From where I write

When complaints come, we listen.  Not really complaints, perhaps, but comments.  Notes that the posts are relentlessly depressing.  That in a down world, consistently reading more down is too much down.  Endless down does not look like a sustainable trajectory.  Not down.  Perhaps some gentling has been overdue.  The great oracle tells us that we cannot persist amidst obstruction.  That the clouds “that lour’d upon our house” must eventually break.

What grounds us then?  Where do we find this “sure and firm set earth” from which any steps we take towards our own descent represent transgression?

We look down.  Beneath our feet.

From where I write, less than a mile to the east, rises a small mountain that geologists tell us was part of the sea floor about 12 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch.  The subduction of the Pacific plate beneath the western coast of the U.S. has rumpled up the land, like blankets on the edge of a fussed bed, raising the mountain that is there today.  In fact, this is the origin of the California Coastal Range, still rising and rumpling, still slowly groaning into folds in a relentless march of ongoing time.

These are special places, dotted with oak dominated woodland in the cooler folds of north facing ravines, and covered with green savannah in the fall and winter that goes spectacular gold in the dryer, hotter summers.  These mountains are largely given to viticulture on the lower slopes, and some residents have built spectacular homes there, braving the dangers of the summer fire season that is capable of causing great loss of property and life.  Can hardly blame them though.  Spectacular wildlife in spectacular weather.

Given to sunny days and foggy nights, this area was once considered largely too cold for viticulture.  Grapes like the hot sun, but they tend to shy away if the weather gets too cold and nights here can turn brisk.  It even snows once in a while, but only about once a decade.  Still, most days doze in the shelter of those golden hills, running, as they do, with pooling rivulets of forest.  Hawks punctuate the skies.  Owls at night.  Small lizards.  Morning hummingbirds.  Decidedly drowsy.  A feeling of being tucked away from the world.

Still the world is too much with us late and soon, as the sonnet aptly says.  Hens no longer dominate the economy.  It is not all eggs and farmland.  Just a smaller town nestled in a valley of occasional fog between the thriving thrum of two much larger towns.  The usual kinds of growing pains that accompany any town, any region, are here too, and the tourism that pads the region’s pockets.  Shops and restaurants–with one or two of the latter being among some of my favorites in the world.  No.  Really.  (Seek particulars anon and I’ll tell you.)

No moral here either except that sometimes posts become a little like a drowsy valley.  Not all can be rain and thunder, after all.  Sometimes we are quiet and grateful, just for what we have.  A roof.  Meals when we need them.  Sometimes truly beautiful days.  Life has enough defeats, enough precipices, dark hollows, evil sorcerers and trolls of all kinds.  Some days, we should simply be where we are.  Sit on the porch a spell.  Drowse in the sun.

At the end of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, the formerly blind flower shop girl finally meets the benefactor who gave her the money that enabled her to have the treatment to regain her sight.  No spoilers here, in case you haven’t seen it, but it is one of the great endings in all of film.  Maybe the only real ending that there is.

When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man’s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut the gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came unto my beds,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken heads,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.

The play goes on, and we all do our best.  In spite of everything.  Good to remember.  Best of luck out there.  Rest in the sun when you can.  Watch those puddles.  Here’s hoping that each of you reading this has a fabulous week.