Beachcombing at Miramar Page 5
I try to time my breathing with the wash of the waves, inhaling as a wave rolls up the beach, exhaling as it rolls back down. I concentrate on my breath because breath is the source of life. When I am aware of my breath, I am aware of myself and my place in the world.
I have a mantra, one that is distinctly my own—a high-pitched wiiinnnd that runs through the rigging of my mind. I say wiiinnnd as I inhale, wiiinnnd as I exhale, and then I start over again, trying to focus my attention on my breath, on the wind, on the waves. I tell myself that if I can breathe in and out ten times while intoning my mantra, I will have chased the evil spirits away.
It seems so simple. All I have to do is concentrate on my breathing through ten full cycles, hanging on to my single-syllable mantra, drawing out the word as I breathe. But try as I might, I can’t master my malaise. My timing is off; I am out of step with the rhythm of the world. Long before I can complete the cycle, I lose track of the count and the evil spirits rush back in to fill the void.
It’s the money, the insecurity, the loneliness, all the collective demons of my life, haunting my nights, haunting my days. It’s ludicrous to think that I can sit here in a hole in a rock and make them go away. I’m not an Eastern mystic; I’m a Westerner by choice and birth, and my salvation lies in Western ways.
I want to rise and continue on my way, but some inner voice holds me here. Even though I have given up trying to measure my breath, I remain fixed inside this oval of stone, listening to the sound of the sea. I allow my mind to fill up with thoughts because that is what it wants to do. The universe is full of philosophies, and I’m open to any that drift my way.
I’m not immune to the crosswinds that sweep over the mountains and plains of the planet, bringing my thoughts to others and theirs to me. Those winds travel without respect for national boundaries, and they can’t be halted by border guards. Despots and demagogues may attempt to stop the flow of ideas they fear, but there is no barricade high enough or wide enough to block the breeze.
The wisdom of the Zen master and poet Thich Nhat Hanh once reached me on such a wind, and I tucked it away in some remote recess of my mind. I believe we summon from buried memory what we need to know when we need to know it, and that is what happens to me now. Words from his book The Miracle of Mindfulness well up, seemingly from nowhere, as if I had been saving them for this precise moment of my life.
“People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle,” Nhat Hanh wrote. “But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth.”
To the devout, his words may seem irreverent, maybe even sacrilegious, but I think they speak to the deepest spiritual impulses of men and women everywhere. When I think of saints, prophets, and poets, when I try to imagine what they are like and how they move through the world, I see them as individuals walking the earth with an awareness that sets them apart from ordinary men.
Gandhi was that way, so was Tolstoy, and so was Thoreau. St. Francis was that way; so was St. Joan. Jesus was surely that way, for we mark his journey through Galilee not by the distance he traveled, which wasn’t vast, but by the intensity of what he did and said as he walked the land.
I don’t know what made those people that way. Perhaps they paused long enough amid the tumult of life to listen to a voice within themselves that told them what to do and where to go. They didn’t suppress that voice, smother it, push it down; they heeded it, obeyed it, followed its dictates—and as they did, the voice grew in power and strength, until it was the primary sound they heard.
Not all men are born to be saints, but I believe we are all born with a voice within that we tend to ignore until it becomes so indistinct we barely know it’s there. The voice doesn’t come from an almighty God in the sky; it comes from an in-dwelling God in the soul. The poet-philosopher Henri Bergson, author of Creative Evolution, called it the élan vital, the vital impulse, the divine spark, the life force that drives us on.
I find in the works of Bergson and Nhat Hanh a common meeting ground, a point where East and West are joined. When we walk the earth in a mindful way, we are fully conscious of ourselves, and when we are conscious of ourselves, we begin to climb the evolutionary scale, entering higher states of being than we have ever known before.
It’s a crucial matter, this business of walking the earth in a mindful way, for it may be our only hope for raising the human race out of the morass of hostility and bloodshed that engulfs it now. What we are engaged in is nothing less than directing our own evolutionary destiny, ascending to a level of awareness where mayhem is no longer a way of life. That may sound like a miracle, and it is; but it is a miracle we can bring about through conscious effort, one man, one woman at a time.
I begin with myself: That is the starting point. I have it within my power to influence the course of history. If I act alone, it doesn’t matter. It only matters that I act. If two act, so much the better. If a hundred or a thousand or a million act, that is better yet. Our separate acts will in time become a collective adaptation, and we will become a saner species than we are.
But that’s not my prime motivation at this moment of my life. I’m not trying to save the world; I’m trying to drive my evil spirits away. Maybe those two objectives aren’t as far apart as they seem. Maybe the personal and political, the private and public, are mirror images of each other. When the demons vanish, so does the destruction.
Where to begin—that’s what I must think of now. The stone I’m sitting on is wet and cold, and so am I. But if I leave now, I know I will be attacked at once by the same old furies. They are out there waiting like swarming gnats and stinging nettles. A suit of armor would protect me from the onslaught, but it would also weigh me down.
I have often heard it said that alienation is the curse of the modern world, but I think it is the curse of mankind and his inquisitive mind, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. Our forebears bit deeply into the apple of knowledge, and that is where our alienation began. Instead of accepting paradise as it was given to us, we examined it atom by atom, we built cities of concrete and cars of steel and we stripped the earth for its fossil fuels. I don’t deny we benefited in many ways from our industry. But where is the Garden of Eden? Where is the music of the spheres?
No other animal is as divorced from its habitat as we. If we are estranged from the land we live on, then we are estranged from the life we lead and at war with ourselves. And the bodies strewn across the landscape aren’t bodies at all. They are the living dead, the hollow men with eyes that don’t see and ears that don’t hear.
I am surprised at myself. I stepped into this rock with a hole in the center, intending to calm myself down. Instead, I have worked myself up to a fever pitch of agitation. Maybe that is how it’s supposed to be. Who says meditation brings serenity? Perhaps its purpose is to shake off sleep, to stir the blood, to rouse the mind. It’s midday now, but I am more awake than I was when I left my bed at dawn.
I hear voices, the laughing voices of children at play. As I leave the rock I see that I share this stretch of beach with a family of picnickers. The adults are huddled around a hibachi; I can smell the smoking coals and sizzling meat. The children are racing down to the water’s edge and dashing back up again, tumbling over each other as they go.
There is a verity in the scene, a universality. Why do people all over the world flock to the sandy shore? I think it’s because the instant they touch the sand, the moment they hear the surf, the evil spirits flee and they feel at home in the world.
I move slowly, deliberately, over the sand, aware that the universe is not a hostile place. “Drink your tea slowly,” Nhat Hanh wrote. “There is a great rush in our world to get things over and done with, but there is no reverence for the work itself.” What I need now is to immerse myself in life—to express my reverence for the moment at hand, the moment in which I dwell, and for the beachcombing I want to do.
I follow the line of the tide along the beach, stu
dying each shell, each scrap of shell, until I see it distinctly in the glistening sand. I bend over and pick up a fragment that has washed ashore. It’s the skeleton of a purple sea urchin, its surface an array of imbedded beads. I close my eyes. I lift the shell to my ears, my nose. I rub my hand across its tiny globes, gathering its message through my fingertips like a blind man reading braille.
eight
the motions of the world
I start my van and travel down the winding Coast Highway, the ocean on my right. My vehicle is old and wheezy and it balks like a mule when going up a hill. In my rearview mirror I see a young man at the wheel of his red sports coupe, with a young woman beside him and a surfboard neatly balanced on the roof. He wants to pass, but there is precious little room on the narrow road and nothing I can do. He pulls out across the double yellow line, blaring his horn, and makes an obscene gesture as he races by, nearly taking off my front fender as he cuts back in. I am badly shaken.
A mile or so farther along, I turn into a side road and park on a grassy shoulder overlooking a saltmarsh preserve. I sit there for a while, quietly collecting myself, studying the eucalyptus forest in the distance, and, closer in, the coastal estuary, the brackish ponds and mud flats. When I am sufficiently calmed down, I string my field glasses around my neck and enter this tranquil habitat, this sanctuary for all manner of wildlife, including me.
I stop on a wooden footbridge that spans a narrow waterway and listen to the harsh buzz of a marsh wren hidden in the reeds. A snowy egret wades in the shoals, spearing prey with his sharp black bill. Bank swallows twist and turn in miraculous flight over my head, catching insects on the wing. Cinnamon teal take off from the muddy embankment—and far off, a blackshouldered kite perches silently on a post and waits.
All these species, and so many more, dwell together in this one fertile oasis without getting in each other’s way. Yes, the egret feeds on frogs and fish, the swallows devour mosquitoes, and the kite kills snakes and rodents whenever it can. Sometimes the peregrine falcon swoops down and snatches a duck out of the sky. But those are not acts of cruelty; they are the way of survival in a natural world. What is cruel is the unnatural way we humans behave toward each other.
I think again of the young man in the red sports coupe, of his insulting gesture and his infuriating attempt to force me off the road. I think, too, of the young woman at his side, laughing at his recklessness as if it were a virtue, and of how that spurs him on. Each time she laughs, his foot presses harder on the gas pedal and the car spurts ahead, gaining on the car in front, which he must pass, because if he doesn’t, the woman at his side may start to wonder if he really is the man he wants her to think he is.
I wonder if he knows where he’s heading, or how, or why—this young man rushing toward his grave. He’s so sure he’s veering south, past farms of artichokes, past fields of sheep grazing on the barren slopes above the sea. He’s so certain that he is the center of the universe, that he is in control of all he surveys, when in fact he is no more than a flyspeck on a planet hurtling through the sky.
When I was young, I read a poem called “This Dim and Ptolemaic Man,” by John Peale Bishop, and the lines come back to me now. In his poem, Bishop depicts a farmer who saves enough money to buy a rattly Ford and how he feels “motion spurt beneath his heels” as he drives hell-bent down the road:
Morning light obscures the stars.
He swerves avoiding other cars,
Wheels with the road, does not discern
He eastward goes at every turn
Nor how his aged limbs are hurled
Through all the motions of the world,
How wild past farms, past ricks, past trees,
He perishes toward Hercules.
For a long time after I read the poem, the line “He eastward goes at every turn” kept reeling through my brain, an enigma. Why is the farmer going eastward? At last the answer dawned on me. He is going eastward because the earth is turning eastward; he is a traveler on the spinning planet, even if he is too self-absorbed in his new-bought car to feel himself being “hurled through all the motions of the world.”
The poem intrigues me because of the title: the way the poet joins “dim and Ptolemaic” to describe the egocentric nature of man. Ptolemy, the ancient astronomer, declared that earth was a motionless body and that sun, moon, and planets revolved around it at varying speeds. That view remained fixed in the minds of men for more than a thousand years—until a wiser astronomer named Copernicus came along. Copernicus said that the earth was moving, rotating on its axis, orbiting the sun along with the other planets. He reasoned that because man was moving with the earth, he couldn’t sense the movement at all.
But Copernicus sensed it—I have to believe he did. I believe he knew he was a passenger on the planet, that he was traveling with the earth through the heavens, long before his calculations proved that he was right and Ptolemy wrong. I am convinced that scientists like Copernicus are the painters and composers of the spheres. Like all artists, they begin with their hunches, conjectures, and speculations—which arise from what they sense—and then they create the painting and the music so that the rest of us can see and hear.
Galileo, gazing through his telescopes, constructed an even more detailed picture of the universe than Copernicus, and in so doing enraged the religious zealots of his day. They forced him to recant his theories and imprisoned him in his own house, under pain of death, until he died. I find it ironic that Galileo, who understood so well the motions of the world, was restricted in his travels, while the dim and Ptolemaic churchmen of the Inquisition walked freely about the streets, never realizing that they were “perishing toward Hercules.”
Four centuries have come and gone since the Holy Office put Galileo on trial for saying that the earth moves. But I have to ask myself what separates the zealots of the Inquisition from the fanatics who drive the Coast Highway in their turbocharged cars today. Their styles may differ, but their perspective is the same. They know nothing of the workings of the earth and how it turns. They cling to their notion that the world exists for them, and they are perfectly willing to run over anyone who gets in their way.
I have a conviction—one I can’t prove, but I believe it anyhow. I believe there is a clock within me, a living clock, and it keeps pace with the pulse beat of the world. I hear the slow ticktock of the planet when I stand in a salt marsh or walk the sands of Miramar, and I lose it the instant I slip behind a steering wheel. The moment I exceed the speed at which I was born to move, I lose the tempo of the natural world and become like a singer who has lost the rhythm of his song.
What science gives, the combustion engine takes away. The former tells us what the universe looks like; the latter numbs us to what we see. The faster we travel, the less we know. It’s as if speed itself is an infectious disease, deadly not only because of the mangled bodies that lie by the side of the road but also because of the impenetrable barrier it erects between ourselves and our world.
My thoughts are broken by a small bird that persists in paddling back and forth under the footbridge where I stand. He swims, half-submerged, and I follow him from one side to the other, leaning over the wooden railing for a better look. Although I have stood waiting and watching in this same place many times in the past, I can’t recall seeing this particular species before. I note the black ring around his thick bill; that is something of a giveaway. I recall seeing a bird with that distinctive marking in my field guide.
A man appears farther along the path, emerging from the bulrushes and pickleweed. He has a great shock of white hair and a face so bronzed he looks as if he has been out in the sun since the day he was born. He is moving quickly, with a purpose; he has a spotting scope on a tripod braced across his shoulder. He stops beside me and watches the ducklike bird that suddenly dives and pops up like a cork about fifty feet away.
“A pied-bill grebe?” I ask.
“Yes,” the man says with the assurance of one who knows.
/>
I ask him if he has seen anything else of interest, and he rattles off about twenty species, several of which I didn’t know were in the marsh and a few I never heard of before. He announces that he has been up since dawn, driving from ocean to bay, harbor to redwood forest, creek to reservoir, and that he has seen 136 species so far. He says he has one more site to visit, a slough about twenty miles down the coast, where he hopes to find at least fifteen more species, raising his bird count to more than 150 for the day.
I watch as he rushes off, wondering if he will reach the slough in time to meet his goal, for he will soon lose the daylight. One hundred and fifty different birds! I wonder if it’s possible to see, really see, that many species in a single day.
I turn back to the pied-bill grebe. I watch him for ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. When I feel I know him well, I leave the marsh and climb a sandy bluff, arriving at the top as the underrim of the sun touches the unbroken line of the sea.
I watch the sun drop below the horizon. It sinks quickly, and I suddenly know that I have been as dim and Ptolemaic as the farmer in his rattly Ford. For the first time in my life I am fully aware of the speed at which I am traveling through the air. The sun is not setting; the earth is spinning away. In a matter of minutes it has pitched eastward a distance equal to the diameter of the sun. And I am going eastward with it, going eastward through the night, through the day.
It occurs to me that perhaps the purpose of a sunset is to sweep self-delusion away. I have no sense of motion when the sun is overhead, hanging in the sky. At high noon, earth and sun appear to be absolutely still. Even as the sun slips down, I feel as though I am standing on a stationary planet. But when I see how the horizon rises to swallow the sun, I realize how I have allowed myself to be deceived.