For twelve years, my family has lived in an amazing home, ten acres with mountain views cradled by the Angeles Forest, yet only minutes away from Los Angeles proper. Our daughters grew up here, able to spend their days outside in nature and beauty instead of super-glued to a video game or a computer screen. Yet five minutes down the hill brought us to traffic, and the city.
Both of our daughters are cognizant and grateful of the home we made, there were many tears and sighs in our final days in that house. As the rooms emptied, our hearts felt the space of loss. We accept that. We waded bravely into that pain and wallowed just long enough to cleanse ourselves before turning our eyes and our hearts to the future with fresh vitality and a surge of momentum.
That home and those years will forever be a bright light in our past. I think as humans we feel the dichotomy of painful partings, the joy of having known people or places and the wrench of losing them so that when we look back at our lives we don’t see only darkness. Like a lantern, glowing farther and farther off, but always a beacon of warmth in the misty night our days gone by.
But now, finally, it’s time to move north, to trees, to rain, to creeks, to mushrooms, to other people who respect their relationship with the earth that sustains them. Along the way, we will make a few stops, it’s quite a journey towing a 37 ft camper.
Our first stop is near Ojai, California. Our trailer is nestled in trees next to a stream, the rain is coming.
Our first night here I slept like an angel in a cloud made of lullabies, the sound of droplets pattering a cleansing tattoo on the roof above me as I cozied deeper into my down comforter. In the morning I woke to the giggling stream, whispering its amusing secrets to me through my open window.
Brilliant.
I can feel the city smut melting away from me. Hell, for the first time in months I can actually see it for what it is, a cloak of undeserving annoyance, a saturated blanket of bad choices and confusion. Here, the worries, clutter, noise, and frail human egos are first exposed, then rapidly diminished. You can see them for what they are, a waste of life, an excess of self-involvement. So eager are we to make something of ourselves, to leave our mark, to deny death, that we learn to confuse activity with true forward motion. All the busy-ness, the mental spinning, and caring what other people might think, help to hide the fear that we might mean nothing, that yes, we will someday die and ultimately be forgotten.
I think that’s what the stream finds so funny. Humans who believe they can last forever. It’s so much less stressful to remember you are mortal, and that’s okay. Sort of…takes the pressure off.
Of course, we are the same magnificent creatures in the city or in a forest, but it is easier to distinguish what serves you and what doesn’t when you look outside yourself. The everyday worries that consume us are more likely to be blown away when you watch the breeze making the leaves mimic the flow of the water through a magnificent gorge, just as it has for millennia. To these cliffs and trees we humans are a fleeting image, a second, a flash of movement, if even that.
We are parked in an almost empty campground next to the flowing creek dappled in sunlight dancing with the soft shadows of trees. Lichen and mushrooms are everywhere, moss grows on stones, moisture graces our lungs and our skin.
In some ways, our new life is smaller—well…simpler. In other ways it has expanded to epic proportions so that now where I once saw a narrow lane, I now see a huge vista opening before me with endless possibilities.
I feel free.
Won’t you join me?
Shari, January 11th, 2017