Notes from Paradise! (an introduction)

I can imagine your facial expression as you digest my title… the eyebrows raised and sarcastic half-smile, the chin swivel from left to right. I can guess that you know the truth about Santa Barbara, so your response to my title sounds a bit like, “What is she thinking?!”, “Cheesy!”, or “paradise??”.

Well you’re right. Santa Barbara isn’t Paradise. But where I write from practically is—I swear you might say so yourself if you got the chance to visit. I type from a home that sits 25 feet off Paradise Road in the Los Padres National Forest.

I write in my head as I hike down the paths that wind through the back-country wilderness. And sometimes, when the light is right or the deer and the Red-tailed hawks are making themselves at home right outside my window, then it feels as if I’m really where I wanted to be all my life: in Paradise. So I’m taking notes for you while you are stuck somewhere else: at the office, or dentist, or Dallas. I want to give you a taste of the sweetness that comes from living in a canyon that hums with crickets and wind, coyotes and star-studded silence. I want to describe what it is to live on the edge of a place called Paradise.

Living on the edge is a good metaphor for the type of living I’ve been up to for the last eight months. Along with my husband and my two great kids, I left the apartment one day and set up house in a tent. We spent last summer re-learning old arts: cooking without electricity, moving from spot to spot frequently (our covered wagon happened to be a Subaru legacy with a top rack), and naming the stars. It was wonderful, but extremely difficult. There were days I felt like I was beating my head against the sycamores, because simplification was so hard.

Eventually we had to give up the lifestyle of Caucasian, middle class gypsies, and move back indoors. School had started for the kids, and both Jason and I had new full-time jobs. It was a great relief to scatter after dinner to our three separate bedrooms. It was also disorienting after sleeping in such close quarters, to be separated by walls. Five full months after moving mattresses into this rental we love, we still tend to sleep with the doors half opened.

I’m telling you this so that when you read this blog you’ll have some sort of reference for where my stories, poems, and descriptions are born. Not just the scenery inspires—the “out of my comfort zone” choices are also the backdrop. I have some large goals for this blog time we’ll share:

1. Make you smile

2. Learn a lot about myself

3. Awaken the longings and hope that you carry around in your heart for edgier, more rewarding relationships with people… nature… God…

All that said, I’ll end this long-winded introduction with a poem I love. It was written by famous poet William Stafford, who “found” his voice as a writer when he was living—no kidding—just a mile up the road from where I live now. A conscientious objector of WWII, he was “sentenced” to work in a camp nearby where he earned $2.50 a month for such duties as fire fighting, soil conservation, and the building and maintaining of roads and trails. Stafford’s writing from that time confirms a truth I have been testing as I live out here in “the boonies”, isolated from friends in town and high speed wireless. That truth is this: I have the power to define where I live. My actions and attitudes will make all the difference in whether or not I find myself living as a prisoner cut off from an entire world, or whether I might, if I can dare to imagine it, be living—you guessed it-- in Paradise….

As Pippa Lilted

Good things will happen

when the green flame of spring

goes up into the hills where

we’d have our ranch if

we had the money.

It will be soon—

we’ll hold our arms ready,

long toward the table

like Cezanne’s people,

and let the light pour.

Just wait a little more—

let new errors cancel

the things we did wrong.

That’s the right way for us:

our errors will dance.

It will be soon;

good things will happen.

~William Stafford~

(The way It Is, new and selected poems of William Stafford, published by Graywolf Press)