Visions of Something Deeper
Spring on the Central Coast
Many times we get carried away with our own problems and those of the world.
We can overlook the beauty and goodness all around us.
We ignore the sublime, but beauty reminds us of something eternal, something of transcendent goodness and peace.
We can look through these portals of the soul and see the deepest goodness that holds all things in existence.
We are reminded that we are deeply loved by Love itself and that we are caught up in a dance of great joy - the dance of indwelling peace and the reward of hope.
There is a famous Spanish Civil War novel called The Cypresses Believe in God. Perhaps they do believe. They brave the sun and salt and reach heavenward. They twist in the fog and host hawks. They don’t bend readily in coastal winds and storms. They have feet of clay. When they are tall and robust and the coast moves into a wet cycle, the clay can be molded in your hands, but they stand and move into old age, bleaching like whale bone. In the end they leave us a vision of vanquished roots even more beautiful.
One of the spiritual challenges of living on the Central Coast is that the beauty can become less overwhelming with time. It becomes familiar, but it still has it majesty, intimacy, and joy. The offshore winds sweep down the Santa Cruz Mountains, wafting over the redwood forests hiding the University of California and the vineyards. They push back the blanket of the morning fog and the flowers explode in riots of color. The kelp forest beneath the waves bides its time, undulating in the pulse, in the quiet of sun rays, with otters and myriads of sea life, covered by blankets of blues, greens, and grays or sometimes slate.
There is a level of focus in which the points of color overcome the plants. The blues and greens become stary fields with points of light and the poppies become whorls of orange. As a child, I think that this was one of my first prayer experiences, as the amazing fog-filtered sun brought the flowers in and out of focus.
Since colonial times, hides have been known as California banknotes. They have been used as an early currency in the ranchos. California was claimed for Spain by Juan Rodgriguez Cabrillo in 1542 and by Sir Francis Drake for England in 1579. Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1841, recounted the pre-Gold Rush years of California. The Spanish land grants have given way to history, but ranch life still remains.
Highway 101 falls 1,500 feet from the Santa Lucia Range (464 meters) in over 20 miles, but the steepest drop is the Cuesta Grade which is about 3.5 miles. Motels and resorts surround the San Luis Obispo Bay and the Central Coast recedes as Highway 101 begins to skirt Point Conception, where the Vandenberg Air Force Base has been replaced by Elon Musk’s Space X.
Around the corner from the world famous surfing spot, Steamer’s Lane, where the last Hawaiian princes introduced the sport, there is a beauty than can easily be overlooked by a purposeful walker in the neighborhood. A pause is far from a distraction to wonder at the amazing symetry and the rays of green-gray trimmed in red.
The first moment of worship begins not with the procession but with a transformation. The red and yellow tongues of fire of the descending Holy Spirit rejoice, in the many languages and the one language, that we have not been left alone. Inspiration dwells in us - courage, peace, patience, and kindness. It is not a reminder but a celestial power to right the world’s wrongs - not with the sword but by the strength of the flowers.