Letting It Go
“No matter what arises, whether in the state of waking, dreaming, or sleeping, you are the mere witness of Attention itself….” Adi Da Samraj
In 1993, we moved to Roanoke, a lovely city in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Our extended family wanted us to come live near them with the new baby. They had been asking us for a decade to join them and make it a permanent family reunion.
We were reluctant, firmly attached to our cozy homestead cabin in California, twelve miles from the nearest paved road, which was the highway that led to the tiny highway town. High on a mesa with forever views, space to build on and arrange things our own way.
Electricity was already available in this paradise, but water had to be delivered by truck to our 700 gallon tank every three weeks. It was hooked up to a simple kitchen sink and a shower at first, the gray water routed to the ancient creosotes and a couple of palm trees we planted by the house.
Upgrading the original outhouse meant digging way deep, sprucing up the wood inside and adding a cheerful curtain. That sufficed for a couple of years till a septic system and indoor plumbing was completed.
We both agreed that actually the conveniences were, well, convenient.
“But I do miss seeing the sunrise from the outhouse.”
“Plus that feeling of solitude…serenity…the silence.”
“Scampering with the dogs through the cold.”
“The wind chimes…”
“Yeah.”
We were taking steps, one at a time, toward simplifying our life, and it was liberating. We were just beginning to understand the power of even a little bit of letting go.
“The Search for Happiness is a confession of un-Happiness, and is the only obstruction to Being Present in the Prior State of Happiness, which is Always Already the Case.” …Adi Da Samraj
As it turned out, the idea of regular family gatherings, orderly paved streets, and plentiful rainwater for gardens, heated up the consideration to move east. The remote pioneer picture looked different after the earthquake.
Records show the Landers Earthquake woke us up at 4:57 a.m. on Sunday, June 28, 1992, buckling the road to Landers, a sparsely populated area with a Post Office a couple of miles from our cabin. The shock had a ‘moment magnitude’ of 7.3 and a Mercalli intensity of maximum IX (9) (Violent).
Yikes! We had a heavy yellow ‘71 Ford Maverick parked out in the dirt driveway, which we noticed was bucking and bouncing during the 30 seconds we scooped up the baby and scooted outside, away from anything taller than us!
The earthquake involved the rupture of several different faults. The ‘surface rupture’ extended for 43 miles with a maximum ‘horizontal displacement’ of 18 feet and a maximum ‘vertical displacement’ of 6 feet.
The house held together fine…nothing broken or awry.
But this visit from Mother Nature shook us to our metaphysical roots.
By the middle of the next July, we had changed course and put the family on the road to Roanoke.
My ex and I did the out-in-the-boonies thing too - we loved it. And we moved back into the madding crowd, as well -
I love your drawings!
I hope you will write more about your time Out There! (Or perhaps you already have and I haven't seen it.... )
Thanks so much for your response…!