beach so near but unreachable to them.

Those hurried pedestrians missed a lot; there were small treasures even in the gutters here. Once I found a green lens from a broken pair of sunglasses, the perfect window for a tiny house of scraps, though I never built what I imagined in my mind, and there were bottles to gather and redeem for pennies, which had value then, and one lucky day, a perfectly fixable red bicycle was part of someone’s trash.

Brooklyn summers. I wonder: do people still sit out in the night talking on stoops, roofs, and fire escapes? Were those streets as innocent in the 1950s as they seem now, looking back?

I used to wish I lived in a house with a big front porch on one of the shady side streets. I never imagined I would live in the country, within sight and sound of the sea, my sleep interrupted by coyotes.

What was I dreaming about before I awoke? Maps and train fares. Trying to find my way home. The kindness of strangers, and some sort of museum. New York City again. Suddenly I remember riding the subway in 1967, looking at a poster of a long-haired girl running through a meadow filled with daisies. It’s an ad for shampoo, I think, and I am a long-haired girl myself who smells of shampoo and probably spearmint chewing gum, and I am wearing white fishnet hose and a swirling pastel watercolor dress -- lilac, pale green, aqua, an Age of Aquarius kind of dress.

Later, my friend Rosemary is standing on a corner in the Village biting into a large green apple, and a man walking by says that apple is bigger than she is, and she smiles (the way she used to smile) and the same old moon is rising above the city, and we will all grow up and forget about each other.

Much later we might learn of early deaths and inexplicable outcomes, or perhaps we will receive a mundane update surprising only in the number of years that it encompasses, because we honestly forget we are this old.

And it’s big, this growing sense of being temporary, really quite a lot to process, especially in the middle of the night. So many things remain in need of understanding. So many things remain in need of being done. 

"The great courage," wrote Camus, “is still to gaze as squarely at the light as at death."

But the light in the heart of the night is hard to look into.

Thank God for that sky grown faintly mauve with morning now and the shape of things returning and resolving themselves. The leaves of the lilac on the deck are suddenly illuminated, and there is the comfort of cows grazing on the soft brown hillside, and the caw of a loud-mouthed crow.

A bowl on the kitchen table is filled with tomatoes from the garden, heavy as grapefruit, and the light in its early autumnal slant is a sigh holding hints of prayer and promise. 

I think of these words by Pico Iyer: "...everything falls away from us - the light, the dark, the warm afternoons-- and all we can do is cry out in affirmation of our joy."

After thirty-plus years of living on an off-the-grid ranch forty minutes from stores and conveniences, I now live in the town of Solvang, and many of my walks involve streets and cars and human encounters.  At a busy junction the other day, I pushed the button on the traffic light and waited a long time until the little walking symbol appeared, granting me thirty seconds to cross the street.

I was heading to the trail behind the bank, a popular dirt path that’s managed by California State Parks. It meanders by an historic stone grist mill, Alamo Pintado Creek, and an olive grove, then up a hill to the Santa Ynez Mission. (Currently, there’s a poignant cardboard sign on the fence at the entrance, asking folks to be on the lookout for a tortoise—he is somebody’s pet on the loose.)

Anyway, the light finally changed, and I stepped off the curb into the pedestrian crosswalk, and I was startled by a car that was turning right onto the main street, veering very close and fast, nearly swiping me, or so it seemed. “Bitch,” I muttered. I cast my meanest New York scowl-face in the driver’s direction, made some kind of arm motion, and shook my head in indignation, all very dramatic, but I was angry. I get that way sometimes. I guess I’ll never make it as a Buddhist, observing my anger in a detached way without acting upon it, as one of my mentors advises. No, I expressed myself and then moved on.

I reached the other side of the street and continued on my way, through the open gate and along the dirt path, keeping my eye out for the missing tortoise, saying hi to the dog walkers, and trudging up the hill to the Mission. The walk revived my spirits, as it always does. There’s a wooden fence where the hill climb ends and my bad hip makes it hard to lift my leg over the top rail, but I successfully maneuvered, then walked across the parking lot toward the buildings.

A thin woman with yellowish-white hair stood in the doorway directly in front of me. It happened to be voting day for the California primary, and she was in the spirit, all dressed in red, white, and blue, including red high heeled shoes and navy blue star-studded socks. She was inexplicably calling out in my direction: "I'm sorry, I am so, so sorry. I'm not that kind of person. Please forgive me. I would never hurt anyone.” 

"I think you're talking to the wrong person," I said. I had absolutely no idea what this was about.

"I'm talking to the right person," she replied. "I'm the woman who almost ran you over! Please forgive me! I'm so very sorry."

"Are you kidding?" I said. "I'm the one who should be sorry. I over-reacted. It was no big deal."

But she was insistent. "No, it was wrong of me. Even my son said I could have killed you!"  

"I don't think you came that close," I said. I had been surprised and angry, but I did not honestly believe I’d narrowly missed being mowed down. Mostly I had wanted to let her know that she’d been inconsiderate. (My husband calls this being “instructive” and I do have that tendency. What can I say? I was a teacher for many years.) Now I felt a little sheepish about my theatrical response.

“Really, it wasn’t that significant,” I said.

But she was genuinely remorseful and upset. Despite her festive, patriotic attire and a little “I voted” sticker on her white denim jacket, she looked sad.

Unable to resist the opening for philosophizing and not-so-subtle political commentary, I expressed my belief that we are all feeling vulnerable, traumatized, and under duress right now due to the current 'situation' and it was understandable that we might over-react to things. (I was assuming she was on the same team as me, which is not really a safe assumption in the Valley, but in any case, we were just a couple of old broads trying to communicate.) 

Maybe she is resolved to drive more carefully henceforth and watch out for pedestrians.

As for me, I’m still working on my anger, but I will definitely look around before stepping out into the street, no matter what the signal says.

We forgave each other. We hugged. (Yes, we really did.)

And she gave me a peppermint.

"This is how people are supposed to be," I said, as if I were wise.

She went back to her parked car, and I walked ahead carefully, paying attention.

The building in front of me said "FAITH FORMATION CENTER".

And I pondered faith, my own in particular, whether formed or amorphous, the mystery and surprise of it, its kinship with defiance, and more than anything, where it is placed.

 "To inhabit was the most natural joy when I was still living inside; all was garden and I had not lost the way in." Helene Cixous

In my dream, I was a child again, a passenger in my father’s car as he drove us home from someplace in the city. The grey dusk sky was deepening into inky blue darkness as the lights of passing cars streamed by, streetlights blinked, and the windows of houses held warm yellow light illuminating lives whose mysteries I would never know. Stars were snagged in branchy treetops, and I felt safe and sleepy as the world slid by, my father at the wheel. Everyone I loved was still alive. I believed in people and had faith in the unwritten story of my future.

I don’t know what prompted that particular dream; maybe it was an unconscious yearning to feel safe and certain again as we all careen along in the runaway train that our country has become.  These days are fraught with danger and disillusionment, and I long for things to make sense again. Hopefully that longing will help prod my deeds and fuel my spirit.

In fact, I happened upon some interesting reflections by the writer Devin Kelly about the condition of longing, in which I clearly dwell. He observes that longing contains the implicit recognition that there is an impossible distance between where you are and what you want. He concludes: “[Longing] is to fill that impossible space with possible things. It is to make of your life a kind of dream and to make out of your dreams a kind of life.”

I’ve never seen it expressed so perfectly. I understand that I inhabit a yearning rooted in my earliest sense of wonder and love, intensified by loss, and forever lured onward by possibility and the sunlight of imagination. In the meantime, I still see flickers of magic all around me, and I can summon up the sense of being loved, and there’s strength and comfort in that.

Still drenched in the lazy pleasure of that dream as morning arrived, I looked out the window and saw a lanky young coyote napping in the yard, completely at ease. He rose in his own time and slid away beneath a fence into the greater wildness beyond. White cattle grazed in the adjacent field, a ridiculous turkey strutted by, and I thought to myself, as I do almost daily, how astonishing and unlikely it is that this is where I live.

I avoided my phone, not ready for the daily barrage. I had my coffee with longing and went for a walk, past hazy mountains and a very green golf course, over the bridge to the Mission garden, with its shrines and flowers and statues. An elderly man with a cane and an old-fashioned fedora bowed in prayer, poignant and earnest, beneath a life-sized Jesus.

The poignance of being human. That’s a phrase the late John O’Donohue used in an On Being podcast I heard years ago, and I think I've been trying to get a handle on this all along. Being alive is such a contradictory state; each of us is a manifestation of miracles, but we are barely blundering through, acutely conscious and yet so unaware, experiencing all this love and pain and wonder without knowing what it means, soon vanishing into what we can neither imagine nor perceive. How could we not be filled with longing?

But thinking about John O’Donohue brings me to perhaps my favorite of all the things he said, which is that one's identity is not equivalent to one's biography, and that "....there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there's still a sureness in you, where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary."

A place within us of sureness and tranquility. How sweet and comforting that is! It acknowledges the miracle-ness of each of us, delivered pure and beautiful from the invisible to the visible realm. I can’t always find that confident, unwounded place in myself, but I know there is a spark in me, and it makes me want to try harder, be better, never give up—to find and manifest purpose.

And I am not always clear on how to apply all this to what we are living through now, but I know this is a time for being real and true and brave, even when I would prefer to sleepily watch the lights slide by from the backseat of my childhood. The inner sanctuary is available for respite, and the shining moments of simply being present; then we muster up the doing, in whatever form it takes.

May our yearning motivate us, and may our decency and dignity demand the leaders and society we deserve.  The world is dazzling me and breaking my heart, all in the same moment, and that’s the way it is and always was. I have not lost the way in.

I have discovered I have a great propensity for naps. And ice cream. Yes, I hit the ice cream several times a day, and I have become a world-class napper. My intention may be a momentary lie-down, but with stunning alacrity, I sink into a deep, drooling session of sleep. I don’t exactly feel refreshed afterwards. There is simply a sense of having capitulated to a condition too compelling and inevitable to fight. I am one with my destiny during these spontaneous naps. And then, if there is ice cream in the fridge, I arise and indulge. Ice cream never fails.

That is not how I ever expected to begin a post for a website focused on amazement and wonder, but I suppose it’s an honest reflection of my current mental state, and among other things, this blog is about honest connection. I hesitate to use the word “depression” because thankfully I have not fallen that far, but let’s face it, many of us are skirting the edges, and it takes a lot of resolve to remain hopeful and functional.

This dystopian darkness has changed us all. I’m pretty sure I used to laugh more readily. And I understood that our country was flawed, and that misery and injustice were real, but I had a sturdy faith in the general decency of humans, and in the belief that most folks lived their lives within some parameters of reason and could distinguish truth from absurdity. When things went awry, and they certainly did, I was among the multitudes who spoke up. But even at the most challenging points, I assumed that our leaders included a critical mass of folks with ethics and integrity for whom power was ultimately a means to improve the common good, and that the guardrails of democracy would hold. Imagine that? I trusted that the Court, despite the members known to be corrupt or ineffectual, would uphold the Constitution, that the press would implement its freedom and sacred duty to speak unvarnished truth, that Republicans might have different views but basically cared about democracy, and the clever system of checks and balances that the founders built into the Constitution was fundamentally intact.  I did not feel ashamed of what America had come to signify in the world. I did not feel that we were betraying our forebears.

Now, I haul around a heavy heart and try to choke down my revulsion. I feel chronically disillusioned and often overwhelmed. I know I am not alone in this, and it’s very understandable. We must acknowledge such feelings, ride them out, take a nap, get back up.

But you know what else? This weirdness has also yielded unexpected blessings. For one thing, I am braver than I used to be. Maybe it’s born of a sense of urgency, but I am finding my voice and standing up, walking on air, as Seamus Heaney advised, despite my better judgement. And friendships are stronger. The relentless assault has forged a sturdy network of stalwart friends who come out in protest, take action, and give one another sustenance on personal and societal levels. We are weathering this together, and our bond is fierce.

I believe we are all seeing weaknesses we had not known were there, and injustices that were real but perhaps less visible to those of us more insulated from them. And I am also more thankful and protective than ever for what we have had and stand to lose.

So maybe, if we stay the course, some of this is good? I for one would rather know than not know. I would rather know, absorb the hard realities, brush myself off, and be part of the counter force. (Again, license granted for naps and ice cream as needed, and walks outdoors. We are only human, after all. Intermittent rest and renewal are vital.)

Here’s something else that helped. The feature documentary Lightworkers, directed by Bobby Roth, is now available to stream worldwide at lightworkersdoc.com. Robert Hubbell talked about it in his daily newsletter, a friend rented it for five bucks, and a few of us watched it together. Lightworkers faces the reality that our democracy is under existential threat, considers what compels individuals to act, and explores how ordinary citizens can make meaningful change.

I scribbled quotes and notes in my little journal as I watched: Silence is not safety. Comfort is a danger zone. Have the courage to believe another world is possible. Don’t stop wanting to be better. Resistance is an ongoing process. Hope is a political and moral choice. America needs a redemption story.  Evil persists when good people do nothing. If you feel afraid, you can still act. We are the ones we have been waiting for. Be the change.

One of the speakers, a brave and eloquent Black woman named Peggy Trotter Dammond Preacely, said, “Sometimes what you have to do to survive and thrive is uncomfortable.”

But we do it anyway.

Robert Hubbell is a hero of mine, and he’s featured in the documentary too. He boldly suggests that we approach this period with gratitude, because look how far we have come and with what clarity we are seeing. We reached this point after a long history of struggle and progress, and the arc of history has detours and setbacks, but we will prevail over the long term. This is a setback, not the end.

But only if we resist. What does that mean? It means a million things, great and small, and we each find our lane. It means peaceful protest. It means connecting with others in community. It means acting with decency and kindness. It means calling legislators. It means writing postcards and letters. It means speaking the truth. It means sending money, hands-on effort, communication, gathering together. It means art and defiance and spoken word and music. My dear friend Jan is starting a resistance choir. I’m working on a storytelling event highlighting the wisdom of folks who transcended hardship. Neither of us knows what we are doing, but we do the things we are not yet good at. Or we do the things we do best and apply these to what we care about most.

And maybe more than anything, it means voting. Voting is the superpower that we must not forfeit, and we can help those who face obstruction by donating to an organization such as Movement Voter Project.

After watching Lightworkers, I went for a walk, and that is another thing that never fails to revive my soul. In the garden of the Mission, a group of children on a field trip from Santa Maria had just disembarked from a school bus, noisy and joyful. The mountains loomed in the distance, roses and alstroemeria bloomed, and a life-sized statue of a healing Jesus gazed upon it all. The children ran about, laughing and playing, and the world was benign and heartbreakingly lovely.

I’ve been finding peace in our new house, too, which, although empty and pending, is nonetheless home. I see it as a story yet to be written, a space of quiet promise, but I know now how the front room at night is suffused with silver-gray light, a mix of starlight with a dash of moon and memory. I have learned the sticky door, the tap of the feet on a cool stone floor, how morning begins with white wisps of cloud caressing the mountains.

On a bike ride in the neighborhood, a curve in the path was bordered by a thicket of trees and tall grass, an old barn sagged in the distance recalling bygone days, and everything was hushed and rustic, rife with winking secrets. Remember when you were young, upon glimpsing such places for the first time, wondering how you might one day fit into this beautiful mysterious world? It’s still there, trying to continue, sustaining us in so many ways.

I am dazzled and humbled by the enormity of it all, by the banquet of this life, the gifts I have been given simply by existing. I am touched by the tenderness and striving of the good people I know. We will not stand by and acquiesce to a regime of putrid sickos who care about nothing but their own egos and wealth.

I once had a dream that that began with nouns. Ordinary objects were infused with light, all waiting and portent, newly significant. Teapots and tools, an open umbrella, a felt hat and a feather. Swept along through the entirety of my past, I saw streets and paths I have walked upon, felt the touch of a hand I held as a child, and watched vignettes that starred the people I have loved, flickering quickly before me but fully absorbed, for they were here already. (I love you, I love you they said to me in a thousand silent ways.) A tiny blue bottle drifted towards me in the surf, an orange fell from a tree, the parched summer ground dreamed of rivers and rain. The lozenges of moonlight quivered on the living room floor, and there was aliveness in everything. My soul opens like a bowl when I let it, and it is filled, and I have so much to give.

Yesterday I stumbled upon an inspiring poem by a Minneapolis-based artist and poet I had never even heard of: Matt Moberg. It’s a long poem, and every line is touching, funny, or amazing, but I will share its culminating stanza here, because it so perfectly fits:

And may we remember—

whatever else this is,
whatever mess,
whatever miracle,
whatever cosmic group project
no one prepared for—

all’ve it is astonishing.

It’s astonishing that we are here.
It’s astonishing that we have loved enough to be ruined.
It’s astonishing that the moon keeps showing up.

It’s astonishing that bread exists.

So pass it.

Tear off a piece
with your bare hands.

Take it in as you take it down. 
And then go outside and look at that moon.

____________

And so I shall succumb to the nap, and I’ll eat my ice cream, and I’m lucky to have access to these balms.

But I hereby reaffirm my commitment to hope, resistance, and action. I’ll keep trying my best, whatever form it takes. It would be so selfish and ungracious to do anything else. What then would my life have meant?

Let’s do this together.

On my first night here, I was abruptly awakened by a presence, a being standing over me. I became aware of it initially as a movement, then a stillness, a streak of white vaguely reminiscent of a snowy egret gliding towards water. As it drew nearer, I realized it was human-sized, even large, and it was startling, but not threatening. It hovered, then stood still and silent, looking down at me. I could not read whether its gaze was tender or indifferent. Perhaps it was just curious. And I do not know how long it lingered, but I was not afraid. It was simply a being, here in its own realm.

I was the outsider, adrift in someone else’s bed at the far western end of the Ranch. We were staying at the house of a friend in the hills overlooking Point Conception, a sacred place for the ancient Chumash, a gateway for the souls of the dead to enter the heavens and begin their celestial journey into the afterlife. The area does have a spiritual feeling, and this was palpable even before the visitation I just described. It’s windy here, and wildly magnificent, a culminating place, a place somehow of drama and echoing peace, an end that leads to a beginning. The grassy hills are sun-bleached to a yellow brown, and the undulating landscape curves as it meets the sea. From where I sit right now I can see the long finger of Government Point reaching out towards the south and east, and west of that, the familiar mound where the lighthouse is.

This is the edge of the 14,000-acre Ranch, which is where we lived for decades, and it’s strange to be here in this new context, as visitors and guests. It’s hard to explain how a place can be so familiar and dear and at the same time so alien and surprising. Certainly, we have changed since our vibrant days here: we are no longer young, and we’re currently navigating challenges and uncertainties that underscore our fragility and awareness of mortality.

The Ranch too has changed, not the fundamental landscape of it, which, though continually reshaped by weather and geology, is steadfast in its splendor, but in the culture that prevails, and the stories that are remembered or forgotten.

We visit with a few old friends. We reminisce about the lucky kids who grew up here, about storms that stranded us, adventures that bonded us, the old-fashioned sense of interdependence and shared wonder. We recognize remnants of the community we once knew, but it’s different now. Those who have stayed confirm this.

One morning I take a solitary walk, up and down steep hills, silence but for the crunch of my shoes on gravel and the hum of the brush, roads bordered by dry stalks of thistles, a muddy ravine, long views of mountains entangled with shreds of cloud. It has never been easy to describe this place. As my daughter puts it, the Ranch’s beauty has always seemed “slightly out of reach, incomprehensible or illegible—something felt rather than described.” The closest she can come to it is with unadorned nouns: cows, birds, wind, waves.

“The words become objects that hold meaning,” she has written, “like the shell, the stone, the sea glass.”

But what is the meaning? And why must I ascribe a personal message to what I see before me: in this very moment gold hills rolling like a shimmering carpet to a very blue sea, a tree whose leaves are trembling, a leaning fence weathered into driftwood. And why am I struggling to figure out how I fit in here? No longer a resident, no longer an owner, but did any of this ever truly belong to me? What does it matter anyway?

We are ostensibly staying here to tend to our friend’s cat, but in truth he has given us a generous gift, a retreat to someplace dear to us, a chance to pause and reflect, then continue in our decline and reinvention. The cat’s name is Winslow, and he is a gargantuan feline who leaps onto the bed and rouses me from dreams by stomping all over me, playing with his jingle-bell toy, and purring loudly in my ear.

Awake, I see a circle of the night sky through a large round bedroom window. I climb out of our friend’s tall bed, and step gingerly across scatter rugs and unfamiliar turns to the bathroom, careful not to trip. I violate my own resolution and grab my phone for a quick round of doom scrolling, then try to resume sleep, hoping Winslow is done playing.

In the morning, I walk up a hill to a high point on a bluff with views in all directions, and in my own way, I proceed to pray.

The mountains are a distant zig-zag of dark silhouettes in the morning haze. The ocean is a shine of silver. A train passes through—I cannot see it, but I hear its muffled chugging and the lonely sound of its horn, iconic and familiar, evocative of many remembered nights. The yellow-brown grass of the fields is muted and frosted by fog, but the fog is gradually drifting and dissipating into white clouds that open to small portals of blue. A distant ridge is gilded with a lemon slice of sunlight.

Lately I have been saying that I don’t feel like myself, but now I don’t quite know what that means, for my self is fluid, un-contained.

“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be,” said Lao Tzu. I guess I’m in the process of becoming.

And my self was shaped for many years by this land of miracles.

“But it was never ours,” said an old friend who understands.

My prayer encompasses gratitude, apology, and a good deal of asking, then disperses like the fog into the mystery, but for the moment, I have a sense of peace.

Nothing is lost. This place did not belong to me as much as I belonged to it, and now in my exile, I walk on air, inventing possibilities, and somehow my soul is now but also then, there and also here.

The mysterious night visitor has not returned to stand over me, but I believe we will meet again.

Seen through the circular opening in the ceiling of the hut, the sky was silver-gray, a flat disk of light suspended above us. Within, the tawny walls of branch and willow embraced us. A small fire flickered, specks of dust and ash drifted about, smoke arising like a spell. The voices of our friends were soothing, and everything we said felt important and intimate, but the words floated away and I can’t recall their substance.

The shed that sheltered us was a Chumash-style dwelling called an ap built by our friends and students within view of Grass Mountain, not far from where a thriving Chumash village had existed centuries earlier. Time stood still within the hut, and we were grateful for the pause. A new week was beginning.

Many things would happen in the course of that week, all leading to a renewed awareness of our own fragility and beauty. As I wrote to a friend, I don’t know whether to describe this part of my life as a sad unwinding or a frenzied crescendo.

“I experience 85 to be both,” he replied, “but perhaps more of the frenzied crescendo.  I don’t want to miss anything.  I find myself tuning up my memories of the hundreds of poems I’ve memorized over the years and reciting them on my early morning walks.  But by late morning, my head is ramped up, and I have to lie down for an hour—with two large dogs resting on top of me.”

Another of my dear older friends, a man in his 90s, was hospitalized this week, and Monte and I went to his house to gather some things that he needed. There is something so touching about the small possessions we accumulate and leave behind as evidence of our lives, the doggedness and bravery it takes to keep going. In the quiet of my friend’s house and the poignancy of its clutter, I felt our shared humanity and vulnerability. We are all so pitiable, though capable of magnificence.

Meanwhile, Monte and I are living in our still-unfurnished home, preparing for its renovation and another short-term exile. As always, the mountains in the distance bring me comfort, and the quality of light, and the blessed fact that we are here together, but it has been difficult to rest and impossible to nest. What books and things we have are mostly in boxes in the garage, and there is a perpetual sense of transition and uncertainty.

I have been searching for reading material that will take me away, and I keep making the wrong choices. For example, I started a book called I Will Bear Witness 1933-1941, A Diary of the Nazi Years by Victor Klemperer. The man was diligent about documenting, and it is a painfully detailed account of his personal travails and the growing horrors around him. At times it sounds so eerily familiar, it could have been written today:

“The never-ending alarms, the never-ending phrases, the never ending hanging out of flags, now in triumph, now in mourning—it all produces apathy. And everyone feels helpless, and everyone knows he is being lied to, and everyone is told what he has to believe…”

We are aware of that encroaching sense of helplessness, for that is the backdrop to this week and the long, discouraging weeks that have come before it. The malignant narcissism, cruelty, and brazen corruption of the current administration affect us daily. I hate that I find myself writing about this so much. I resent the way it invades my head and distorts our lives and undermines our faith in the guardrails designed by the founders to protect us from tyranny, and in the goodness and intelligence of others. I’m certain I used to laugh a lot more. Now I feel sad, disillusioned, and angry. I know I am not alone, and I know we cannot give up, but oh, it is exhausting!

Yet somehow the week also held fortifying walks with friends, an onscreen visit with my grandson, and the gathering of our writing group, with its therapeutic sharing of stories, poetry, and song .

I had recently asked my friend Lynne, whom I respect and admire, what “community” means to her. She responded in an email that arrived a few days ago, and here is what she said:

Community is more than a place, more than the streets that lead to my house, more than the neighboring houses and offices.  In my mind, "community" refers to the people that you rely on, and who rely on you.  Like-minded people who band together in a multitude of ways to make the world a better, safer, more inviting place.  A better place for all of us, but especially for those who are less capable, more fragile, less sure.

Lynne’s current state of mind, she admits, alternates between despondency and determination. But she also talked about what brings her hope, and I have observed the many ways she makes hope happen.

“What is your source of faith?” I wondered.

“A belief that hard work pays off,” she wrote. “And that integrity will be rewarded.  And you will sleep well at night if you just do the right thing.”

Will integrity and virtue prevail? Too many of our fellow citizens seem to have abandoned these values in favor of cheating, lies, and cruelty.

We cannot give up. We have a sacred duty to honor the hard-won legacy we inherited.  

So, it has been a long week, and you can probably tell I’m weary.

But we find our solace and our sustenance too, in order to survive. I liked the sense of shelter in the Chumash hut, somehow lightly enclosed but not at all apart from the world outdoors. I liked the sense of sanity and stillness. I liked the subtle solidity of it, its deceiving strength.

 ___________

Here is a link to an interview I recommend with the brilliant historian Timothy Snyder, an expert on how democracies collapse and how they fight back.  It’s an hour-long listen but well worth it.  Snyder clearly explains what is happening and what we can do about it. I found it validating.
https://youtu.be/1U0I2wI5UOc

Yesterday I attended an Earth Day celebration at the local school where I was once a teacher. There were three special guests: anthropologist Paul, farmer Jacob, and Gabriel, a descendant of Kitsepawit (1839-1915), the Chumash elder and storyteller more commonly known as Fernando Librado. Fernando was the principal informant of anthropologist John Peabody Harrington, and thus helped to preserve the language, customs, and knowledge of the indigenous people who lived here for thousands of years, long before the arrival of Europeans.  (I’ve written about Fernando Librado before; you can read those stories by clicking on these links: here and here.)

Our little school happens to be a short walking distance from the very cave where Fernando lived and wrote and ultimately crossed into the afterworld where his ancestors welcomed him. But before walking to the cave, we gathered in a classroom for a talk by Paul. We learned that there are millions of indigenous people worldwide, and they share the idea that the earth is sacred. In the Andes, where Paul did his field work, the term is Pacha Mama, or Earth Mother, and she is to be honored and respected.

Then Jacob spoke to us about the idea of respect, the essence of which is to look again (re-spectate). Keep looking, he said, to really see and understand. Understand: what I stand upon, what I stand for. It’s another word I had not thought about in such a literal way, but it’s important. We need to “make up our mind” he said, but isn’t making something up a form of fantasizing? I love how the borders begin to blur.

The Chumash stories are metaphorical and enigmatic.  “Our Samala language is like the flower of this earth,” said the beloved Santa Ynez Chumash ancestor Maria Solares (1842-1923). This prompted thoughts about how words and ideas spread seed and grow, and sometimes bloom in beauty. The term “Flower Power” entered my mind, perhaps some silly residue of my 1960s youth, but language, in its various forms, can indeed flower, and it certainly has power.

Jacob described his feelings about plants, based on his very real, day-to-day interaction with them. “As a farmer,” he said, “I feel that my dependence on plants is a form of humility that makes me tend to them differently. I listen more.”

And he talked about connectedness, the interrelationship of all beings, including plants. Our task, he said, is to observe the ways of the world so we can be useful to future generations.

I had recently been reading poetry by Ada Limón and this fragment came to me, from one of her poems:

J said, You don’t believe in God? And I said,
No. I believe in this connection we all have
to nature, to each other, to the universe.
And she said, Yeah, God.

I believe in that connection too, and it doesn’t matter what you call it. I believe, as Rumi said, there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the earth. And the beauty we love can be what we do, and that too is a form of prayer. Our relationship to the planet can begin with listening and observing in wonder, then offering something back. Tending and mending, perhaps. And loving. Manifestations of love do seem God-ly.

In a recent podcast, Limón suggested this: “You can offer some small thing…. sometimes there just needs to be repair work on a very small level, that we know that we are in relationship with this place, that we are part of this place. And sometimes it can be as small as a poem. Sometimes it can be big enough to be collective action, and sometimes it's just small enough to say hello to a tree.”

So these are the things I was pondering as we  went outdoors to meet Gabriel, who would lead us up the narrow brushy trail to the cave. He prefaced the walk with an introductory talk about the multi-tribal Chumash, the skills they developed with practice across thousands of years, and their reach along the coast and beyond. His pride and enthusiasm were palpable. “Maybe someday we’ll bring a tomol right here and you guys can look at it and climb in it,” he added playfully.

The campus abuts the mountains Fernando knew so well, and the old oak trees around us might well have been here in his time. I watched a pair of crows landing on a red tile roof that wasn’t there and a very blue sky that was. I heard the rustle of the beckoning backcountry behind me. I felt the anticipation of the children, and I wondered how much of this they would remember, and whether it would somehow influence the way they approached the world in the years ahead.

“And now we’re going to the cave where Fernando lived. It is where he chose to be. He had a typewriter in there, and books, and you can see the remains of its wooden door, but beware of poison oak.”

I have been to the cave a few times before, but never in circumstances like this, with a procession of children led by someone who had a direct connection to Fernando’s family and cultural heritage.

The entrance to the cave was visible through the brush and branches now. Gabriel left an offering of bundled sage inside, then sang a song in the Chumash language, keeping the beat with a clapping stick. It told the story of a time of drought when the Ancestors came to Jalama in search of food, and a pod of swordfish appeared and beached three whales. The song was one of thanks to the Creator.

The words hovered in the air, and the woody rhythmic clacking echoed, and beneath all sound, the brush was whispering. I felt prayerful.

This land has been given many names, but we are all a tribe, and we stand here remembering. We are stewards. We belong to the earth, and we belong to each other.

Lately I have felt that we are grieving great loss together, but today I remembered we are also embracing and cherishing what remains.

Last night I was one of the presenters at a poetry event at a local museum. It was an intimate, uplifting gathering of gracious and receptive souls. Poetry, as W.S. Merwin said, is not something we understand; it is something we recognize. And that kind of recognition was palpable among the listeners in our audience last night.

“Most of us hold these kinds of feelings in our hearts,” said one woman to me afterwards, “but we don’t know how to express them in words. It feels so good to hear the feelings spoken.”

In the poems chosen and the informal conversations before and afterwards, there was an acknowledgement, both explicit and implied, of the dystopian nightmare in which we are immersed, but a sense of defiance and determination prevailed. I suppose art and literature have always been forms of resistance.

“It was kind of like a call to arms,” said my friend Vickie. “But also like a memorial, mourning what we have lost.”

And it was. A mournful call to arms, a slow, heartbroken one, with a persistent percussion of necessary toil, and dissonant strains of exhaustion and disillusionment, but building to a crescendo of hope. There within the circle of blessed community, we could see how powerful we are, and the words of the poets lifted us.

Then, this morning, I attended a book talk in the park, attended by the ladies of the hiking group. The book we discussed was All The Beauty In the World by Patrick Bringley, who writes about his decade as a guard in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It prompted wonderful discussions about art, and grief, and being in the world.

“On a typical day,” he writes, “it is easy to glance at strangers and forget the most fundamental things about them: that they’re just as real as you are: that they’ve triumphed and suffered. That like you they’re engaged in something (living) that is hard and brief.”

Bringley took on the job of museum guard after the death of his beloved older brother, seeking some kind of refuge, solace, and stillness in his bereavement.

“Artists create records of transitory moments,” he muses, “appearing to stop their clocks. They help us believe that some things aren’t transitory at all but rather remain beautiful, true, majestic, sad, or joyful over many lifetimes…”

Pausing his life in the larger world outside the museum, Bringley learns to pay attention, and to think differently about time. He develops a camaraderie with his fellow guards, and above all, acquires an intimacy with the mystery and power of art, which leads to a better understanding of life itself.

“When you walk through a museum,” he says, “you’re not just looking at art, you’re moving through centuries of people trying to explain love, grief, power, beauty, and belonging.”

And, as with poetry, it prompts a recognition, it reminds us of the obvious, of the universal experiences of humanness across the centuries; it unsettles the beholder, but can also instill compassion and empathy, and perhaps a newfound realization that even the ordinary is extraordinary, and there is poetry in all of it.

Back to the book group in the park. One of the ladies is 92 and happens to look a lot like my mother, although she has certainly led a different kind of life. (That’s her in the picture above, expressing herself.) She grew up in central New York and still has a cottage on the St. Lawrence Seaway, which she will be visiting soon, getting around solo in a rowboat, if I understood correctly. She  is a Wellsley graduate, Class of ’56, and her plans this year include witnessing the total solar eclipse in Spain on August 12th, and walking a portion of Camino de Santiago, which involves a climb across the Pyrenees. Her 65-year-old son will be with her, and hopefully he can keep up. She strikes me as someone who approaches life with a bias toward the side of yes.

I so respect these readers and learners, walkers and sharers. You might have smiled to see this little circle of women sitting by the shade trees on their portable chairs, earnestly talking books. But there’s so much caring and connection here. Afterwards, I felt as I did when I left the poetry event: fortified, reassured, a little more observant and grateful.

And it occurred to me that the gathering itself was a form of art, and it fit Bringley’s description: “This is real, is all it says. Take the time to stop and imagine more fully the things you already know.”

(Pictured below: the cast of Sunday’s poetry event at the museum. We adhere to Mary Oliver’s instructions: “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”)

It hits me at random moments: I am not okay. I especially feel it in the middle of the night, when I bolt awake and cannot find the familiar sense of my own being. I am uncontained and undefined, tremulous and small.

Sometimes I live inside a poem, taking a time-out from following every new outrage in the shit show, putting music in my ears, and marveling at the flamboyant, evanescent spectacle of life. Yesterday I saw a guy in the middle of Solvang cruising along on a skateboard playing a guitar. I walked the path behind the Mission and along the olive grove, and the air smelled like horses and eucalyptus. A life-sized doll in a box in the thrift store brought back a childhood memory. The river was a mirror, holding rippled reflections of yellow grass and sycamore trees. But I was not okay.

Today, I decided to accept an invitation to lunch with the Lompoc Old-Timers. It was a beautiful drive…hills washed in sunlight, plump white cinematic clouds…and I found my way to the restaurant located in a broad parking lot near a Walmart and various other stores and businesses, a few of which were boarded up and empty. I resisted the impulse to go back home, and I bravely entered the restaurant, where I immediately saw my friend Ron, 90-something years old, ordering an Irish coffee and showing other old-timers to the table.

These are people with deep roots in the area and long friendships with each other. There was Dr. Jamison, at 97, the eldest of the group, who retired from his obstetrical practice at the age of 95 after assisting with one last C-section. There was Donna Chandler, a professional violinist and one-time reporter, and Esther Sloan, who, with her late husband Jim, spent fifty years farming and raising cattle on a 2,000 acre ranch. (“She worked with AI,” someone said. “Artificial insemination.” ) There was a lovely lady named Alice and my friend Karen from the historical society and many others that I wish I’d had a chance to talk to. But what amazed me was the wonderful bond of friendship and history these people shared, the communal ease at the table. “We voted about voting once,” Ron told me, “and we made a rule not to vote on things.”

But there are understandings. “We don’t talk politics,” he said. “And we don’t stand up and brag about what we’re doing. And we don’t ‘socialize’ – what we do is ‘mingle’. Yes, we get together once a month and mingle.”

I like the mingle mode. It’s more relaxed, kind of a casual being there and blending, less pressured and performative than socializing.

“You’re our newest member now,” he added, handing me a pen.

Ron is a ribbon-winning grower of roses, and he has been at it for at least seventy years. After lunch, he invited me to follow him back to his house, a slight detour, to see his rose garden.

And who could have predicted how much those roses would lift my soul? The place was a rose extravaganza, a fiesta of fragrance and color. Roses lined the walls and walkway of his tidy little house, brightly in bloom and quivering in the breeze.

“This is my favorite,” he said, pausing at a bush of luxuriant white roses, “Pope John.”

Oh, the fragrance of them! It seemed the perfect perfume of rose.

There was also Julia Child, and Rainbow’s End, and Veteran’s Honor, that he had planted for his neighbor, a veteran. There were mauve, pink, orange, and yellow roses whose names I don’t remember, and one that was the reddest red I have ever seen, all thriving and abundant. The secret may be the compost tea Ron puts into the soil, or the patience to explore the micro changes that affect them and a willingness to pull out the ones that don’t do well.

Or maybe it’s just a matter of attentiveness and care, the tending of something with love and pride by a kind and gentle soul.

I watched my white haired friend walk slowly up the walkway beneath a curved brick archway that he built himself when he was young. There was an antique Lompoc streetlamp with beautiful frosted glass that he had found years earlier, and a skinny palm tree was etched against a very blue sky. I hugged him good-bye and headed home.

I passed an old church and railroad tracks and a line of great shadowy hills. I turned the radio on and quickly off. I remembered that quiet is a corridor to elsewhere, and that I am sturdier than I think, a fledgling old-timer, as a matter of fact.

I felt okay.

The World’s Fair came to New York in 1964, and a few of us skipped school to check it out, among them my friend Robert. We watched atoms collide at the General Electric exhibit, journeyed into space in the Hall of Science, flew to the moon in an easy chair courtesy of General Motors, saw ourselves on color television at RCA, then zipped above it all in a monorail.

At the Coca-Cola exhibit, we walked through a humid Cambodian rainforest, a noisy street in Hong Kong, and an Alpine ski lodge that smelled of snow and peppermint. Loftily dedicated to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe in an expanding universe,” the fair was in fact mostly about big corporations and gee-whiz technology, but its official theme was “Peace Through Understanding,” and for a handful of kids from Central Islip, this was heady stuff.

At the Parker Pen Pavilion, Robert and I filled out forms for computer-matched pen pals. I answered in ways I believed would garner me a cute British boy, but my pen pal turned out to be a girl from the Netherlands, who really was a perfect match; we exchanged letters for years before we finally lost track of each other, and I still wish I could find her again. The grand finale of the day was ascending on an escalator in the Vatican Pavilion that moved us slowly past Michelangelo’s Pietà, its white marble lit eerily against a blue backdrop. I do recall an ominous display of global population growth sponsored by Equitable Life Assurance, whose astronomical and continually increasing numbers gave me a vague sense of anxiety, but overall, the fair presented a breathtakingly optimistic view of the future. Tomorrow would bring affluence, convenience, and steady, full-throttle progress, with American industry at the helm.

Oh, we knew there was turmoil in the world, and plenty of it: Cold War tensions, escalating war in Southeast Asia, and the civil rights movement heating up and impossible to ignore. Even the shiny facade of the World’s Fair itself hid ugly politics and behind-the-scenes racial inequities. But Robert and I were sailing ahead with idealism and confidence, certain of great possibilities. He was a restless and creative person, determined to get out of town as soon and as far as he could, and in the meantime, he approached life with curiosity and enthusiasm, paying attention, recognizing opportunities, and stepping forward from the sidelines.

When Bobby Kennedy’s Senate campaign announced a series of stops in Long Island later that year, it was Robert who knew we should be there. Robert had a sense of history, a sense of occasion. We walked downtown together and waited among the crowds that lined the main street. Soon the vehicles approached, and there was Kennedy himself, his hair a thick shock of sandy brown, his features youthful and handsome, smiling and waving and reaching down to accept the hands offered up to him, including ours.

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself,” Kennedy said that year, “but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.”

The future arrived. It came far more swiftly than we could have ever imagined and, as the World’s Fair had predicted, a great many marvels unfolded, but things were also terrible and complex. In the spring of 1968, our senior year of high school, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and two months later, Robert Kennedy. Our class graduated, proceeded into summer jobs and colleges, or went to fight a war. The following year, a man walked on the moon, and we saw pictures of a tiny blue planet, fragile and beautiful and beleaguered, already threatened by the very industrial progress we had celebrated.

We drifted further into our challenging and distracting lives, and I never saw Robert again. He called me once, 20 years later. He had somehow discovered that we were both on the West Coast, not quite neighbors, but relatively close: I was living in Laguna Beach then and he in Los Angeles. He worked as a costume designer and wardrobe supervisor for a popular television show, and he was proud of that. He did not seem to be looking back on our Long Island years with affection or nostalgia. “There were some small minds in our town,” he said. “They’re still there, probably.”

Robert was a man who had gotten out, and was successful, and felt vindicated somehow. He wanted me to know that. As for me, I was just excited that he had called, and I felt a great surge of warmth and encouraged him to visit me, but even as we said good-bye, I sensed this was unlikely. A few years later, wondering if there was a chance we might reconnect somehow, I typed his name into a search engine, and an obituary appeared. It had been published in Variety in 1992; he was 42 years old when he died.

Robert had been a friend to me, and nothing can change that fact. We stood side-by-side at a remarkable moment in history, and we watched it all with wonder, imagining the future. We each endured our private pain and we each enjoyed our separate achievements, and perhaps we even changed our own small portion of events. I became a teacher and moved to a ranch in Gaviota where I would live for thirty years. The future has proven tricky—these are very troubled times. But I continue to believe that collectively and intentionally we have the power to bend history.

You see? Some kind of crazy hopefulness took root in me long ago, and I never did shake it.

My father was born on this day, March 29th, in 1911. He has been gone for nearly fifty years now, although “gone” is probably not the right word to use for someone who is such a constant presence in my heart, my head, and in my DNA. On this particular Sunday, 115 years after his birth, I am buoyed a bit by the historical protests of yesterday, but at the same time feeling overwhelmed and sad, wondering what my father would think of all that has been happening in this strange world that he would barely recognize. My own default state is one of bewilderment, but it is clad in dogged hopefulness, and even if I don’t always know what I’m supposed to be doing, I know what matters, and I refuse to give up, and I’m pretty sure this would have been my father’s attitude.  

He was born in Brooklyn just a few days after the horrific fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in Greenwich Village that took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young women, recent immigrants trying to make their way in a new country whose promise was difficult to access. I imagine the newspapers were still filled with the details of that tragedy and its aftermath when my father was an infant in his mother's arms. I try to picture the city as it must have been then, with its tenements and brownstones, peddlers and shopkeepers, street cars and horse drawn carriages. The New York Public Library Building on 5th Avenue was dedicated by President Taft that spring, and the song on everyone's lips was Alexander's Ragtime Band. Madame Curie won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of radium and polonium, Italy attacked Libya, and the first U.S. transcontinental flight was completed...from Sheepshead Bay to Pasadena in 49 days.

When my father was a boy, in fact, airplanes were still rare and exciting enough to cause everyone to stop what they were doing, point upward, and stare in wonder. The airy-plane! That's what they would sing out...the airy-plane... (He told me that himself.) He was the son of an immigrant from Naples and a first-generation Italian-American girl. He grew up in a rough neighborhood, the eldest of three surviving brothers, and he was tough and smart, but he had a lot of responsibility thrust upon him. He was expected to tend to his younger brothers and their ailing mother while Pop took to the road on mysterious business trips that lured him from New York to incongruous destinations like Kansas City, which may as well have been on the moon. At eleven years old, he became the family scribe, sending letters in care of General Delivery about progress at school, unanticipated household expenses, and a baby brother who toddled into the front room calling for his poppa. Written in a neat fledgling cursive and signed with his nickname, “Sonny”, the letters inevitably went unanswered, but they must have mattered – two of them survive to this day in a safe deposit box filled with things I deem treasures that will no doubt baffle my daughter when she one day comes upon them.

The pattern of being the responsible one continued throughout my father’s life. He was brilliant and eloquent, and he yearned to go to college, but the opportunity was not available to him. He spent some time in the military during World War II, stationed at Camp Cooke, and married my mother in the 1940s. Six kids, a great deal of struggle...he shelved his own dreams to take care of everyone, and he picked up the buckets and brushes he had hoped to leave behind, painting walls and murals in rich people’s houses. I remember him going to night school when I was a child, attaining a degree as a Doctor of Chiropractic, and the discipline and effort that must have taken is humbling to contemplate. But still, he rose in the pre-dawn hours, donned his paint-splattered overalls, and left us safe and sleeping.

He seldom bought anything for himself. A bag of candy, perhaps – he liked those orange sticks covered in dark chocolate. And once he went to Little Italy and came home with a couple of Italian records. One of them was Renato Carosene singing frivolous tunes like Tu Vuo' Fa' L'americano. He got a kick out of those. Another was an LP by Luciano Virgili, songs with names like Piccola Santa and Addio Signora, somewhat maudlin, yearning songs about love and loss—Italian schmaltz, as my husband would say. But I believe those songs were part of my father’s true essence, a deep-rooted sentimentality and sadness that the demands of his life would not allow him to linger on. Chocolate and opera were luxuries, and his own proclivity for prose and even poetry was a secret. Life was a battle.

A memory comes to me of a winter day with my father in Manhattan. How is it that I had him to myself that day? There is a jangle of traffic, city noise, gray sky, gray buildings, the marble steps of an imposing façade, maybe a bank. We are hurrying, and it’s cold, and he buys a small paper bag of hot steamed chestnuts from a vendor on the street, and I hold the bag up close to my face and feel its warmth. I am a gap-toothed girl in a red and white striped scarf and a blue coat missing two buttons, my ears are cold and my nose is running, and there’s a sense, as always, of worry and hurry, but the chestnuts beneath their hard brown skins are buttery and satisfying, and I am here with Daddy, safe and loved. I wish we didn’t have to go home, where this glorious day will end in a fight, where the best in him will be misunderstood, where all the proclaimed turning points will take us in circles and the patterns will repeat themselves into hopelessness. I wish we weren’t heading for the things I know about now.

“He who mounts a tiger cannot dismount,” was one of his sayings. And so he never quit, working through the last day of his life, teaching and guiding, cooking for the family, painting flowers on the walls, making everything more beautiful, loving us fully and unequivocally, and imagining so very far beyond what I could see.  

Because he was a writer, I can still read his words, and sometimes I find counsel in them to help me navigate the present. “Your object is survival,” he wrote to my Uncle Joe, who was stationed in the Pacific during World War II, “not merely within the strict limitations of the word, but more -- survival in the best manner possible. Not to emerge a sad sack, forlorn and beaten into submission by adverse circumstances. Not to come back an unreasoning savage, wild and hostile to each and all, eager and ready for revenge. But to come back with balance, with a reasoning mind, to hate your enemies and to be on the alert for them, to respect your friends and appreciate them, and to love those who love you...”

He contained contradictions. Though he described himself as a cynic and often spoke like one, he burned with passion, ambition, and desire. “My God damn mind insists on analyzing, weighing, thinking, scheming…” he declared, yet elsewhere he wrote about “the heart that sings its wild poetic song” -- so plainly his own.

He wrote to me directly, too. Some of those letters sting because I know I let him down, and that fact is painfully apparent in every sentence. I held great promise, and he loved me very much, but I was selfish, misguided, and stubborn, as young people often are --- and then he suddenly died. I didn’t get a chance to make amends.

“In the end, nothing matters but who loves you, and how they perform in this.” He wrote those words to me not long before his death. I was in my twenties then, childishly accepting any help he could provide, while rejecting advice and criticism. I was trying to figure things out in my own way. I couldn’t explain myself, even to myself, and I don’t think I understood what he was telling me. And I certainly did not know how little time there was.

But he also told me this: “It is possible to keep both feet on the earth and still have your head in the stars.” Was he warning me, or advising me to do that? Today I am quite certain that what he meant was that I, who was then so erratic and ungrounded, should create a practical infrastructure but not give up my ideals and aspirations.  And that’s my scripture now.  

We are being tested in this moment. The wrong people are in charge, generating cynicism, cruelty, corruption, and chaos. The values and precious blessings for which our forebears fought are being trampled. An unnecessary war has been unleashed by incompetent people who view it like a video game, children have been killed, the very planet is at risk, and a propaganda machine pumps lies, nonstop, into the heads of millions.

All the struggle, all the courage, all the dreams cannot whimper away into this. No, we won’t allow it.

On my father’s birthday, I hereby resolve not to be beaten into submission nor relinquish my heart’s wild, poetic song.  And I don’t know what tangible form our efforts to right the ship of state will take, but we have the compass and we have the drive, and yesterday I saw again that we are manifold and strong.

Meanwhile, I have learned to walk on air as well as earth, and I’m making peace with my befuddlement and finding a weird kind of freedom in being unmoored. The fact of missing my father has become such a fundamental part of my being I don’t know who I would be without it, but  I try to do good things in his memory. No one lives in vain who has changed someone else for the better. And the story has not ended.

I’m walking in our new neighborhood, early morning before it gets hot. I’m wearing a straw sombrero that was half-price at the local thrift store, and a white-on-white embroidered cotton top that I bought at a bazaar in Istanbul—yes, when I journeyed to Byzantium, which years later feels like a figment of my imagination. Anyway, as I walk I’m listening through an ear bud to the first Harry Potter book, which I started as a way to feel connected to my grandson, but is actually quite enjoyable and very well performed. Now a dog-walker waves and nods, and a gaggle of turkeys crosses my path, promenading in front of me with their plumage fanned out. (I understand that the correct term for a group of turkeys is “rafter” but “gaggle” seems more fitting.)

Everything is absurd and incongruous.

And so, I let myself be glad. Why not? It’s way too easy to go the other way.

Last night some friends had a belated birthday dinner for me. I guess when you turn 75, it’s okay to have a protracted celebration. It’s especially okay when you focus on gratitude and friendship. Also, there was pizza and ice cream.

Birthdays. I remember my birthday fifteen years ago, when I turned 60, which of course I thought was a pretty big deal. Then, as now, a walk was always a good way to commemorate an occasion, and Monte and I went walking. There had been recent rains, and we waded through the creek in tall rubber boots, exploring the water’s new meanderings and pulling out some of the debris from the previous week's storms. It was branches, mostly, and uprooted trees, but also pieces of fence, and wire road support, and a stray yellow rake, and most memorably, a volleyball, upon which was written the words "Life is Good.”

I always wonder about such things. Whose was it? Where did it begin its journey? How did it come to be caught here in the culvert? (It harkens back to one of my favorite fairy tales, The Steadfast Tin Soldier. Remember how a gust of wind -- or was it the mean, scary jack-in-the-box? -- blew the tin soldier out the window and he was picked up by a street urchin who placed him in a newspaper boat and set him sailing in a rushing gutter which swept him along and tumbled him into a deep canal where he was swallowed by a fish, and discovered by the cook who cut the fish open...)

I know. That is a major and irrelevant digression. But the idea of it intrigues me. Whether it's a tin soldier or a volleyball, a piece of beach glass or an Indian pestle, or me in a sombrero sharing the street with turkeys, I like unexpected travel and improbable outcomes.

And that gets me back to where I started, which is that my whole life has been about improbable outcomes, and my course has been determined as much by chance as by choice.

I am thinking too of one of my favorite poems, “Snow” by Louis Macneice. I found it in a book that my favorite (and only) daughter bought and presented to me in a little book shop in England more than a decade ago. And these are the lines I love most:

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

Maybe just this once I will not obsess about the open wound that is festering on our country and our souls. You know what we’re dealing with, and it keeps getting worse.

But in this time of shared trauma, loss, and disillusionment, I aspire to what Nick Cave expresses here:

Collective grief can bring extraordinary change, a kind of conversion of the spirit, and with it a great opportunity. We can seize this opportunity, or we can squander it and let it pass us by. I hope it is the former. I feel there is a readiness for that, despite what we are led to believe.

Hope and protest and constructive activism acknowledge that our world is worth saving. Let’s stay strong and fight back and never relent, taking necessary time for walks and friends and whatever heals and fortifies.

In the words of the volleyball, “Life is Good.”

I walk in wonder and curiosity, collecting images, gathering fragments of voices and sounds, feeling the air, as my grandson would say. This is how I soothe myself. It’s therapy.

Last week, I walked along the mission trail, on the bike path, and through the back streets of town. The postman in his white van was whistling along to country western music. At a bakery in Solvang, I learned that the head baker is Armando, and he bakes the dense, fruity muffins that bear his name. There are five shy horses behind a fence now near the mission, daring to come a little nearer each day. On the bike path, someone has painted the word, DANCE, all in caps, more command than option, but I can’t. I run into a friend who is walking her dog and ask her what the meaning of life is. She says, “Fly first class if you can.” (This feels very true in certain situations.) I see a winding creek, an old wooden farm house with faded paint, a large crow taking wing from the branches of a tree.

In Santa Barbara that afternoon, three plump pelicans are paused on the boardwalk, completely unafraid, and there’s a sand sculpture of a rubenesque woman reclining on the beach. On the front wall of a white stucco building adjacent to a palm tree, someone has written a terse graffiti message in thick green spray paint: Fuck Ice. The farmer’s market is happening on State Street, an explosion of flowers and piles of picturesque produce, and busy vendors are weighing and bagging and counting out dollars. We walk to the Courthouse, the very place where Monte and I were married, and we take the elevator to the top and look out at red tile roofs and the mountains beyond, and down into the garden below where a wedding is taking place. We encounter the newlyweds afterwards and tell them that we were married there 42 years ago and–look at us–we’re still together, and the bride’s eyes fill with tears. “Now I feel that I’ve been blessed,” she says.

I chat with the sweet docent lady in the lobby; she wears a turquoise knit sweater and round spectacles, and she has been a volunteer here for decades, watching newlyweds and tourists come and go. In the mural room, we scan some centuries of California history as depicted on the painted walls. We hear the echoes of foot steps in a cool dark corridor, and head back onto the street outside. There’s an actual mobile library out there—a whole van filled with books and staffed by two earnest librarians guiding folks to reading discoveries. We look at landscapes in a gallery, and wind chimes and crystals in the metaphysical book store, wend our way past a tangle of streets and crossings and eventually climb stone steps through the campus of the community college, then back to the shoreline.

This morning I found an unexpected comment from a reader of my blog responding to a post from six years ago, early in the pandemic. It was a thoughtful and poetic comment, and I decided to revisit the post that had prompted it. This is what I had written, the post in its entirety:

Here is my new epiphany: hope is a seed that hitchhikes on our souls, and is carried far and wide, and it will take root if given a chance, and something good will grow. Hope is a traveling seed, and I want to be a host. There is no other way.

Strange times. Someone told me that the local Costcos are selling out of toilet paper, face masks, and Pepsi. Priority goods for the apocalypse. And it’s Super Tuesday, with a newly narrowed Democratic field, and the practical advice is to vote for Joe, and hopefully avoid an election day showdown between the orange clown-king and an angry old socialist who promises plenty but can’t deliver.

My tribe is traveling and checking in. When I last heard from my friend Diane, she was hurdling down Route 66, two hours from Amarillo. Kelley and Bill left this morning for New Zealand, Cornelia is in Berlin, and my daughter is in Paris. Connect these dots and a thousand others for a map of my heart. Thinking bigger still, these words of astronomer Jill Tarter come to mind: “We are part of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust.”

All interconnected, I am certain of it. Light in search of sense, perhaps. But as individuals, we are not given the luxury of time, and so we are obliged to write it down, pass it along, remember, stay true, and build upon the learning. How is it that we have strayed so far?

Hope is a seed, clinging to me now, and may it catch onto you as well. Let’s share stories and find fecund soil and grow a small, good start to better days.

________________

A lot has happened in the ensuing six years. I don’t know if stores are still running low on toilet paper, and I see very few people in face masks lately, and I have come to respect and appreciate Bernie, but I was certainly right about the orange clown-king, although I would use a stronger term now.

And the messages I gleaned, the epiphany, these still hold true.

The wise and insightful Robert Hubbell has observed that a psychic wound has been inflicted on American democracy that will take a generation to erase. It’s hard to hear this, but it is the truth.

A young friend in his 40s said something to me recently that broke my heart: “I’ve been witnessing the thread being pulled from the American sweater, to where it’s just a pile of yarn on the ground right now. It’s embarrassing what the world sees us as.”

I refuse to believe our story ends in a sorry heap of unraveled threads, but this is certainly a scary and disillusioning time. I do indeed feel traumatized, wounded on a psychic level. And yet sometimes I also feel weirdly energized, determined, in love more than ever with the ordinary and astonishing ways that we are human, and this magnificent planet in need of our cherishing.

So I stand by these words I wrote six years ago:

Hope is a seed that hitchhikes on our souls, and is carried far and wide, and it will take root if given a chance, and something good will grow.

If you had happened to wander through River View Park that morning, you would have seen three older women huddled together at a picnic table. They were in brainstorming mode, words coming fast and swirling about. There was sense, and nonsense, and scribbles on a notepad, and sometimes the session seemed frenetic, but this was really urgency and passion.

Because, let’s face it: the relentless assault on all we care about is scary and exhausting. The deranged and depraved are empowered, the guardrails are down, and, as if it weren’t rough enough already, we’ve now been plunged into a war.

But silence and submission are forms of complicity, and we have chosen to respond by becoming larger, louder, more courageous. “Our choice,” as the poet and essayist David Whyte has said, “is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully.”

And in this full and robust mind set, we were riffing, rambling, and searching for ideas.

We fervently believe that each of us must find a way to help, to do something(!) as opposed to nothing, to seek our lane and apply whatever abilities we each possess, and that such actions cumulatively constitute powerful resistance. These activities take a variety of forms, and even the smallest have a ripple effect, but the most potent actions occur in the context of community.

So here we were, three silver-haired women at a picnic table in a small-town park adjacent to the local botanic garden, trying to generate ideas to make visible and more effectual the community we know is here. Sometimes the suggestions were extravagant, and who would do the work? And sometimes they were silly and impractical and maybe even futile, but we were certain that this free-wheeling flinging of ideas into the air was necessary, and certainly preferable to the panic or paralysis that lies in wait.

Meanwhile, the trellis above the table cast a crisscross pattern of sun and shade, the air smelled fresh and grassy, and the strands of our voices wove themselves into a murmuring kind of music. A dog-walker passed, and a runner, and a young mom pushing a stroller. Jan is working on a song, Rebecca had ideas for collaborative art. We talked of rallies and networking and raising funds for vital causes. We gradually felt nourished and heartened and a little bit lighter. Now and then a fragment of our own laughter took us by surprise.

We decided to take a walk across a wooden bridge and enter the botanic garden, a labor of love created largely by local volunteers. It is a 2.5-acre area that was once a wasteland of cement, construction debris, and gravel, but was gradually transformed into a living replica of the natural landscapes of the Valley, a sanctuary for plants and wildlife. There are also Chumash-inspired stone carvings, colorful mosaic animal images, and a dome-shaped Chumash hut constructed of bundled tule reeds attached to a willow branch framework.

As we strolled, we came upon the wishing tree whose branches are hung with touching messages handwritten on brown paper slips. We paused to read the wishes and found them to be a poignant form of poetry, a quiet litany of longing. 

 I wish my grandpa would get better.

I wish for a sleepover for my birthday.

I wish for a bigger bike and to be healthy.

I miss my grandma.

I will find inner peace and light to find my destinations.

I wish my family was all together.

I wish for my green card.

Try to come home.

We walked further along magical trails, entering the hut whose earth floor was dappled with sunlight, and passing a wooden airplane once piloted by my grandson in his toddler adventure days. In the shade of a nearby tree, a group of preschool children were resting on the ground for nap time. The smallest child was held in the arms of a young woman with long golden hair wearing a white dress, like a fairy tale, I swear. And another woman was humming a lullaby--a haunting, lovely melody that hovered in the air. The world was timeless, and we were here.

I’d like to say we emerged with a definite plan for what to do next, but resistance and transcendence entail gradual processes and multiple branches, with inconsistent visibility ahead. All I know is that our cause is just, our commitment is real, and, as it says in the song Jan is writing: “It’s not too late.”

I found further guidance in a poem by Stuart Kestenbaum, which reads, in part:

Gather up whatever is 
glittering in the gutter,
whatever has tumbled 
in the waves or fallen 
in flames out of the sky,

for it’s not only our
hearts that are broken, 
but the heart
of the world as well.
Stitch it back together. 

We are seamstresses, storytellers, spinners of dreams, stumblers and strugglers, stepping on air, no longer young but ablaze with anger and lit by love, and the pool of our allies is vast and expanding, and we will not go gently. I wish for the return of decency and kindness to our country. I wish for a better world.

______________________

A NOTE FROM CYNTHIA: Please step out on March 28, 2026, wherever you happen to be, and help make the nationwide, nonviolent “No Kings” protest the largest in history. Your presence makes a difference. Let us demonstrate the will and power of the people in epic numbers.

A few days ago, as I was walking, I noticed a pair of coins on the ground. They were dull and partially covered in dirt, and I suppose it says something about me that I bothered to bend over and pick them up. They were a quarter and a penny, twenty-six cents, and I dusted them off and tucked them in my pocket, not even sure why. Then I started to think about how rich I would have felt in possession of a sum like that when I was a child on Coney Island Avenue. Imagine finding such a bounty on the sidewalk? I would have been drunk with wealth! I would have gone straight to the corner store to spend like a tycoon, procuring some blissful combination of candy and comics. Happiness was easy.

I continued my walk along the road that skirts the golf course. It always feels surreal…everything so green and groomed and luminous. I found a few errant golf balls and flung them back onto the course, which is always fun, and I asked myself the usual question: How did I end up here? It’s like the grounds of a very exclusive sanitarium. Then there's the procession of dog walkers, and the women in their yoga pants, and I'm startled by the middle school boys speeding back and forth, up and down the hills on their fancy e-bikes, which, Old Biddy that I am, annoys me. (I mean, seriously, you’re 12 years old, use your muscles!)

Old dead trees have been cleared from our yard now, and we can see the mountains in full glory. Monte has put blue tape on the floor to show where walls will come down and counters put up, and in March we will get permits to begin remodeling, but in the meantime, I have gotten used to being in a weird state of uncertainty and unfinished-ness which mirrors my state of mind (or maybe has helped create my state of mind). There's no solid ground. It’s good practice, walking where there is no solidity or certitude, leaning back sometimes and letting circumstances catch me, supported by beams of light. I planted crocus bulbs outside the door, and tiny yellow flowers have erupted like smiles. I could be happy here. In fact, I am happy here. It’s the hellscape beyond that is breaking my heart.

I just finished reading a book called The Correspondent about a woman who writes letters, written in the form of letters. It has me thinking about the importance of letters and words, something I have always intuitively known. I do sometimes miss the pages and pages of handwritten letters stuffed into plump stamped envelopes I used to exchange with some friends back in the 70s, and I cherish the letters I still have from my father in his bold, distinctive cursive; I parse his words like scripture. And it occurs to me that this “blog” (unfortunate term) is a form of letter-writing too.

See? It’s the old familiar pleasures and habits that bring comfort. Walks and books and letters and the bright little burst of a crocus.

I grow old, as J. Alfred Prufrock said. I grow old ... I grow old ...I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. (But I actually don’t, because my legs are so banged up and sun-damaged, they are best left unseen.) Sometimes I wake up at night in pain from my arthritic hip, which there has been talk of replacing. In the interim, I have been working on strength, flexibility, and balance at a gym, where my last visit involved, among other things, crawling across the floor, apparently a useful skill, and where with every session I learn new reasons not to take myself too seriously.

I think about my 94-year-old friend who assures me that whatever I am feeling now, if I live to be his age, I will wish I felt that good. Sometimes he just seems tired of living. On the other hand, he looks out at the ocean at Point Conception every day and a shimmering meadow of wind-rippled grass, and he has a room filled with books, and he dons his 1970s trench coat and gets behind the wheel of his little Mercedes and drives a bit fast, and he gave me a calendar called "In Love with Earth 2026".

We are all such contradictions. Being alive is an unlikely gift, but it is also incredibly confusing and challenging. I try to find the balance between masochistic doomscrolling and staying informed. The difference lately blurs. And I mostly feel compassion for humanity, but I am unable to find forgiveness for the ones who are destroying our world and desecrating all that matters, and now, starting a new war—or for those who are complicit.

Meanwhile, as E.B. White famously said, “I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

My friend Kappy and I often talk about the lens through which we choose to see. It’s tricky sometimes..

Anyway, I have 26 cents in my pocket.

“Given so few clues —
we bow to what is gone
what continues to grow”

Those lines conclude a beautiful poem called “Morning Birds” by my friend Naomi Shihab Nye. I share them here because I’ve been thinking so much lately about the gone-ness of beloved people and once familiar things, the regrets that haunt me, and the many questions left unanswered.

The other night, there was a storm. I’m not referring to a storm outside, but a storm in my head. It was blue and bleak, and all of my anxieties, fears, and sorrows swirled about. I lay in bed and hosted the usual ghosts, replayed mistakes and missteps both recent and long ago, then shifted to a larger canvas, reaching for my phone to doom-scroll, soon in the full throes of nausea and disbelief about the current reign of lunacy. As I watched morning come across the mountains in its veil of fog, I conjured up a mental to-do list, and hoped a cup of coffee might snap me back into a more constructive mode.

Hope is my religion, as I have often said, and I consistently advocate license to be happy now and then. So these nighttime squalls are fundamentally discordant. My usual state is amazement and gratitude for my own implausible and bountiful life, and I try my best to bear witness, document, find meaning, maybe even make things a little better if I can.

I guess you can say I try hard.

Try hard? What does that even mean?

About thirty years ago, confronted with a crisis at work, family problems, and the usual challenges of being forty-something years of age, in the middle of a busy life that galloped along in a blur sometimes, I went to a psychologist for counseling. He was in the habit of writing notes on lined yellow paper to hand me at the end of each session, sort of a summary of what we had discussed, and follow-up cues. I still have the last little note he handed me, and this is what it says:

1) Have time with Monte and Miranda

2) Be accessible

3) Experience life without a Biblical theme

4) Be happy—enjoy!

5) New job

6) Lessen your sense of responsibility. Lighten up!

Nowadays, it’s difficult to have time with Miranda, who lives in England with her husband and two children, but this belated suggestion is a good reminder to appreciate the dear ones in front of me in any given moment. Fortunately, Monte is still around, and by and large, he’s used to my quirks and foibles, but I know there are behaviors I can work on.

Number 5, “New job” referred to the teaching position I was about to begin at Dunn Middle School, which turned out to be a lovely chapter of my life.

But with regards to experiencing life without a Biblical theme, lessening my sense of responsibility, and lightening up…I may be a lost cause.  I think that brings us back to “trying hard”.

I am trying.

“Yes,” Monte would say, “You’re very trying.”       

I suppose I have survivor guilt, because people dear to me, long gone, were given so little, and I have never felt that I did enough to help them, and that haunts me. Meanwhile, it is impossible to ignore the terrible sufferings of others in the world today or the unprecedented threat to our own way of life.

And so, despite my therapist’s admonition to lessen my sense of responsibility and lighten up, I haul around a heavy heart, seeking to somehow reconcile the ceaseless dichotomy of wonder and grief. I do my best to navigate the inconsistencies and inequities without self-loathing, and I try to hush my noisy failures, for they cannot be undone.

And I look to this moment, in which I truly feel called upon to be fully present, bearing witness, giving voice and doing something, even if my contribution is miniscule.

I admit I am bewildered. But once again, a poet helps me. Now it is Wendell Berry who speaks:

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,
and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.
The mind that is not baffled is not employed.
The impeded stream is the one that sings.

And the brilliant writer George Saunders advises:

“Don’t be afraid to be confused. Try to remain permanently confused. Anything is possible. Stay open, forever, so open it hurts, and then open up some more, until the day you die.”

So maybe I am on the right path after all.

When I was a little girl, I saw the moon through the window of a neighbor’s house in Brooklyn. It was a house whose kitchen emanated unfamiliar smells, a house whose dog jumped up on me and nearly knocked me over, a house whose grown-ups were not fond of me—somehow, I could tell. But I glimpsed the benevolent moon, with its snowy face, and it winked at me through the window, like an accomplice.  

I’ve always been lucky like that. In the city of my childhood, glassy storefronts glared and gleamed in sunlight, and there were flecks of diamonds embedded in the sidewalk. There was a fancy boathouse in the park and I sat by the lake with my brother eating Cracker Jacks, and a burst of a breeze sent fragrant blossoms snowing, and I knew intuitively that magic was involved in the composition of the world.

Last week, I had the honor of speaking before a gathering in the sanctuary of a local church, and my friends performed music, and poetry, and theater. It was a celebration of community, an affirmation of decency and hope, and it was clear in the aftermath that people thirst for this. So even in our confusion, let us not make the mistake of thinking we have to go it alone.

Today, I see the mountains shining and the symphonic majesty of old oak trees, and I don’t know why I am so fortunate as to be here for the brief duration of my life, but I won’t let the storm take me away.

Today I found a letter my beloved father wrote to me many years ago, in which he said this: "It is possible to have both feet on the earth and still keep your head in the clouds. I believe in this."

I believe in this too. I am putting it in practice every day. Those clouds about my head are exceptionally beautiful today, and there are stars in my eyes, and I am holding on to thoughts of hope and love to keep me steady on the ground.

Oh, how I miss my father! I was twenty-seven when he died. Even after nearly fifty years, the ache of missing him is unabated. It’s just the regular background to everything else in my life. But somehow, paradoxically, so is his presence, so is his voice. And because he wrote letters, I can see these words he wrote upon the page, and hold them in my heart, and tell him, “Yes, Daddy. I believe in this also.”

What I don’t share as readily because it makes me so sad is the next line of that letter, in which he wrote: “Cyn, I am very tired and I don’t know how much sense this makes.”

He was so very tired. Sometimes he had doubts that all his efforts and aspirations meant anything. Sometimes he wondered if there was sense in what he said to me.

Nevertheless, he’d added, “I believe in this.” It was optional, that affirmation, but it was an aye, an amen. And in adding this, he turned the statement of what is possible into a kind of doctrine, and he gifted to me an intrepid hopefulness and a capacity for wonder.

Yes, it is tempered by the need for practicality and balance, that admonition to keep both feet on the earth, but somehow permission is granted, across the chasm of time and despite cataclysmic change, to dream myself sky-high and keep trying.

I am working hard to prepare for a community event next week. I keep reading the words that I plan to say, and I hope that they are not simply urgent but also light enough to beam through the current darkness. We’ll have music, which adds magic, and the comfort of friends and neighbors gathered in a beautiful space. And I hope it will be inspiring. We shall see.

In the meantime, and through it all, it is vital to bear witness to the miracles and delights, great and small, and accept the grace the world offers. These words from Mary Oliver say more succinctly than I ever could what I experience daily:

Every day

I see or hear

Something that more or less

Kills me

With delight,

That leaves me

Like a needle

In the haystack of light.   

This week has galloped by so swiftly I can barely process all the input. Sometimes the heaviness and sadness bow me down. And yet, in joyful contradiction, the miracles are lifting me. One day the chatter and laughter of the women made a kind of music when we hiked on a bluff above the sea. Yesterday I got back on my trusty bicycle and my legs remembered what to do. Someone I know is practicing a new song, bread is baking in the oven, and a white moon is perched in the branches of an oak. These hills, the shine of sea, a graceful hawk—it all feels like a prayer sometimes.

I am bearing witness as I near the edge, and my head is high, and I resolve to do my best because I must.

It is possible. I believe in this.

February 2nd is significant to me, for it was the day I rolled into California 44 years ago and began a new life here. (I’ve written about it before: the ’73 Buck with its broken gas gauge, my luggage of plastic trash bags, the desperado that was me at the wheel.) I’m sure I didn’t realize what a fitting date February 2nd was. It's Candlemas, which in Christian tradition commemorates the presentation of the baby Jesus into the temple of Jerusalem, and in secular folklore it's Groundhog Day, when the shadow (or its absence) of a certain marmot predicts the length of winter. And astronomically speaking, the date marks the midpoint between Yule (the Winter Solstice) and Spring (the Vernal Equinox).

Here where the seasons slide into each other almost imperceptibly and winter is a gentle old fool who ripens oranges and turns the landscape green, the significance of this turning point is muted. But still, it's a time to shift gears and look towards the lengthening days, a date imbued with hope and light and yearning, and I am forever reminded of my life’s great migration, that milestone in my personal history, a time when I was brave.

I could not have imagined it then, but the decades have now brought us to a time when courage and resilience are needed more than ever. I am moving through the days in that spirit. For this is a moment when we are called upon to remember who we are, what we aspire to, what struggles and migrations bequeathed to us the magnificent banquet of our lives. Everything feels unfiltered lately. There is a new intensity to the wonder and the grief, the flashes of surprise and delight and gratitude, the shocks and stabs of heartbreak and rage. We are called upon to rise, with love and resilience––and somehow we will do it, and prevail.

A few days ago, I stood at a volcanic ridge above the sea where Chumash people left their enigmatic art on the canvas of a smooth, glassy rock. This particular site was used for ceremonies and rituals and solar observation, and for contemplation, perhaps, of death and rebirth, and it was impossible not to feel a sense of its sacredness. The hot sun beat down upon us, and the ocean sparkled in the distance, and the red markings danced before our eyes, and I felt humbled and grateful to be standing there, bearing witness. Real people lived their lives here. I felt their presence.

And the following day, I participated in a local rally for democracy and decency, in solidarity with Minnesota and all who are targeted by ICE and the cruel administration which, in the words of one protester, is looting us, not governing us. Demonstrators lined both sides of the main street of this bucolic little town, and passing cars honked and cheered and gave thumbs up. I only saw one middle finger, and one of my friends was treated to an unintentionally ironic tirade about how the president is making America great again by getting rid of criminals. An old man in a wheelchair, himself a veteran, was distributing pages of historical information showing unequivocally that what we are seeing now is exactly like what the Nazis did to “make Germany great again” and he wanted to make sure we all recognize this and keep resisting. And a group of high school students were there holding up signs, shining so brightly in all their youthful radiance and hope, that my heart brimmed. “These kids are learning history, and about the rights democracy brings, and the responsibilities,” said their teacher. Thank you.

Meanwhile, a few friends and I are planning a community event to bolster spirits and raise money for the local food bank, and I’ll tell you more about that as it evolves. But last night, I went to the very church that will be our venue, and in its lovely and welcoming sanctuary, I heard a concert of hauntingly beautiful medieval music performed by the Folk Orchestra of Santa Barbara. As I said, everything seems unfiltered to me lately, and the music entered my soul with all the magic that music contains, emotions reaching across the centuries, universal and transcendent.

Afterwards, I walked with a friend beneath a full moon that cast a spell across the nighttime streets. We passed Jedlicka’s, the Western-wear and saddle store that was so dear to my daughter in her long-ago horse girl days. Through the window, we saw, in the surreal interior light, the brown horse statue that usually stands on the street, a pale mannequin boy in a big cowboy hat, racks of Western shirts and Breyer model horses (that my daughter once collected) on a shelf, stacks of cowboy hats, and a stuffed pair of blue jeans looking ready to climb on a horse. It made me feel nostalgic and whimsical, and I missed my daughter with all my heart, but I also missed my dog and the Ranch and the way life used to be, but the missing was quickly followed by gratitude and amazement at where my journey had led me.

And the journey continues. I had a phone conversation recently with another dear friend, an artist pondering loss and meaning in a very visceral way. “I used to think I was looking into an abyss,” she said. “Then I began to understand that what I thought was an abyss is in fact a portal.”

A portal, yes. Transition. Turning points. On this, my personal Candlemas, I am lighting every candle in the chapel of my soul and passing through portals.

We shall not be undone.