Salve for the Soul

I wondered if the timing belt on my car was going to break or if it was going to rain or if I should go on a diet and worried that the music store I was driving past would go out of business because everyone was buying music online now, including me.  Too much of nothing important.  I was far from a panicked and jibbering mess; more of a low-voltage worrier on a slow static fizzle.

Time to get out on the road, go heal myself.  I needed just what I'd planned for the day:  A wildflower walk way up in Carmel Valley, far from the cold coast and throngs of people.

So, I drove east 12 miles to Carmel Valley Village -- hugged close between two ridges of hills and cut clean by a jostling little river -- and then onward another 15 miles to the gate of Hastings Natural History Reservation where I would join 25 other restive people in need of a good soul-soothing walkabout in nature. 

Hastings is a vast tract of 2,700 acres of hardly-touched land draped in trees and brush where bright, interested, and curious-minded students from UC Berkeley look very carefully for long periods of time at patterns that emerge in nature. Over and over again, since 1970, they've discovered that what nature -- God, if you will -- has been doing routinely, is exquisite in detail and complex beyond imagining.

This was a rare walk led by the caretaker and manager of Hastings, Dr. Mark Stromberg, a guy so well versed in the studies and goings on all over the Reservation that he seems almost weighted down by all of the knowledge. A group of people and I, ready to listen and look closely at whatever would present itself, walked with Stromberg up hills, along trails, under spreading oak.  Nothing was too mundane to notice.   No vista went unseen, unappreciated, and all musings were attended to.

Life felt grounded here. God moved in closer to me with each deeply drawn breath, and I remembered the possibility of angels.  They could have been right amidst the lupine and shooting stars sprinkled in the grasses, bobbing and dancing in the cool waves of spring air.  

Wildflowers were everywhere, mostly very tiny, requiring me to walk slowly and look with my eyes open and my mind swept clean of worry and distraction.  It was a balm and a refreshment.    

I knew long since that a hillside forest of trees is my cathedral, my sanctuary, where communion takes place.  I felt immensely grateful and a little amazed I'd had the good sense to plan ahead and give myself the chance for renewal and respite in a unique natural landscape.  

A quote from Steve McQueen states my feelings and values very succinctly:  "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth."  Amen.  

The Layers of Onions

When you cut open an onion, time changes.  The scent of an onion mines deep memories of scent-laden kitchens, pots stirred by patient hands, the clink of silver on china set by a smoldering fire.  Memories yield one by one to ever older images of places and times stored in memory, layered like the onion on the cutting board.  Foods prepared long ago are real again, brought to mind by the fragrance this onion today, the onion bubbling softly in our heavy black pan.

I remember other hands stirring other pots long ago, the way the one hand held the long spoon, and the way the other hand tipped the pot up just a little bit.  I remember the whisking sound of a fork in a large thick ceramic bowl holding a half dozen yellow foaming eggs and bright light on linoleum floor, cast through a nine-pane window.  Sweet peas, just picked, standing in a translucent bud vase with silverine bubbles trembling as if they are holding small secrets.

Onions, minced fine but aromatic as a shout, sing in hot oil and butter, conjuring a sizzling spell, re-awakening even earlier memories of other onions, going far back in time, onion by onion, layer by layer of memory, reaching back perhaps to the first kitchen of my most ancient grandmother who threw a freshly cut onion into her black pan while she learned and remembered for us who came after her.

The onion there in my glistening dark pan is yellow-golden, softening, tender, mellow and sweet.  Scent-beckoned memories of slowly simmering onions and patiently stirring hands are as clear and present as my own are now.  Cutting the onion called forth a memory, as it does every time.  I remembered to stir the pan slowly, heat the food with patience, savor what was before me -- all that was before me, brought back by the echoing shout and pungent aroma of a freshly cut onion.

True Facts

There's day-to-day life:  You forget your keys, get stuck in traffic, lose your wallet, your dog eats something stinky, your kid puts something small and weird in their nose, you worry about your taxes and your car needs a tuneup.  


And there's extraordinary life:  You find yourself discovered and appreciated.  Suddenly, you can fly.    


Those moments, when they are honest and true, are the high points of your entire life.  


Dare you to notice someone you usually pass over.  Mmmm hmmmm...Take a second look and see what you haven't seen before.  Could it be that when you look in the mirror you'll be a skoshe less critical?  


Be a daredevil, go counterculture, buck the trend of snarkey, ugly, mean-spirited criticism.  Go 'head.  Say what you feel when your heart warms up and your day tips up towards happy.  We all need it and long for it.  Those momentary feelings of elation spread so far beyond you it's unbelievable.  All the tea in China, all the gold in the world is just stuff compared to the feeling of plain ol' love.  

I'm Puzzled! on Grand Avenue

Out on errands today, I decided I'd overlooked one little store too many times, so I went inside to say hello and have a look around.  


Before I go any further, imagine walking into any megastore:  They're huge, clerks are usually hard to find and don't know much about the products they sell, signs are meant to teach you about the merchandise and entice you to not only buy what you've gone there to buy but "companion products" as well.  The lighting is ugly, the image is impersonally corporate and you end up feeling like you've been processed somehow, churned through a mill, that you represent a statistic on the company balance sheet.  Products have to be "turned," items are "merchandised," and personnel do only what they are trained to do, just like their minimum-wage-earning "sales representative" co-workers.  Okay, end of rant; I'll step down from my high horse.  

I'm Puzzled! on the corner of Grand and Laurel Avenues, uphill one block from Lighthouse Avenue in downtown Pacific Grove represents the small-town, mom-and-pop groove in the best possible way.  They have oodles of charm, creativity, and imagination right alongside an interesting, engaging and generous array of fun stuff (aka puzzles and games).  It's a place you can feel well cared for:  You ask a question, you get a thoughtful answer.  You want to browse, you are handed a cup of steaming fresh coffee and asked if you'd like cream or sugar.  You need a snack, you can have a cookie.  


There are puzzles and puzzles and more puzzles, every shape, size, color and type ever imagined.  You can even have one made from a picture of your own charming self or anything else you wish.  People as young as six months old can find what they want, and everyone from geniuses to mentally challenged can also walk away with something appropriate and engaging.  Did I like the store?  I loved it!  

I bought a puzzle and within a minute it was set in a bag, gift wrapped with puzzle-printed tissue and a tag made from repurposed puzzle pieces.  They sell gift cards made the same way.  

Side streets off Lighthouse, like Grand Avenue, have lots to offer your specific groove.  Go looking for something and I can guarantee you will find it and probably lots you had given up on finding anywhere else.  

The Beginning of a Book

If you've been following my blog (and I appreciate you sticking with me if you have), you'll notice I am not confining myself to travel writing or anything in particular, although Pacific Grove gets in my sights more often than not because I live here.

I've begun work on a book, but it would be more accurate to say it has begun working on me.  Yesterday's post reflects some of the content in a small glimpse.  I am not going to predict when it will be done or much about it, but I have a feeling you readers will the first to know when it's done.  Don't you feel lucky?  In the meantime, I'll keep on posting here on my blog and looking for your comments.

I've considered trying out several genres and slotting myself into something recognizable to the reading public, and eventually that might happen.  A good bodice ripper might be fun:

Helga, with red lips parted in a teasing smile, threw the clucking chicken back into the henhouse, dropped the pan of corn in the cobbled yard and ran barefooted to her lover, Bob, who sat on a prancing white horse, his black cape flowing in the wind.

"I made you some goulash, my love," she panted.  She wasn't used to running across the yard in bare feet like she had in days of yore.

He reached down for her, puzzled by the goulash remark.  He dimly recalled telling her that he preferred aspic with Wasa crispbread and gruyere cheese.  But, no, it didn't matter.  His loins were aching, his shirt ripping away from his broad tanned chest, waxed hairless as a marble statue.  Their hands touched and it was as if flames leapt up in her bosom, which was heaving like a bellows.

He began to swing her up to his saddle, but the impossibility of their love overwhelmed him.  Yes, he had told her about the aspic and crispbread, he was certain of it.  She let go her hand and she wailed with surprise and shocked disbelief.

Now his choice was no longer in question.  Helga had betrayed him and revealed her true love, the love she had tried to hide deep within her heaving bosom.  Bob looked at the heaving sea of soft flesh and felt disdain.  He knew Urgundheind had always begged for goulash when they were boyhood friends.  He felt bile rising in his throat and hot tears of anguish blind his eyes.  His dark hair streamed dramatically in silhouette in the blowing wind.   His cape was still billowing and the horse's mane and tail also billowed.  The effect was that of a whole clothesline full of freshly cleaned costumes pinned out to dry on a summer's day, whipping and cracking in the stiff breeze blowing at 20 knots or so from the southwest, an unusual direction for this time of year, which was autumn.  

"Helga, this is the last time you will ever see me.  The time has come for me to join the little general at Waterloo and win once and for all.  I must do this in memory of my father who gave me this golden amulet!  You don't love me anymore.  You love Urgundheind, who loves goulash.  Farewell."

"No, Bob!  How can I live without you?  I have nothing but these horrid chickens if you leave me!"  She wailed and sobbed, bosom still heaving -- the dash across the henyard still having its effect on her.

Or, how about a slasher novel:  Blood and guts everywhere and screams galore, a woman running down dark hallways in Topeka while a loud storm thrashes the trees outside.  Oh, and I'd toss in an insane postal service worker, delivering something a bit more sinister than an ordinary envelope, banging heavily on her door....