Here. Where Nothing and Everything Happens

For years the sign on Highway101 read, “Gaviota: Population 94” and although that number was a low-ball estimate, this is still a place with more cattle than people. Of the humans who reside here, some are members of families who have been here for generations; others, like myself, were entranced, transplanted, and transformed.

Sometimes I flatter myself and imagine that I'm a transcriber of wonder, exported from reality to dwell on the edge of things, loitering in the nineteenth century, falling asleep to the cries of coyotes and the radiance of stars on my roof. The brilliance of the physical world, in its constancy and ceaseless turnings, distracts me, shapes me, dazzles me...but often in the heat of summer, dulls me. Dull is how I've lately been, infused with news about which I feel helpless, and challenged to stay purposeful in this space where nothing happens.

And where everything happens too. Case in point: the other day Monte and I set out for a walk up the canyon to visit our neighbors, perhaps two miles away but mostly uphill, sometimes steeply. Heat radiated from parched earth and sandstone, and we trudged along sweating. Within five minutes we encountered one friend who has been trying to progress through a crisis in her life and is stalled by someone's lack of reason and inexplicable meanness.

Then another neighbor came by, getting ready for a journey with his still-kinda-new love, but he pulled over to chat as we do around here, trying to be sage and philosophical and kind. Along came someone else we know, about to welcome his grandsons for the weekend, and another dear friend approached in her car; she was hurrying to the airport for a red-eye to Australia to be at her beloved sister's bedside as she nears the end of life, but we had a tearful hug.

Then we crested the big hill to our destination house and visited a new mother and her beautiful baby girl, all of it at the wondrous beginning. It seemed to me that in the course of a very short walk we had encountered quite a range of human experience.

Even here. I look up, I look out, I look in. I want to understand and I want to do good but sometimes neither is possible. This morning I read an essay by Pico Iyer about suffering, a topic that seems currently and always relevant for all of us who live in the world, even a small corner of it. This link will take you to the article, and it's worth reading as we struggle to make sense of that which makes no sense.

Iyer concludes that maybe "....you could be strong enough to witness suffering, and yet human enough not to pretend to be master of it. Sometimes it’s those things we least understand that deserve our deepest trust. Isn’t that what love and wonder tell us, too?"

What love and wonder tell us...I'm listening for that.