CALIFORNIA UNIVERSE

The native flower, the California Poppy is a color so vibrant and beautiful I think it might in some highly-realized people cause a bout of pure ecstasy.

The flowers are popping up all over. In our backyard there were a couple. On the corner of our street there are more than twenty and then around the corner, on the roadside, there is a line of them bordering the vineyard.

Artists talk about the "light" in France as if it is a miracle of nature created just for painters. The light here, in Mendocino County, is as clear as it is there and hotter. It’s as if even the sun itself shines brighter on this state.

The sky is a pure, crystal kind of blue making the clouds seem even whiter than they are in other places on the globe.

Every so often a red-tailed hawk soars overhead as if it has chosen this sky out of all the skies extant, just because it is so beautiful. It’s a place he can show off or maybe just be California Dreaming while it catches the updrafts that take him higher and higher.

The ground is different too. It’s dry and hard and definite. When you walk through a field of golden grass up in the hills, you know you are stepping on the earth. No squishy tentative feeling about it. It’s real, hard ground beneath your boots.

People talk about having a "sense of place." And this is a place where you can feel you ARE somewhere. Not going to or from someplace else. It’s a place that’s so easy to be, to live in, to fit into, that you start to feel more deeply connected not only to yourself, but to the world at large. And, because of the expansiveness of the landscape, you feel more connected to the universe itself—you know, the place where we all reside.

In a very real sense, California, when you are aware of living in it, becomes a universe itself.