Pt. Reyes Station Part Nine

Pt. Reyes has also been a natural testing ground of sorts. That sounds bad, but the place just has a way of uncovering what is.

Put simply, the gracious of heart and mind thrive there, a few others have not.

You may accuse me of being petty. I am not. For example, my Ex-wife feels as free there as I do, as she should. Despite our many differences it is holy ground to both of us. It makes me happy to think of her at the retreat house we both found that day.

[Editor's note: I talked with her on the phone and she believes the retreat house had been casually mentioned by author Parker Palmer, who is really fantastic, when he visited Sacramento earlier that year. I do not recall this, but it may well have happened. The timing is about right...and Darrell Johnson and I spent a wonderful afternoon with Palmer and picked his amazing brain together for several hours in 1991. I still read his works and highly recommend them.]

I once took a woman I was dating not once, but twice, to Inverness. Though a stange Pagan, she claimed to have a Jesus epiphany as we sat and talked under the huge pine trees. She said (this was her claim, I cannot, nor will I attempt to verify) that as we sat and talked she had some tangible sense of Jesus just above me.

This is not unprecedented, but I tend to be skeptical.

Both trips ended badly. Later I would understand why when more was revealed. A proclivity to cruelty that I had not forseen. I now understand why I was unwardly troubled in Pt. Reyes. I have only, in 38 years, had four bad incidents there. She accounted for two of them.

The other two? Oh you must know I suppose.

One was when I missed how sensitive my oldest son was in adolescence about his own growing pride (good pride) and I threw him in the surf. It was a huge mistake and I apologized later and humbled myself. I also lost my glasses in the surf at the same time. A very poetic justice.

Then I also left my camera once on the beach as my later-to-be first wife and I walked on the beach. When we came back. It was gone. Stolen.

To those four monor incidents, I have thousands of amazing memories, pictures, paintings and experiences. The few you see here are the tip of an immense iceberg. I hope you will keep reading.