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.