After a summer of planning of adventures for my children, I had planned this trip for me. They were not exactly enthused. But they knew it was fair.
The resistance disappeared when we got to the campsite overlooking the Big Sur coast.
After tents were set up, we settled in to the quiet. One son grabbed the guitar and went and sat at cliff’s edge. Another picked up a hammer and entered into a scene in his imagination. I felt that other me emerge.
For years, I have been making my way to the coast in Lucia to put logs on the fire of my heart. The quiet of that particular section of the Big Sur Coast is thick, like fog. The beauty provides incredible perspective. There is so little that I need on that coast. “This is my wealth,” I told one son. “The fact that I can come here.”
Thursday we drove the two mile driveway up to the Camaldolese hermitage for mass. When I saw that it was a Mary feast day, I smiled. We’d almost made the trip the night before. What muse had stopped us and sent us on Mary’s day instead?
As we sat in silence waiting for mass to begin, a man I know from my children’s school walked in. Another coincidence, signifying what? That my love of the monastery and my life in Silicon Valley are not as far apart as I think?
We lingered at the monastery after mass. I showed the boys the hermitages where I often stay during my retreats. We picnicked at a table on the mountain top overlooking the wide open sea.
After a while, we drove to the state park next door. Walking through redwoods, I told them how sad I had been when the trees were damaged by fire a few years before. They pointed out that redwood bark is made for fire and that the trees are still alive.
Back at the campsite in late afternoon, we watched whales, climbed trees, and read. An Australian hiker had moved in to the site next door. As I prepared a warm meal for my boys, I noticed that he was eating a slice of bread for dinner. Without thinking, I invited him to join us for pasta and squash. He eagerly accepted and brought his loaf of bread to share.
Over dinner, he told us about how he had been traveling for 14 months through South and Central America and said he was finishing up his journey with a trip up the California coast. He shared stories of working on farms, meeting a woman in Nicaragua whose husband had been executed during the war, running out of money and surviving on the kindness of strangers. His whole perspective on life had changed dramatically during the course of his journey, he said.
As I listened, my perspective changed, too. His enthusiastic reception of a simple meal and water reminded me how extravagant is the flow of gift. I wondered whether my offering, that had flown effortlessly from my mother's heart, might someday be offered back to my children. I was also reminded about how my own travels to places of poverty and war in my early adulthood had led me to seek work and a way of life that could somehow be a response to what I had seen. Then, I told him about the hermitage. Though not a religious man, he was intrigued.
As darkness descended, we washed dishes and said goodnight. One son and I moved to the chairs on the bluff to watch the stars and discuss our sacred visitor.
The next morning I woke early. Instead of my usual meditation, I watched dolphins play in the surf and received the gifts that are so abundant at the coast. I wondered how I could bring this quiet and clarity back to my life at home.
I am back at that home in Silicon Valley now. I do not yet know the answer to my question on the bluff. But it is the grace I pray for now.
