Full summer arrives, my car is broken into and I am struggling with the push pull between luscious hibernation and the visit of a friend that I dearly love.
With June and the approach of Solstice, Ojai moves into its season of extreme, dry heat and I move into a kind of semi-hibernation. Walking to my neighborhood creeks and hiking in the mountains become nighttime meanders by moon or starlight. (The nights are, blessedly, comfortably cool, often as much as 40 degrees cooler than the days.) The few times I wake at first light, I can sneak in a meander before the sun is full up. More often, I wake with just enough “cooler” hours to tend to my little gardens or do a few chores before I am prostrated by the near and above 100-degree temperatures.
I spend the lion’s share of most summer days lolling about on the rug under my fan, in my walnut-tree shaded hammock or on my giant-oak shaded swing: reading, drifting, dreaming, napping. (Except on my two-day-every-other-week ten-to-twelve hour workdays!) When I’m feeling restless or penned in by the heat, I head for one of the several semi-wild beaches a half-hour or so away and spend the day walking at the tide line.
It is, as winter is in colder climates, a time of stillness, inwardness and retreat. There is such lusciousness to the solitude in which I luxuriate in this season. The heat induced lethargy. The moving as though through molasses. The gradual surfacing of more lively energy as the day cools into evening. The juicy ripening of the summer fruits in the family orchard on the property (ambrosial apricots and Santa Rosa plums just now). Such delicious voluptuousness!!!
And, in the middle of this wonderfully lazy bliss, the lessons continue!
An especially dear friend comes to visit for a long weekend. I am delighted to see her in person, since ours is mostly an every-few-days, long-distance telephone sharing. I am full with anticipating the uproarious laughter and silliness we share in the midst of the really deep relating, fabulous eating and magical hiking we always do when together. Yet, I am also enormously crabby about surrendering my solitude. Even for such a brief time with someone I so love. Even with someone who is herself, by nature, a kindred spirit: a lover of solitude. For the last few days before she comes, I am irritable and very cranky. Wonderfully enough, I can share news of this process with her as it unfolds. She understands and recognizes the ambivalence to which she, too, is often subject when faced with “social plans.” She knows that she can trust that I will get through to the excitement by the time she comes. And, I do.
During our first mountain hike, the newly arrived “Ojai trail-head burglars” break into my car. Fortunately, in the week since their last “hit,” they’ve progressed from using a ball peen hammer to break the car window glass (five cars at another trailhead). They now use a “slim-jim” (the tool that AAA and locksmiths use) to get into my sixteen-year-old Toyota station wagon without damaging it.
They take my camping gear/earthquake emergency supplies, two library books-on-tape, my prescription sunglasses, my favorite windbreaker. It’s all been neatly packed in the baskets and containers I use to keep things in order under the flap that hides the “trunk” area. They just lift and carry it all away, $881 worth of “stuff!” (I know the total value because I have to make a list with replacement values for the claim on my renters’ insurance.)
But, none of it is irreplaceable or of particular sentimental value - except for the $15 totally perfect-for-me windbreaker! Even more magically, they totally miss my black crocheted backpack-purse stuffed under the driver’s seat – my credit cards, checkbooks and endless other cards/papers are safe! And, because this is Ojai (population: 8200), the police actually come to meet me at my house, to take an endlessly obsessive list describing every item I can remember and to fingerprint the car!
I cannot eat much of the sumptuous dinner we cook. I work to let go of the part of me that would, were I alone, make lists and plans for gathering replacements, for getting to the insurance company. All of which would make room for experiencing the grief, hurt feelings and outrage that someone would so violate me and my sense of sublime safety in this little town.
We both understand that I am wishing she weren’t here. She is wishing I could share the emotional processing that I need to save for later, when I am alone in my tent-womb sleeping space. But, I cannot.
When I go off to bed, I am awake most of the night. Awash in the expected storm of anguish, hurt, rage and distress. I cannot imagine how I can let go of all of this and be present with my friend over the next four days. I am resentful that I cannot (without waking my light-sleeping friend) take my awake self into my tiny house and at least begin the list making. I am overwhelmed at all the life changing this burglary precipitates: I can no longer feel so safe in my little village. I can no longer use my car as a storage space. I can no longer carry all my “just-in-case” supplies around with me all the time. I also hate that I cannot calm down to rest!
And then, finally, I do. The storm ends.
When I come in the next morning, we talk about how it was for both of us through the evening and night. We get to appreciate how different our styles of being with upset are. She, had she been in my place, would have wanted what to her would feel like the comfort of sharing from the middle of the processing. My way is always to withdraw into myself for the safety and comfort I need to be in the middle of raw emotions. I see how my way can stir feelings of being rejected. (Even as she has reminded herself that she knows this is “just Robyn’s way.”) The burglary, in the end, has given us a gift: the deepening of our experiential understanding of our differentness.
The distance of the night before melts in this sharing. I have surfaced. The distress I swam though in the night is over. I am fully present. I am ready for the playing and journeying together that even this conversation is a part of. I am done dealing with the burglary until my friend is on her way home. The endless lesson is letting go.
Originally published July 2001
