After lunch, you step outside under a perfectly clear and limitless blue California sky. You stand, gazing up in a moment of wonder at the bigness of it, the blueness of it, and chuckle to yourself as a question bubbles up, ‘Why is the sky blue? ’
It is a warm afternoon, and your job is to clean the gutters packed with oak leaves, little acorns, and dirt. It is an unpleasant job, tedious, dirty, up and down ladders, bending, and getting stuck by the various California plants, all seeming to have thorns and invisible needles in their survival strategy.
However, you can’t help but notice, as you go about your task, a surprising enjoyment in the work. Where you would typically expect impatience and aggravation, you find lightness and space around everything, even the unpleasant things. For whatever reason and maybe for no reason at all, the mind, right now, is free and clear of the usual clutter of the sense of an imagined past and future self. You are free of the merry-go-round of self-concern that operates for most of us, most of the time, below the radar of consciousness.
Free and clear, amazing and ridiculously simple, this sense of freedom and ease of being gives rise to spontaneous happiness that comes from nowhere, for no reason.
It seems too good to be true, yet here it is, like a clear and limitless California
-Ojai, CA 5/1/25