Beachcombing at Miramar (6 page)

“I get out my work,” O’Keeffe writes, “and have a show for myself before I have it publicly. I make up my own mind about it—how
good or bad or indifferent it is. After that the critics can write what they please. I have already settled it for myself
so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.”

I am deeply affected by the directness of her words. What O’Keeffe writes and what she paints—they are one and the same. The
individual who fears the criticism of others is no different from the one who seeks their praise. Both are shadow figures,
fading into the landscape, lacking the will to act for themselves.

I can’t help but think about what the world would have lost if O’Keeffe had felt otherwise. What if the artist in her had
succumbed to the voices in her past—the knowing voices that must have been there—the voices that attempted to tell her which
colors and shapes to live by and which to avoid? If she had heeded them, she would have died within herself, died in the spirit,
if not in the flesh, and left no lasting testament of her passage through this world.

I am forever indebted to men and women like O’Keeffe. I aspire to be as they were, as they are. In the aftermath of my nightmare,
I feel as though I am closer to that moment of awakening than ever before. There is only one person who can sanctify my life.
That power lies with me and me alone.

The light of morning has passed over the peaks of the coastal range and filled the sky. I leave my beach house, climb down
the rickety steps from my deck, and head for the edge of the sea. I am lost in thought, moving by compulsion toward the exact
place where I saw the woman in the breakers the night before. The loose end of the rope is still there; I can see it in the
surf, floating free. It is a temptation—the way it washes in the waves. I feel as if I could wade in, grab hold, and yank
it free. But I go on by.

F
ar down the beach, I see a woman bending over, her head almost touching her toes, the strands of her windblown hair blending
with the sand. She is wearing jeans and a white sleeveless T-shirt, and as I approach, she looks up at me and smiles.

“What are you looking for?” I ask.

“Stones with holes in them,” she says. “I have a shelf full of them at home. A stone with a hole in the center wards off evil
spirits.”

“So how are you doing with evil spirits?”

“Lately—not so good,” she replies.

I laugh and she laughs, too—but under her laughter I detect an earnestness. For her, this is more than a pastime, a momentary
diversion on the beach. She believes in stones with holes in the center. If she didn’t, why would she devote an entire shelf
to them in her home?

I continue on my way, thinking about what she said, about what it means to me. I have my evil spirits, too. At night they
invade my dreams; in the mornings they weigh me down.

I’m worried about money. My funds are dwindling. I no longer bother to balance my checkbook. Any day I expect a notice from
my bank telling me they have closed my account because I’m so overdrawn. Suppose I become ill? I have no health insurance,
no paid sick leave, no retirement income, none of the benefits that accrue to the workingman. Who will look after me?

I am alone, completely alone on this strip of beach. I want an antidote for my loneliness, a placebo I can swallow, a talisman
I can hold to cast out my fears. I see a stone riddled with holes, half-buried in the sand. I pick it up—but even as I roll
it over in my palm, I know it is too small to dispel the ache in my heart that grows larger with each passing day. I need
a stone that is huge, a stone with a hole so big that it surrounds me body and soul.

I come upon a rock with a cavernous hole in the middle, carved out by the perpetual pounding of the waves. The rock is easily
twice my height. It is perched at the edge of the beach, beside a bluff that rises straight up out of the sea. I crawl into
the hollow and sit on a hard ledge, watching the breakers crash against the offshore reefs, sending plumes of spray into the
air.

I sit as still as I can, my back straight; I make a valiant effort to empty my mind. I want to feel the cadence of the waves,
the rise of the swells, the ebb of the tide. I want to move in unison with those elements, to become part of them as they
become part of me.

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, studying 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.

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.