Random Musings 2016

A few days ago a large piece of the cliff along Shoreline Park sheared off and crashed to the beach. It's a massive pile of rubble with some boulders as big as my bed. It easily could have covered my jeep two times over. The slide didn't reach all the way up to the top of the cliff so it's unnoticeable from the path. Only when I was able to walk the beach at low tide did I see it. And now after several days the high tides have washed away most of the smaller loose debris leaving only the heavy rocks and a fading black scar part way up the wall. Evidence of the irreversibility of time.

  I imagine a day when these cliffs will be worn to a smooth sandy beach. Of course I won't be around to see it. Perhaps in ten thousand years or so some evolved version of humans may be found surfing the gentle breaks of what ever form the Pacific Ocean has taken. But who knows? Scientists who spend their time calculating the odds for humanity's future are not overly optimistic that we are going to have that kind of longevity. The deck, as they say, is stacked not in our favor.

  Then there is that massive looming earthquake that's predicted to cleave off a significant portion of California and cover these lowlands with water that may happen between now and then. Hell, it could happen today according to the experts. In fact, the city of Santa Barbara has erected tsunami warning signs all along the busy waterfront areas like the harbor and Stearn's Wharf.  Just in case the fault slips anytime soon we know to scurry to higher ground. These blue and white signs, if nothing else, offer a false sense of security. Someday, I fear, they will be laughably ineffective. But if I'm lucky, as usual, I will already be living at 4000 feet in the Sierras when those inevitable waves roll up State Street and turn the Arlington Theater in to a waterfront venue.



  All of a sudden it's Spring.  Whales are making their way north and are easily viewed from the cliffs at Shoreline Park or the Wilcox Property. I'm seeing several a day. The whale watching boats hover so close to shore that I can hear the spectators cheer when they spot a spout or see a tail above the rolling surf.

  It seems as if overnight the jacaranda trees near my house have exploded purple, my guava shrubs are blossoming and the white petals decorate my yard. The peach tree is bearing small but sweet fruit. There are poppies everywhere. The mornings are full of birdsong. I believe that there are crows building a nest in my front yard palm tree.

  I've had a bout of insomnia. Several nights of tossing and turning and then I find myself wide awake at five am. I read some and then walk. I've added a few miles to my morning rambles. Training for Yosemite in July when I plan to climb a mountain or two is what I tell people. But I'm also trying to tire myself out and perhaps even slow my racing mind, as usual.

  As busy as my thoughts have been lately they haven't translated into any real focused writing. My work comes in fits and slow paragraphs that on a second reading seem cumbersome and repetitive. Like normal, I'm juggling a bit much and I wonder if I'll ever balance it all out. It seems unlikely that I will.



  I suspect that we all have personal inner calendars. We have our own collection of dates and anniversaries that are unique to us. We have times of the year that evoke memories of past life events that have never lost their significance and have remained seared in our hearts for whatever reason. We have dates that are holidays for one. Holidays unlike Christmas or Thanksgiving or Passover.  I remember dates of my own past that are meaningless to almost everyone else. On these days I toast to my thoughts and let the importance of the event usually go unshared.

  Sometimes it is natural occurrences that resonate with me. The solstices and equinoxes seem more meaningful than Easter or Christmas. Although we all should now know that those religious holidays were purposely piggybacked on to the time of year when pagan festivals were celebrated in order to convert the uneducated to the new religion that came to town.

  Somehow, I still feel it's more interesting to contemplate the fascinating way the earth moves and tilts causing days to have shorter or longer periods of light and darkness than to believe in two thousand year old myths.

  The full moon closest to late July or early August has often found me alone watching it rise. I always hope to be on top of Sentinel Dome on that night. And a few times I have been lucky enough to be sitting on that rock at close to eight thousand feet as the earth spun and the moon looked impossibly large and seemed so close that I could almost jump on it. The hike back to the jeep under the glow of mountain moonlight put a lump in my throat. There's a good chance that this summer will find me watching the July full moon from that magnificent vantage point.

  Other events on my yearly datebook are more melancholy and tinged with great loss. There is a day that is the birthday shared by two late friends. Both added to the richness of my life by quantities that can't be measured. They were born on the same day a year apart. They met through me but lived on opposite coasts so they were never very close, although on those rare times when we were all together we had evenings of great fun. And here's the rub, what it means is probably nothing. I believe that coincidences are just that. They are not significant in any mystical or meaningful way in the grand workings of the cosmos. They are just two events that happened, randomly, at the same time. The fact that it is a coincidence pretty much only for me makes it no more magical than if the whole world shared my life. (Which thankfully isn't the case.)

  So here's the other coincidence, they both died on the same day a year apart. Smarter people than me could probably calculate the odds and I suspect they would be lower than I imagine. While these things are not common they are not that impossibly rare either.



  I was packing my bags at Sea Ranch when I heard the news of the passing of the great writer and poet Jim Harrison. I was momentarily stunned and slightly paralyzed. He seemed immortal to me for some reason. There was simply too much of him and to think that he would suddenly not exist was rough to comprehend. I am not prone to weep at celebrity deaths. But this one gave me a negative jolt. I have made it a habit to meditate on the transience and fragility of everyday life but no matter how much I think I grasp these concepts I often find myself struggling for meaning when something as common as the death of an old poet shocks me. What possibly could be more common?

  His body of work has been a massive source of inspiration to me for twenty-five years. I have ravenously devoured his books and my copies are battered and highlighted. Anytime I need to shake feelings of languor or ennui I pull one of his books from the shelf and have at it. It rarely takes long before the raw power of his words begins to energize me. The grand scope of his vision, wether it be in his poems or novels or essays, is so full of a pure lust for existence that it almost never failed to restore my equilibrium and give me an inner strength that I often forgot that I had.

  After an afternoon of reading Jim's poems I would be ready to face the mundane again. And face it with an eye toward beauty. I could actually see better with Harrison's words bouncing around in my skull.

  Long before I read him I was firm believer in the restorative power of nature and food.  So when I came across his essays in Esquire I sensed a kindred traveler. The fact that at times he seemed to encourage overindulgence only fortified my own desires for a greater relationship with nature and a tendency to overfill my plate and perhaps top off my glass one time too many.

  To think that he died at his desk working on a poem somehow makes the loss slightly more bearable on some gut level. Any other method of the extinguishment of his powers would seem unfair. Hopefully some day these final poems will be published because his pristine last volumes had not been diminished by age. In fact I felt his later poems bristled with the energy that should come from a younger mind. Such was his ceaseless determination to understand his own thoughts and share them with his devoted following.

  My drive home from Gualala that day was melancholy and contemplative. It's a wonder to me that we can be so alive even as our hearts falter as we come to grips with the momentariness of our meager trajectories though a mostly confusing world. Jim Harrison had a philosophy to combat this malaise and I quote him often. "I crave the substantial in life."





   It was a long long time ago when I first heard Neil Young sing Out On The Weekend. A song so full of heartache and longing that there was a day when I found it hard to listen to. It simply hit too close to home. But like I said that was many years ago. And in the ensuing decades life's crooked traverses have proved interesting. Now when I come across that old tune I can sing along without a tear forming in my eye although the old wound still throbs just under the surface of my seemingly unflappable appearance of stoicism. We all carry with us much that is left unfinished and dangling.

   In the years since that song first touched me I have weathered many other setbacks (what could be more un-rare?) and heartbreaks. And when I ponder on the nature of life's propensity to let people come into my orbit and sear my heart for a while and then have our feelings fade off like the morning mist on Pontoosuc Lake the pathos can be disconcerting. I try not to dwell on what might have been different because it wasn't. The mystery of free will looms large when I try to gaze backward in time.

  Leave it to Neil to give me a flashback on this beautiful autumn morning as the wind whips at the trees causing a colorful rain of dead leaves.



  Another song that struck me with a tinge of nostalgia recently was Travels from the live album of the same name by the Pat Metheny Group. That was an album that Bruce and I would play at our house during the cocktail hour as our guests arrived before dinner. It's an album full of inspired improvisation with moods ranging from joyous to contemplative to heart  scratching.

  Travels is a mellow reflective song that for me really does evoke feelings of covering distance both physical and inner. I even sense a certain amount of road weariness in the crisp guitar notes.

  As another poet wrote for his friend to sing; "Mama mama many worlds I've come since I first left home."



  I cleaned out a desk a few weeks ago in order to give it away. Seven or eight years of clutter a good portion of which I pitched.  There were postcards and letters, old bills, notes to myself, pictures, clippings from news papers, a few love letters, concert ticket stubs, a key I'm probably not allowed to use anymore, menus and old journals. The journals were the most, and the least, interesting.  Not much depth to some of my old random thoughts. The usual brooding about time and melancholia. My old themes.

  Minor flickers of infatuations that now seem absurd. In fact some of the names draw a blank. More evidence of the fickleness of my heart.

  I found a list of books I wanted to read and was amused that I got to almost none of them. Even though through all these years I've never been not reading.

  So the desk is gone. Along with another bag of clothes donated to a thrift shop.  And, a box of books I left at Sea Ranch. The house we rented had a fine library that I contributed to. CDs I'm passing along one by one.  Lightening the load little by little. Too much stuff can be distracting. For me anyway. I see clutter everywhere and I am already filling another bag of clothes that I haven't worn in years. And I'm giving an old sleeping bag, almost unused and like new, to Homeless Dave.

  As 2016 comes to an end I look to the coming year with an eye towards simplicity and a lion's (or possibly a raven's) heart.