Reinvention

I like the confidence of the cat who hangs around here. She knows where she belongs, and she knows who she is, and she slinks about with ease, finding a comfortable spot on the grass beside a tree, and staring at me, calm and complacent, as I pass. She knows I don’t belong here, but she tolerates me. I’ll be gone soon.

Monte says he feels like we’ve been involved in a crime and this is our hideout, and hopefully they won’t find us, but we aren’t missed and no one is looking, and I don’t know what we did. In the meantime, tufts of white clouds are sailing by in a porcelain blue sky, and the stringy leaves of a pepper tree are trembling in the breeze, and when I venture out to the curving road, two picturesque long-horn cattle wander close to the fence, wanting some attention. Nothing has gone smoothly, but maybe that’s just how it is when you tumble away from all your props and routines. I am a creature out of place, but I will try to find a new way of being.

It prompts a lot of thought about ways of being and identity, at least for me. I wonder at how we invent our daily lives, how routines and rituals become their substance, many necessary, others purely arbitrary, but eventually we are embraced within the scaffolding we have built. I am only now beginning to discover how the Ranch defined me, how each hour was shaped by the way the light fell across the hills and spilled into our rooms, how comforting and familiar our habits and pathways became, how even the hard work was a template, exhausting but tangible, purposeful, and real. As Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote, “Show me the landscape in which you live, and I will show you who you are.”

Now we have relocated, and the framework is dismantled, and it’s interesting to watch ourselves as we awaken to blank spaces dotted with different kinds of demands, but open as well to brand new designs, and to brooding and reflection, for those of us so inclined. Our temporary quarters are simple and pleasant, one room, and little is required of us. We begin to see the patterns in the days here too, how fog gives way to golden light, the way wind whistles through an open screen. We can drive ten minutes past vineyards and mown fields to get to town. I see the shadowy form of a deer at dusk, and the mountains in the distance, but the wildness here has been subdued.

Who am I here? Who do I want to be? The values we held remain our compass, friendships are intact despite the shuffle of change, and what is true is true. My dear friend Jeanne understands it well. “This will be the time to choose what you remember,” she writes, “and to find a way to live in a foreign place without losing who you are, or trying to recreate a version of yourself that is elsewhere now.” Jeanne was my canyon neighbor for many years before she moved away, and she knows what this passage is like. But she also reminds me that the life we had in that elsewhere was real, not a dream, and it is forever a part of our souls. But perhaps, as my daughter has written, we did not so much possess the Ranch as it possessed us, and there is a sense of being orphaned now.

But there is also fun in the newness, and discovery, and an off-balance exploration. One evening, after an appointment at a bank in nearby Lompoc, Monte and I went for a walk through the old part of town, past Italian stone pine trees planted in the early 1940s and still majestic, past the gleaming white church, the museum housed in a grand old Carnegie Library building, colorful murals and motley homes somehow both proud and ragtag, train tracks and alley ways, store fronts and flags, a windswept abandonment, but bright blue skies. Two young women detoured to greet us.

“I know this is strange,” said one, looking directly at me, “but we’ve seen you walk by twice, and I just have to tell you how gorgeous you are. You are the most beautiful woman my mother’s age that I have ever seen. What’s your secret?”

“I’m thirty-five,” I said.

I couldn’t keep a straight face to sustain the joke, of course, but the interaction boosted my spirits. Isn’t it funny how a few kind words even from a stranger can make you feel good? It’s something to remember, a power we all possess. Here I’d been thinking that Monte and I were broken, bedraggled, and decidedly over the hill, and this young woman saw us as attractive and robust. I walked away a little taller and straighter after that.

These bits of brightness matter. Continuing our stroll around Lompoc, we wandered into Certain Sparks, a music school and recording studio. There were colorful guitars hanging on the wall, drums and cymbals waiting in silence, music books and microphones, a sense of promise everywhere. A fledgling guitarist was practicing in an upstairs room, and fragments of a tune drifted toward us. This place is magic, I thought. Music is born and encouraged in here, and from such starts, who knows what dreams might follow?

It was a beautiful evening, and I kept turning up delights, marveling at the loveliness of our tired old planet, the sweet morsels and memories in the air, the way it still felt good to have both feet on the ground walking with someone I love at my side. But this evening had come in the wake of a deeply disturbing day, and I have to admit that it is difficult to fully immerse oneself in joy when things have become so dire.

In this blog of amazement and wonder and gratitude, I must acknowledge a contradiction: I am also sad and angry. There is a dual awareness in each moment, as my heart is infected with the toxicity of the current politics, and “politics” is an insufficient word for the existential threat that has arisen, for the contempt and cruelty, the hate and hypocrisy. I didn’t know that our democracy could be undermined so quickly, and I’m heartbroken by the compliance, capitulation, and betrayal.

Now, in the aftermath of yet another shooting, instead of reason or efforts to shed light, seek solutions, and heal the broken soul of our nation, there are incendiary accusations. No one I know is applauding murder, but this is the divisive lie being perpetrated, and this is what we have as “leadership” today: ugly, vindictive distortions of reality, and a brazen grasping for more power. Each day brings new violations of the Constitution, the lessons of history, and the fundamental ideals of democracy, compassion, and shared humanity. How has it gotten this far? Have I overestimated the collective intelligence and decency of people? Sometimes I feel so low, I can barely get going.

And yet I also know that getting stalled and overwhelmed is exactly how to be defeated, and there are many millions of us who are seeing all this clearly, speaking out, taking action, seeking strategies and gathering strength, and we cannot give up.

So let us not give up, whatever that means. We each have something to offer, and we must keep on doing whatever is required of us.

In this, my personal time of reinvention and transition, I hope I can attain the patience and equanimity to sustain the struggle over the long run, doing what needs doing, but welcoming delight. Maybe I’ll become like that cat, calm and confident. I hope the new landscape that defines me will render me resilient but pliant, open to surprise, still lit by the outrageous faith of my ancestors.

I found this poem by Jack Gilbert that suits me fine, a declaration for my new way of being:

I spend the days deciding

on a commemorative poem.

Not, luckily, an epitaph.

A quiet poem

to establish the fact of me.

As one of the incidental faces

in those stone processions.

Carefully done.

Not claiming that I was

at any of the great victories.

But that I volunteered.