A Kind of Paradise

I don’t make my peace with paradise by flicking a switch. It takes about 48 hours for my body to acclimate to pleasure, sun, quiet, the complete absence of responsibility. This tendency to struggle with the transition from real life to vacation life was especially difficult this time after I got caught in the bathroom on the plane to Cabo during a 30 minute period of intense turbulence. The rocking and rolling may have been caused by those famous culprits, the Santa Ana winds, or possibly by the intense heat from the fires. I was 35,000 feet above the disaster but I felt it and it was fierce. Even at that altitude, I knew something was terribly wrong. In the bathroom, you understand, there are no seatbelts and the sides of the cubicle are very close to your head. Additionally, my pants were down, adding a shot of shame to the potent fear cocktail. I thought immediately of my mother who always warned of the horror of being discovered by emergency medical personnel wearing dirty underwear. All I could do was hold the grab bar on the right and the sink on the left and repeat what I guess is my mantra. Dear God, holy one of Being, thank you for this day. I can’t explain my theological relationship to these words but they work and that’s what counts when you have lost all control. This is a different order of magnitude from the day to day experience of believing that you do have control over events, even though that is the grand illusion.

The following morning in Cabo, the clock radio in the room went off at 4:45 am. Someone else’s early morning return flight was fueling up. My organism was still far too out of whack to go back to sleep so I blurred through my first day in paradise, marveling at the cobalt tiles lining the bottom of all the pools making them look like giant inkwells. Later, we arranged for a driver to take us to the massive supermarket that sells Cheerios and cactus. I enjoy shuffling my fifty words of Spanish into little phrases that are good for getting help. Dónde está la cerveza? I have a second very bad night’s sleep in which I have to remind myself that nothing lasts forever. Not turbulence. Not insomnia. Not life itself.

Photo by Eric Clark on Unsplash

Now I am fully here, well rested and bringing my overfed body and my overactive mind back into some sort of equilibrium. I am thinking about that mantra. For starters, it’s interesting that it’s a prayer of gratitude not a plea for help. I know without any doubt that I have lived a life of great good fortune and I’m more than willing to give thanks for that. But I am not willing to ask some entity outside myself to bail me out of a jam. When I was awake at 2 am on the second night, I went out on the balcony overlooking the Sea of Cortes and listened to the surf. I reminded myself that I was continuous with that creation and that everything in it ebbs and flows. This is what I mean when I use the very politically loaded word God. I mean the whole of life, every molecule of it integrated with every other molecule. Every molecule of it impermanent. We forget that this word people use to refer to the holy is just that…..a word. It has an infinite number of definitions and means something quite different to Pete Hegseth than it means to me. The middle-of-the-night reality check I experienced on the balcony in Cabo left me with my jaw hanging open. Why me? How come I’m here? Why am I human? Thank you for this day. Nowhere is it written that I would see this moon over this water. Pure dumb luck.

I wasn’t sure about being in Cabo in the lead-up to the inauguration but I’m finding the perspective illuminating like a flashlight revealing the old yearbooks and photograph albums piled up in the basement. The stark emptiness of the landscape, the cliffs descending to the sea, is clarifying. I can see my blessing, my aging, my whiteness. I can see the women in the hallway carrying the towels and my plate piled high with raw tuna and sea bass. I can see the coming turbulence, the fires and the floods. But I do not see a God I can appeal to to spare us. I see only us and the water and the fish and that is the God I know and that knows me, a kind of paradise.

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