Beautiful Nightmare
The sky is blue and the usual coastal fog was not present. The temperature at 52 degrees is going to change up later by more than 15 degrees fahrenheit. Today is Sunday.
The words, "beautiful nightmare" were spoken as we found ourselves lost late at night after 10 hours driving from southern California to northern California a few days back. We laughed at the time, realizing that beautiful nightmares are everywhere and they are truly beautiful and often unwanted, but important to experience – we have a lot of them these days.
Facing the Pacific and sitting on the headlands at Pt Reyes National Park, we are on the other side of the nightmare and have entered a dream. Today, one can experience an extraordinary coming together of weather, animals, blooms, and silence (except for the winds). Hard to believe that all of this may one day disappear becuase of the waste and insensitivity of how humans occupy land and nature. The "being one with" really shows up here.
In the medicine garden at Commonweal, you can feel the way in which human touch works with what nature brings and the effect is unbelievable beauty and communication without words. The Natura Institute (second generation of stewards after the RDI -regenerative design institute) took on the task of stewardship to keep up the work that started two decades ago). RDI and Natura found a way to bring back land that was fallow and under-nourished. Humans with deep sensitivity and care, tended to the wounded land and created a kind of energy that one can feel even before you enter the gates of the garden. People have been known to go into tears even before passing through the medicine garden's gates.
The redwood trees that sit on the land are only 46 years old, yet the energy they produce - as we breathe in what they breathe out, and the shade they provide when cancer patients are brought there to rest under their boughs, and the fact of their deep-rooted transmission between one another - can actually be felt (IF you can go into deep silence and slow your breath so it matches the rhythm of the redwoods). Cancer patients have been coming to the garden for years now. And the healing that takes place is not necessarily the removal of the condition; but it is in bringing peace to the one who lives with cancer - and may die from it. Peace is what is delivered and remains in the memory banks – or so people have said.
Getting here a few days ago - another beautiful nightmare. We were lost and it was after 10 p.m. We circled and circled because there are no street lights here. There is no GPS service. The numbers on the houses can be found posted on a tree, hanging on a gate, or painted on a rock. Oh - and most interestingly, the street takes hard right turn so a city person might make the mistake of thinking that the street name changes. We learned it doesn't. People here don't pay attention to having house number in sequence or making the street name change because of small things like a right or left turn. Shameful as it was, we had to knock on a couple doors and drive down a few dark driveways to disturb neighbors to ask for direcitons to a specific address. A beautiful nightmare because we were lost, people were kind, directions were poetic ("make a left and where the road really dips, look for a gate, and take the dirt road all the way past the pond on the left..." etc. etc. etc.")
Long essay today; feeling blessed and grateful to a friend who made this beautiful nightmare a very special dream on this day.