Report From California

Christmas Eve 2016

Report From California/Dec 24/2016

It was a rare, soggy, rainy day yesterday in Sierra Madre, the first honest rain in two months. Today, the clouds are shredding over the San Gabriel Mountains, and the sun is lighting up the hills, which have gone from brown to green overnight. Our neighborhood has bands of raucous parrots making their rounds from tree to tree. All morning long they gather in the branches of live oaks and palm trees and screech until they have a quorum and then move on to the next tree and repeat the process. They must exhaust themselves and go back to bed because, by noon, there is not a parrot in sight.

Parrots and palm trees on Christmas Eve. For someone who has spent a lifetime in the Northeast, the Christmas season in southern California is odd. Yesterday, we drove by a house whose whole front yard was covered with cotton batting…fake snow! Christmas music commences in the stores a minute after Halloween. Houses and trees are strung with lights, and the malls are filled with shoppers, but in a blue sky, sunny 75 degrees, the whole affair feels like a stage set.

Reality, however, is not far away. Less than an hour from here, in San Bernardino, they have, by now, buried the 14 people who were murdered a couple of weeks ago, gunned down at their workplace by a radicalized Muslim and his wife, both born and raised in suburban California.

The killers were killed, Bonnie & Clyde style, in their getaway car, by 380 rounds of police fire. Before the couple went on their rampage, they had thoughtfully dropped off their 6-month-old daughter at her grandmother’s house, you know, just in case things didn’t work out.

The world, it seems, is lately coming unhinged in ways that crawl into our dark places and disturb our dreams. As far as anyone knew, these two neighbors blended quietly and unremarkably into the fabric of everyday American life. To have discovered that they had long been planning and were capable of monstrous acts in our midst…well, surely, what makes it so disturbing is the something in us that wonders who else of our neighbors at the supermarket, PTA meeting, Home Depot, or out raking their lawn, is also planning a nightmare? Then again, as we witness the present national toxic reaction to Muslims, The urge for revenge is apparently woven into our DNA.

Having just read the NYT at breakfast, these ruminations were on my mind one recent morning as I stepped outside and stopped to observe a singular tree in our side yard. I don’t know what kind of tree it is, but it has a prehistoric look, with large, simple, mitten-shaped leaves. Following the season, the leaves have been turning from green to yellow to brown and then dropping from the top down so, by now, the tree is balding, revealing its skeleton of bony branches, sticking straight up.

The tree and I have become friends, and every day, I take a moment on my way out the door to see how it is getting along. As I paused to visit this morning, the sun illuminated the tree leaves like a lantern. The tree was radiant, and I had the odd feeling that it was conscious and happy to have someone take a moment to share its beauty. A little breeze came up, animating the whole tree. One of the dried brown leaves on top let go and tumbled down through the branches. The dead leaf hit the ground with a barely discernable, crunchy sound, like stepping on a potato chip. And then, for no reason at all, I, too, dropped away.

I was suddenly empty, meaning there was no longer a little inside ‘me’ looking out on the world. The tree was being observed, not by a ‘me’ or an ‘I’, but by awareness itself. It wasn’t some dramatic, cosmic experience. It couldn’t even be called an experience. The tree was just no longer outside of me. At that moment, the notion of inside and outside was irrelevant. In the abeyance of the idea of a single, separate self we discover that the world is not made up of uncountable, separate parts but is, in fact, a transparent, seamless whole.

If dropping away has ever happened to you, you know what it means to be healed by presence. That morning was a healing, not only of my own nagging concerns but, mysteriously, for everyone and everything, including those filled with fear and anger. The question of human violence and whether it can ever come to an end was and is answered in the silence of simple being. In its utter innocence, the tree was showing me the ‘other world’ of unlimited peace, beauty, and love that exists, not in some future ideal world, but only now, in the light of awareness.