this place
What can be said about Big Sur that hasn’t already been said?
Some of history’s most proficient poets and prosaists have waxed lyrical about the resonant peace of its canyons; its ceaseless wars of land and sea; and the many happenings, both great and minor, hidden behind its misty coastal curtain. They have all said different things while saying the same: This place is fathomless. This place is mysterious. This place is wild.
It’s the celestial, made terrestrial—a microcosm of all that is ragged and unhewn. This place is a beat of the heart and a scrape on the chin. A stinging contentment. A soul place.
A place whose secrets remain secret except to those who sit long and quiet.
I’ve had the pleasure of spending some days and nights in this profound place, including a recent jaunt with my good friends at OTIS, and yet it continues to outweigh my abilities of description or summation.
Therefore, I’ll simply share a few passages that I feel capture at least a corner of Big Sur’s enigmatic ether, written by those who took the time to sit, long and quiet, and who were in turn told the veiled secrets of this place.
Big Sur is a thin place, that wonderful goosebumpy term describing the Indescribable; a veil lifted, light cutting through. It is why mystics and poets, seekers of all sorts, have long ventured [there].
- Taylor Bruce, Wildsam
“I and my wife are here in the pursuit of happiness as we exist for good”
- Helmuth Deetjen
“I’d say that such retreat-places are ideal for people who crave a kind of peace, an active quiet and a silence that isn’t merely the absence of noise, but the presence of a kind of quickening. A place to do what is hardest, which is nothing at all.”
Mountain Pines by Robinson Jeffers
In scornful upright loneliness they stand,
Counting themselves no kin of anything
Whether of earth or sky. Their gnarled roots cling
Like wasted fingers of a clutching hand
In the grim rock. A silent spectral band
They watch the old sky, but hold no communing
With aught. Only, when some lone eagle’s wing
Flaps past above their gray and desolate land,
Or when the wind pants up a rough-hewn glen,
Bending them down as with an age of thought,
Or when, ‘mid flying clouds that can not dull
Her constant light, the moon shines silver, then
They find a soul, and their dim moan is wrought
Into a singing sad and beautiful.
The Road to Kate’s by Heidi Hopkins
The fog spread out at my feet is a world of shadowed canyons and steep-sided hills where everyone would be weightless, where running up the sides of hills and bounding from rise to rise would be effortless. A world tantalizingly within the reach of my eyes yet just beyond the reach of my legs. If I could only jump out far enough… one huge leap would carry me to that cloudy world. It is too far. My eyes rove so much farther than my legs.
Birdsong cascades down the steep canyons to meet the rising sigh of the streams. Jumping up, I add my shout to theirs out over the expanse. The call floats back out of the canyon in the wavering echo. I play with the echo, shouting it down, encouraging it along. Hello Hello!
In recent months, the Big Sur community has been dealt multiple blows and is struggling. If you wish to support its people and businesses, donations can be made via the Community Foundation for Monterey County.