Song

Peace reigns in the heavens today, and soft petals are floating down with curling contrails of delicate perfume winding and bending, playing like a dancer's hands.

Standing in solitude on a granite rock lying among the supple grasses on this hill is a singing bird.  He is no bigger than a laugh, no smaller than a smile, as light as air with black diamond eyes.  His song is a cascading ripple of sound played on a silver flute, and the notes fly on the light breeze up past the treetops, lifting through the dissipating storm, over all the hills and then the mountains where stars gather at twilight to relay the notes of his song to shooting stars.  His feet hold him to the rock even as his heart is inclined to lift with the song straight up the winding contrails of perfume.

Soft breezes run across the grasses and strum them in rippling waves of shushing air and then climb up into the emerald and peridot oaks.  Just like they had six hundred years ago, after six hundred other birds sang their spring love songs, budding for the two hundredth time, the oaks waved and bent lightly, motioning with their arms for more music, applauding and wondering when they'd ever heard such loveliness ever, ever before.  And it was always so, these trees, this rock, and this bird and his song.

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.  

Hastings Natural History Reservation and Art

After exploring Hastings Natural History Reservation in upper Carmel Valley on Saturday morning and meeting Dr. Mark Stromberg, zoologist, resident director, and man with an endless supply of wacky science stories, an idea has begun to hatch.

Hastings is part of the University of California Nature Reserve system, consisting of about 33 properties in many areas of the Golden State.  In each of them, grad students help scientists conduct studies of everything from geological history of California (now that's a really longitudinal study) to the mating habits of black widow spiders (really big ewww factor).  Hastings alone has generated something on the order of 600 papers over its lifetime as one of the reservations.  It's generally closed to the public in order to preserve the pristine nature of the land and so that studies can be conducted without "contaminated" data.  In other words, if mountain bikers and horseback riders were tromping through regularly, resident species would be trashed, trampled and scared off, not to mention the introduction of further non-native species.  Groups of local K-12 students are welcomed now and again in an outreach effort to connect the kids to science and local native history. 

You get the image as you listen to Dr. Stromberg that the scientists who have taken up residence on the property through the past several decades are a rather quirky lot.  Probing minds have figured out the social structure of acorn woodpeckers, the symbiotic nature of spanish moss and blue oak trees and the effect of gophers on native grasses.  And about a zillion other things that you get curious about if you spend a little time in our coastal wood- and grasslands.  But, the persistence of the scientists over time as they study the minutiae of nearly invisible things has been impressive to a spectacular degree.  Some studies have been ongoing for over 20 years, something the Reservation is famous for being able to provide.  

Now, in the dreary broken days of California's bankrupt economy, the UC system is suffering from an alarming lack of funding.  Thus, Stromberg and his colleagues hope to find other sources of money in order to continue their work, arcane though it may seem to us.  There is benefit to all of humankind, and this one little item is a good example:  One Hastings study found that crickets have little cups inside their "ears" that direct sound to their nearest ear, acting as a funnel of sound in a way.  The idea has been adapted to the newest generation of hearing aids.  The ability of a person who wore hearing aids in the past to differentiate between one sound and another was pretty dismal until the cricket study revealed this tiny mechanical adaptation that the insects have made.  Pretty amazing, huh?

I've begun to think that the science that is revealing amazing things about Hastings and its 1500 species resident there is not the only thing that the beautiful coastal hills and valleys can teach us.  Artists and writers can be equally influenced and productive when allowed to nourish their minds there, too.  With respect and attention to the needs of the land and studies being conducted there, perhaps the artistic community can be welcomed and, in turn, present a different interpretation of the natural world than pure data can.  Through interpretive photography, art and/or writing, Hastings might pique some interest in the local and state-wide community, and consequently - I would hope - more financial support.  Hmmm....I'll keep you posted.