California beauty

The Golden State still feels golden.  Not because I'm set on striking it rich, like the 49'ers of old.  For me it glows with the familiar heat and blue skies of summer, green oaks against toasted golden hills.  Just enough sea breeze making its way over the coastal ranges to keep from similarly toasting hikers and bikers who find their treasure in the outdoors.

I spent the past week just inland from the coast, in the east Bay Area hills hiking and biking with my brother.  The hills are golden now, although the transformation is not complete in places due to some May rains.  In the shade of the coastal and canyon live oaks, green spaces persist.  Stands of manzanita, maiden-hair ferns, coffeeberry, wild currents, hummingbird sage, poppies, and poison oak hug trail edges and weave among fallen branches along dried streambeds.  The brown hills are alive in the breeze, wild oats and grasses waving in whatever direction the wind suggests.

The death of my 90-year-old stepmom is what brought me back to California.  Such times always carry some sorrow, but Nancy would not have approved of teary eyes or heavy hearts.  She would have approved, I think, of a hike in the hills.

Her Christian Science beliefs guided her life and specified the terms of her death.  Mary Baker Eddy decried the contradictions of Christianity, the notions of a perfect God who held out the promise of forgiveness and a better life in heaven, but who would still somehow allow to exist the imperfections and evil people faced in the world.  The spiritual world is, according to Christian Science, the reality, and it encompasses all that is good, all that flows from a perfect creator.  What we experience in the material world is an illusion, something we pass through.  Prayer and thoughtful living connect us to the spiritual world.  They remind us that we, too, are all good, all a manifestation of a good God.  Birth and death are meaningless markers of our passage through existence, our journey as spiritual beings in all times and all places.

I'm sure I have missed or slightly mangled the nuances of the Christian Science worldview.  Nancy would have been glad to provide me with whatever reading material I needed to improve my understanding.  She was a faithful host at the Soquel reading room, every Monday for years, even into her late 80's.  And although I sometimes found it maddening--her insistence that "It'll be all right" in response to any and every illness, injury, worry, disruption, disappointment, or failure--I know that it was her faith speaking.  And she exercised it with the same stubbornness and determination in everything she said and did.

Her son by her first marriage (her only biological child) organized a small luncheon in her honor, even though she insisted that there would be no funeral service or other celebration of her life or death.  I'm glad he did.  It was a chance to meet her friends from church, the Masonic lodge, and the senior center; the handymen who helped her to tame a large garden and teetering old house; her grown children from 3 marriages (my dad being the last); and a few of her grandchildren.  Everyone told stories about her generosity, her good nature and (sometimes irritating) unflagging optimism.  Her only request of us in life was that we believe in the inherent goodness of all things.  In death she asked only that her ashes be scattered in the ocean that brought with it the cool weather and salty freshness she adored.

She was in my thoughts as I tramped through the oak woodlands with my brother a couple of days after the luncheon in her honor.  I tend to use the open spaces, the undeveloped bits of the natural world that we have thankfully preserved, as a means to reconnect with what I think is important.  The rhythms of the natural world always make more sense to me than the frantic comings and goings of our unnatural lives--the moments when we are driven by the need to earn and spend and cram our pleasures into what time we can squeeze between our obligations and worries.  As soon as I hit the trail, I feel my heartbeat slow, my shoulders relax, my stride lengthen.  My senses come alive, tuned to bird song and wind song and the smells of earth and plants and animals.  I feel a part of something bigger, something more important.

Nancy enjoyed walking by the sea, her "unspoiled place,'" not as a form of exercise, which she found silly, but as a chance to be next to the calming immensity of so much water.   She told me once while walking together along the path above the beach at Seacliffe Park that to her the ocean was "just beautiful."  At the time I thought the comment another one of her homely platitudes.  But now I understand it was a perspective compelled by her faith and its insistence that we live a life which celebrates goodness and beauty.  As the poet and philosopher Robinson Jeffers wrote, and as Nancy might also have said were she of a philosophic rather than practical bent:

"I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things by making one's own life and environment beautiful, as far as one's power reaches.  This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe.  But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important, its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning; the beauty of things is sufficient without him."

Some pretty humbling words.  Nancy was, above all, a humble person and in that a role model for us all.  Inspired by the grandest and most universal of things, she performed good deeds with an open heart.  That is probably why she and my father found each other, two good people whose very nature compelled them to do good for others without expectation for reward, a gift freely given.  That is how my walk in the hills felt on Saturday, a beautiful gift that asks for nothing in return.