Notes from California

I’m reading a book about a man’s stay in Montana in the winter. He had no electricity, just running water and some batteries for light to read by at night. It’s a pretty cool book to read during my “silence therapy”. Friday night I was reading and listening to the frogs outside (its been rainy here) and it sparked a couple of memories of places I’ll probably never go again.

As some of you know, I lived in California for a little while. Linda used to cater events on occasion and I would work with her every now and then and help her in the kitchen or serve, or do whatever she needed me to.

Once she prepared food for a women’s retreat in Matilija….now, to tell you the truth, I have no clue where that is. I think its somewhere near Ojai, CA. It’s a law that you can’t smoke cigarettes in Ojai…and we had to hide to smoke there, so I know it had to have been in Ojai. Anyway, the retreat was at this cool place in the middle of nowhere. It felt like it was a secret place that not many people knew about. We got to sleep on the floor in one of the cabins. There were natural hot springs in the cabins and I thought that was cool. No TV, no radio…our cell phones didn’t work, we were truly tucked between mountains. I remember having to get up really early to help Linda with food for the women. It was mainly a vegetarian menu. The ladies had yoga and meditation in the morning and then they came to eat breakfast. I remember just totally tripping out at these women. For one thing, I guess yoga makes you hungry because they ate more food than a dang football team. Throughout the retreat I watched them paint gourds, do weird goddess dances, chants…it was interesting. On the final night there they all got in a big tent. They burned coal in a hole dug in the middle of the inside of the tent. I’m not sure what the purpose of this was – something about sweating out impurities or something. I was really amazed by the whole thing. I watched them and couldn’t believe how long they could stay in that tent sweating to death. Anyway, watching them was extremely entertaining (preparing their food was not, they weren’t the nicest women in the world). But – the coolest thing about it all to me was the noises you heard at night out there in the middle of nowhere. There wasn’t anything close to this place. No car sounds, nothing but the sounds of water in the creek below and the hot springs, and whatever animals lived in the forest (if you call the forest “the woods” in CA, you get laughed at.) I felt revitalized when it was time to go home. All the stresses I brought to the place melted away somehow. I think I have 1 picture of us there. I hope I never forget it.

Another place we worked was at Zaca Lake (http://www.zacalakeretreat.com) Its located in the San Rafael mountains. Linda worked there quite often, but I only worked one wedding with her. We, again, got to sleep on the floor of a cabin. The place was awesome. It’s a huge 20 acre lake that has these huge orange fish. I don’t know if they were koi or what, but I sat and looked at them (you could see the bottom of the lake) for hours. We had to be careful with the food and make sure that everything was locked up so that bears wouldn’t break in and eat everything. I remember it was the first time that I had experienced tofu (disgusting no matter what you do to it). I don’t know what it is about vegetarians on retreats! I got the very cool job of running the juice bar (it was cool except after grinding 8 million carrots and beets your hands turn interesting colors). It was cool, we had wheat grass and ginger and all sorts of different things to juice. The WOODS (I cant help it, Im southern) around the lake were awesome, the mountains were covered with greenery. There were cool birds there. We fed weird looking geese. I remember the sounds at night…..I remember that it sounded like crickets, but it wasn’t crickets…Linda told me what it was, but I can’t remember what she said. We had a flash light when the sun went down. There wasn’t any electricity in our cabin. We were reading a Harry Potter book and we took turns reading to each other and we drank some wine that we had brought along …it was cool to read with flashlights. Anyway, that’s what I remember, and that’s what flashed through my mind as I was reading and listening to the frogs.