Esalen 2

October 27, 2013


Night. Twenty minutes before my final session. The first two went well, so the fear of being an abject failure is gone.

Day spent staring. Staring at the orange marigolds with the orange monarchs upon them, as though the butterflies drew their color from the flowers on the fly. Staring, ever and ever at the sea. This landscape with without nostalgia for me. It is pure. I have no memories of it, no sadness, no longing; the reception of it is oddly clean, fully fresh, unmarked. Staring most recently at Venus tremendous over the sea, the horizon still a little blood where the sun sank. When I turned on the lights in my room, I thought how some creature far out at sea could see me, know that I was by the light I shed toward the darkening west. And I no longer could see it.

I am sad about something. Leaving? Seeing L again, as I do every few years, remembering that I love him, seeing his beauty and his virtues undiminished? I am sad about something, and there is nothing to be sad about, only light and waves and the perfect stars. I am alone beside the waves and under the perfect stars. Perhaps it is that.

Mist over the sea, no stars, but the high small moon leaking a kind of radiance into the murky dome. The Pacific to one side grumbling and hissing. It is too early for the land to say anything.

4 AM

Three women at my presentation last night. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t have come, either. The discussion was good. What they needed? Who knows? I think of the long hill path, lined with uncertain lights, threading through darkness to the Murphy House.

I can’t account for my feeling of dull, pervasive dread. I feel many things, but usually not that. It’s as if I had a premonition that Esalen were about to be pitched into the sea. Just as I found it. . .  It would figure. It is possible that the dread is not dread, but sadness, and it is over L. I really do forget him between timeswith  the Sun; the remembrance is both bittersweet and gratuitous. It’s like some failed pretender to the throne remembering the time he was almost acknowledged in the streets.

This beautiful, changeable place. Changeable and immovable at the same time. I am like the elves in Tolkien, disquieted by contact with the sea.