Ah… sad day with the fires…
I hope this entry finds you safe, with family, friends, Loved Ones.
Life is fleeting, but beauty, she is everywhere….
On The Menu:
Big Sur Burning
Henry on Big Sur….
Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch…
Big Sur, The Way It Was…
Poet Of The Blessed Coast: Robinson Jeffers
A gift from Mike Crowley: Rabbi Shergill – Bulla Ki Jaana Maen Kaun
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Big Sur Burning
This was going to be an edition with some very nice poetry from ancient India, but a fire got in the way.
As I write, Big Sur is burning. Maybe Nepenthes, The Big Sur Store, or Deetjens… Big Sur, has always been a place of great beauty and a location that changes me spiritually from when I was 15, and standing on the shore, to living up Lime Kiln Creek Canyon a half year later.
Big Sur is where Mary and I had our honeymoon, (8 years into our marriage)… staying at Deetjen’s: 
(this is the original building when the highway ran right past… ) We stayed in the Fireside Room, with nightly visits from the Raccoon’s after they raided the kitchens….
Lots of good memories of that time… Tripping up the Little Sur with the Blessed Little Ones, watching the sunset at Nepenthes, driving down past Esalen, Emile White holding and kissing Mary’s hand and making cooing sounds about her beauty at The Henry Miller Memorial Library…. He must of been about 88 then. We still have his poster on the wall next to Mary’s computer.
Mary says we’ll go south in a year or so, to visit. I have promised Rowan and his friends a road trip south down Highway 1/101. We will end at Lime Kiln Creek where my life took a turn and by the blessings of the sea, sky and land of the Sur, I ended up who I am today. Everything changes everytime I visit. The road opens up, and vision comes clear again.
Big Sur has that effect. Long may it tumble down into the sea….
Blessings,
Gwyllm
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Henry on Big Sur….
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Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch…
“Some will say they do not wish to dream their lives away. As if life itself were not a dream, a very real dream from which there is no awakening! We pass from one state of dream to another: from the dream of sleep to the dream of waking, from the dream of life to the dream of death. Whoever has enjoyed a good dream never complains of having wasted his time. On the contrary, he is delighted to have partaken of a reality which serves to heighten and enhance the reality of everyday.
The oranges of Bosch’s “millennium,” as I said before, exhale this dreamlike reality which constantly eludes us and which is the very substance of life. They are far more delectable, far more potent, than the Sunkist oranges we daily consume in the naive belief that they are laden with wonder-working vitamins. the millennial oranges which Bosch created restore the soul: the ambiance in which he suspended them is the everlasting one of spirit become real.
Every creature, every object, everyplace has it’s own ambiance. Our world itself possesses an ambiance which is unique. But worlds, objects, creatures, places, all have this in common: they are ever in a state of transformative power. when the personality liquefies, so to speak, as it does so deliciously in dream, and the very nature of one’s being is alchemized, when form and substance, time and space, become yeilding and elastic, responsive and obedient to one’s slightest wish, he who awakens from his dream knows beyond all doubt that the imperishable soul which he calls his own is but a vehicle of the eternal element of change”
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Big Sur, The Way It Was…
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Poet Of The Blessed Coast: Robinson Jeffers
Fire On The Hills
The deer were bounding like blown leaves
Under the smoke in front the roaring wave of the brush-fire;
I thought of the smaller lives that were caught.
Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror
Of the deer was beautiful; and when I returned
Down the back slopes after the fire had gone by, an eagle
Was perched on the jag of a burnt pine,
Insolent and gorged, cloaked in the folded storms of his shoulders
He had come from far off for the good hunting
With fire for his beater to drive the game; the sky was merciless
Blue, and the hills merciless black,
The sombre-feathered great bird sleepily merciless between them.
I thought, painfully, but the whole mind,
The destruction that brings an eagle from heaven is better than men.
—
July Fourth By The Ocean
The continent’s a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is
for park and playground, this helpless
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
All docile between this ocean and the other. If
flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
Cracks walls, it is only a slave’s blunder or the
natural
Shudder of a new made slave. Therefore we happy
masters about the solstice
Light bonfires on the shore and celebrate our power.
The bay’s necklaced with fire, the bombs make crystal
fountains in the air, the rockets
Shower swan’s-neck over the night water…. I
imagined
The stars drew apart a little as if from troublesome
children, coldly compassionate;
But the ocean neither seemed astonished nor in awe:
If this had been the little sea that Xerxes whipped,
how it would have feared us.
—
—
The Summit Redwood
Only stand high a long enough time your lightning
will come; that is what blunts the peaks of
redwoods;
But this old tower of life on the hilltop has taken
it more than twice a century, this knows in
every
Cell the salty and the burning taste, the shudder
and the voice.
The fire from heaven; it has
felt the earth’s too
Roaring up hill in autumn, thorned oak-leaves tossing
their bright ruin to the bitter laurel-leaves,
and all
Its under-forest has died and died, and lives to be
burnt; the redwood has lived. Though the fire
entered,
It cored the trunk while the sapwood increased. The
trunk is a tower, the bole of the trunk is a
black cavern,
The mast of the trunk with its green boughs the
mountain stars are strained through
Is like the helmet-spike on the highest head of an
army; black on lit blue or hidden in cloud
It is like the hill’s finger in heaven. And when the
cloud hides it, though in barren summer, the
boughs
Make their own rain.
Old Escobar had a cunning trick
when he stole beef. He and his grandsons
Would drive the cow up here to a starlight death and
hoist the carcass into the tree’s hollow,
Then let them search his cabin he could smile for
pleasure, to think of his meat hanging secure
Exalted over the earth and the ocean, a theft like a
star, secret against the supreme sky.
—
Vulture
I had walked since dawn and lay down to rest on a bare hillside
Above the ocean. I saw through half-shut eyelids a vulture wheeling
high up in heaven,
And presently it passed again, but lower and nearer, its orbit
narrowing,
I understood then
That I was under inspection. I lay death-still and heard the flight-
feathers
Whistle above me and make their circle and come nearer.
I could see the naked red head between the great wings
Bear downward staring. I said, ‘My dear bird, we are wasting time
here.
These old bones will still work; they are not for you.’ But how
beautiful
he looked, gliding down
On those great sails; how beautiful he looked, veering away in the
sea-light
over the precipice. I tell you solemnly
That I was sorry to have disappointed him. To be eaten by that beak
and
become part of him, to share those wings and those eyes–
What a sublime end of one’s body, what an enskyment; what a life
after death.
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Rabbi Shergill – Bulla Ki Jaana Maen Kaun
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Thanks for reading Turfing.
Bright Blessings…
G