STORY

I delight in the fact that I was born on a bluff a few hundred feet from the lighthouse that overlooks the Pacific Ocean in Santa Cruz, California.  I imagine the delivery room window open and my first breath to have been a coastal redwood-scented sea breeze.  Just up the street Monarch butterflies had probably finished sipping the rich winter nectar from flowering eucalyptus trees. Maybe the last few flew by the window that winter morning on their migration to South America.  I know for certain, that just past the lighthouse the fishing boats unloaded their catch at the wharf where seals barked, seagulls swarmed and pelicans glided in straight lines on the ocean horizon.

A minutes’ walk from the wharf is the boardwalk, where cotton candy and taffy sugar seduces, where the sights and sounds of crashing bumper cars and the tick-tick ascension of roller coasters momentarily freezing above everything before gravity takes its turn to thrill us – to play its part in what’s to come in life. In the middle of it all was The Fun House that, among other entertainment had mazes and mesmerizing mirrors that bent, twisted and abstracted the self-image.  All this was separated from the ocean, our origin, by a hundred feet of beach sand. By five, I was pocketing fossilized shark teeth, sea shells encrusted in stone and bringing home lizards, black widows and scorpions from the forest in the backyard. I came of age in the deserts, the beaches, and the blossoming orange groves of southern California. I lived outsides as much as possible.   

In college classes in comparative religion, logic and physics blended with classes in calculus, cultural geography, biology and chemistry. Sociology classes and my independent travel to different countries including many regions of North America added immensely to healing large gaps in my early education. Profound visceral experience in meditations opened doors of perception. The grace to live this wisdom into everyday life comes and goes, but is always strengthened in service to community. Twenty years of working with thousands of patients in a stand alone, locked-door, psychiatric hospital adds to this confluence of lived experience.

Toward the end of fall I walked the brook and watched a leaf tumble through the bumpy air current in its own unique pattern of rhythmic improvisation,   I had just finished practicing Chopin’s posthumous Fantasy impromptu in C# minor to some degree of personal satisfaction. Although it was day the moon was visible.  Resting on a large boulder was another leaf, cupped and filled with rain water. Looking closer, the little pool of water in the leaf reflected a tree, white clouds, blue sky and the distant moon.  All that information contained in this synapse between water and air, where they touch each other.  A tiny bubble released from the pool’s edge and passed across the reflected moon. I closed my eyes and there it was, the outside world, in my mind, in my own reflecting pool.  

Early progress of Kissing in the Grass.

Sky Painting 2 .detail.