Taking the Long View

(standing in the garden at Esalen, looking out towards the sea)


The other night I was at dinner at Julie and Jhos' beautiful house up in the Berkeley hills. After saying my hellos and being introduced to their three kids and Tiger, the cat, Julie took me on the tour and our first stop was the sweeping deck that runs along the entire back of their first floor. Since the house is built into the hill one actually goes in at ground level in the front and then walks out onto the deck in the back and is about twenty-five feet off the ground with the slope of the hill unfolding below into an urban orchard with fruit trees and raised vegetable beds. Raising one's gaze from the intense, detailed beauty of the mini-farm below to the vastness of the Bay Area poured out across the horizon really helps to explain how the expression "as far as the eye can see" was coined.

To the far left, or south, I could see the San Mateo Bridge and to the far right, or north I could see Sonoma. Past the skyscrapers and hills and encroaching evening fog of the city I could see the Terrific Pacific, as we've called it in Third Grade. "Isn't it amazing?" Julie asked. Um, yes...

She told me a story of how she goes out there for her fifteen minutes of Sunset Therapy every evening, how she first learned when visiting her sister who lives nestled among the tall trees of Ukiah how profoundly restorative it is to allow your eye to be drawn so far away from your own location, how when taking the long view of things your lungs can't help but breathe more deeply and your heart will begin to beat more slowly. So I tried it. I looked out past the sharp rising beauty of Sutro Tower, a mere eight blocks from my old apartment in the city, and imagined myself standing on Ocean Beach looking out over the waves of the sea. I gazed at the ocean, not from close up with my feet in the sand but from high up in the air miles away on Julie's deck and I felt it in my lungs and heart, my mind and my spirit. The long view came to rest upon and within me in a way I had not expected at all.

So what does this mean, taking the long view? It can been done from high peaks and smooth beaches, it can be done from within one's self. It is not easy, for me at least. I am nearsighted both in body and in soul but unfortunately there are no contacts for my psyche, no way to bring into focus the things off in the distance and expand my sights beyond what is literally right in front of me. Lately as I have been thinking about the summer and weighing options for next year I've been considering everything from where to live and work, what kind of community in which I want to participate and whom I want in that community with me, and I have been overwhelmed. The short view of the present is crowded with images that compete for my attention, is hectic in design and difficult to interpret at times.

As an antidote to that chaos I have begun in the last few days to try and bring Julie's Sunset Therapy into practice in my own life, to see the long view from within my soul and, when all else fails, to lift my eyes from my computer or my studies or my dishes that I'm washing and look up, out the window, at the tops of the trees, towards the sea.