The house with a path with a heart

When first I heard, around nine months ago, that my Indian meditation and yoga teacher was going to be in Petaluma, California for a weekend in late July 2024, I booked a hotel room, thinking I would drive there and back on the most direct, largely interstate and most southerly route. It would be a trip of around 2000 miles entailing 6 days away from the house and garden.

In May 2024, someone very important in my life celebrated a milestone birthday that few achieve, in another county. I tossed around ideas of going for the birthday, prevaricated and did not, in the end, make the effort to return to the old country. On 20 June news came that a dear dear friend, also from the old country, had died. A week later the Very Important Person whom I had not visited for their birthday died. I impulsively plotted a 5000 mile, 14 day roadtrip route to my meditation teacher’s event via old friends on the Oregon coast and checking off few places from my To See Before I Die list.

We had been work colleagues way back when I was new to the ways of this very material world, almost twenty years ago, these friends and I, Though we maintained contact over the years via sporadic cards, email and annual holiday card mass mailing updates, we hadn’t spent time together for over a decade.

I joke about only having imaginary friends but truth is I was a little nervous, after having invited myself for a few days into their house, that I had imagined this friendship. I mean I AM cranky, judgmental, blunt, opinionated, assertively solitary and live most vitally in and through (written) words and the silence between words, through vision and ideas, through metaphor and image, and only minimally through flesh and blood everyday human contact. I could conceivably have imagined that I had friends. Once upon a time. Like in the fairytale which we all know isn’t true, isn’t the thing itself but only an instrument of enchantment.

It wasn’t like that at all. It seemed to me that the three of us picked up again as if it was just last week we last saw one another. They were the same intelligent, engaged, kind, open hearted and generous individuals I had known when we had all been in another time and place. They were also outstanding hosts. The dog and cat household members were different, but consistently in character.

They took me to secret beaches which only locals know about, where, though it was height of tourist season, there was hardly a footprint on the pristine sand and where their boisterous dog ruined someone’s picture, but completed mine.

They took me to all the major tourist spots in their seaside home on the magnificent, magical central Oregon coast.

We saw lighthouses.

We saw roaring sea caves, blowholes and arches where the ocean played music on the instrument of the land. We gazed out over shorelines shaped by contact between elemental forces, where all is constantly shifting in the giving, taking, depositing, eroding.

We saw turquoise waters through trees on oh! so typical Pacific coast headlands (ah I remember!) framing calm bays.

We saw a huge colony of common murre .which look a bit like slim little penguins but fly magnificently and which, it turns out (after I did some research) I know as guillemot.

This was one of the few times I regretted not bringing my camera with a telephoto lens. Can you spot the murres?

We saw seals hauled out on rocks. As above about the telephoto lens. Look closely at the rock in the foreground below.

Though we took picnic lunches to viewpoints and tried hard enough, we didn’t see sign of whales. Summer isn’t really whale season on this coast.

We ate good food; they trusted me to be home alone with the animals when they had a social engagement; we talked late into the night and had too little sleep, then talked again through morning cups of coffee, but most of all these two lovely people shared with me the everyday details of their life On Golden Pond, made me feel absolutely welcome and cherished in their house with a path with a heart.

For which I am truly grateful

Friendship like that has been rare for me in this Unbrave New World which, incidentally (is it just me?) seems to get weirder (deliberate choice of word) by the hour.

BC & M: thank you for sharing your lives, your house, your animals and your path with a heart with me. Truly, deeply. Knowing people like you makes it all worthwhile. In the end. Oh and the book of photos and painted rock aren’t half bad, neither.

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length--and there I travel looking, looking breathlessly.

Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge