Mark and I arrived in Ojai 10 days ago. A community member generously offered us their guest cottage for a few weeks, shaded by the maternal presence of oak and sycamore trees. The Chumash name Ojai translates to nest. This nest, a valley of stillness, sheltered by the TopaTopa Mountains, drew my grandparents to live here decades ago. It is the place where Mark and I first met in 2013 and the place we called home for 5 years.
This morning, while on a walk at the river bottom, we had the shared realization that it had been exactly seven years — to the day — since we had left Ojai and driven cross-country to resettle in North Carolina.
We had chosen the mountains of western North Carolina through our appreciation of the deep green forests, the warmth of the people, and the affordable land. We hadn't known the timing yet of our move date, but when we each actually had consecutive dreams about a big wildfire coming through Ojai, the kind of dream that carries the instructive clarity of a premonition, we packed our belongings and began our drive. Exactly two weeks later, the Thomas Fire came through Ojai moving through our neighborhood first, and our entire community back at home was catapulted into trauma.
Though Ojai and our community here have all recovered, returning to this place on the anniversary of the day we left feels particularly tender. Having been flung out of our home and community in Black Mountain, NC, by Hurricane Helene (the most unexpected series of events), this fall has been for us a period of profound displacement and disorientation; yet it has also been a re-awakening. Being cast out of the sanctuary we had created there — and the land we were in constant communication and interrelatedness with — has made us even more aware of the fragility of this life… and the vulnerability of the human built environment.
Our larger community has been sheltering us, as we have traveled from the East Coast back to California, yet it has been disorienting to be in a different place every week, knowing there is actually no home to return to. We still have raw moments of feeling in complete shock.
It has also put us more in touch with our compassion and solidarity for displacement as a collective experience. There's an increasing number of beings displaced on Planet Earth right now, ranging from climate refugees to refugees of war, the homeless, those who are incarcerated, children who are displaced through the child welfare system, and animals displaced by desertification and other ecological phenomena. Here in the US the displacement and deportation of millions of immigrants has been announced for 2025, a fact that chills me to the bone.
I believe we all feel some degree of disorientation as we meet the year’s end, through the cataclysmic changes we are bearing witness to in our world… the aftermath of the elections, the continuation of wars in Israel, Gaza, Ukraine, and across continents, and a dismantling of systems we have relied upon in our world.
Before we left western North Carolina, Mark and I bore witness to the dismantling of an entire region as we had known it. The sheer amount of debris, Armageddon-like destruction, and chaotic devastation cracked open my mind beyond possibilities I had imagined before. It is the closest thing I’ve seen to a war zone and our community there will be in recovery for years.
I’ve heard stories of military volunteers coming back to the US only to find existential confusion and disconnect in the process of returning home to a society immersed in normalcy. Having had such an expanded experience of service and unification, of life and death, coming home to the relative world concerns of people back home often hasn’t made sense to us. On some days, Mark and I are navigating a similar experience to veterans returning from war zones. Given a second chance at life, we are more present than ever each day to the expanded state of being and the fundamental question: What is of essence and what is not?
Alongside meeting the responsibilities of endless forms to fill out seeking aid, constant running of errands, and tangling bureaucracy, we are guided by a fierce, primal calling to prioritize Truth as we simultaneously engage with the relative world’s demands. We were flung out of our home but also flung out of familiar habit patterns and life as we knew it. We are in a liminal process of dismemberment which opens the door to all possibility.
Yesterday, I prepared to lead a teaching online about Luminous Darkness. That morning, I had reflected on and outlined certain excerpts and practices from my book. I had created a comfortable setup for teaching on Zoom in the tiny cottage where we are staying, and picked wildflowers and sage for the vase beside me. Just as I was about to go live, my computer unexpectedly crashed and the connection entirely disappeared. Gone were any notes or documents I had prepared. The group of international participants was left waiting. The host was left wondering.
My body responded with sensations of disorientation and surprise, alongside a familiar relief. I felt the symptoms of the now familiar experience of everything in the relative world being stripped down unexpectedly. Expectations being erased. Plans dissolving. Communication disappearing. Ground Zero. We all know the experience of our expectations dissolving, through storms and power outages, through COVID-19, through the recent election, through life changing dramatically before our eyes; but still we forget… The crash felt symbolic of the spiritual teachings of the Hurricane Helene experience and my lived experience of displacement.
None of us know what will happen next. The only preparation for Life is living in the Now. The only real preparation for Life is our Self. This is the teaching of Zero.
Everytime Life strips away that which is human-made and puts me in touch with the distilled nakedness of being human without the external trappings we’ve come to assume are dependable, I feel a glimmer of freedom, alongside the jolt of loss. I recognize the truth of Zero as our home base.
There is nothing external that we can rely upon all of the time, nor that can save us from our vulnerability as human beings. We can spend a lot of time investing in preparations and fears that take us entirely away from the only thing worth investing in: The present moment. Ground Zero. Groundlessness.
In the hurricane, my husband and I had the life/death experience of everything being lost. Our house fell apart with me inside it. Our life’s belongings disappeared into an unfathomable landslide and flood. Access to water was gone. My life was nearly taken by the home I considered my safest place. For the entire week after (and weeks for many), communication lines were down. Roads were disrupted. The modern human world was stopped in its course entirely. Everything was stripped down to Zero. There was no one “out there” to save us.
When I first emerged from the mud where I was buried and tumbled and nearly died, I felt the benevolent presence of St. Francis and Clare, two saints who have been inspirations for me since my time as a Buddhist monk. St. Francis offered, in his time, a teaching called holy poverty, in which he renunciated all of the material trappings of his life and devoted himself to radical Trust in Life, inspired by the teachings of Jesus Christ. Similar to Buddhism, the teaching of renunciation reminds us that being overly caught up/invested in the material world and world of appearances/attainment (in ways we might not even realize) distracts and blocks our access to what we most long for: Trust in Life.
I've lived as a monk and I’ve lived as a lay teacher in this lifetime… and I’ve come to understand that it doesn’t matter what context we are living in…
Ground Zero is the place of emptiness where we have nothing but our connection to Source, which is everything.
Meditation teaches us to anchor in Source even when there is no solid ground beneath us.
We have a choice in every moment to let go of every shiny, colorful object, thought, distraction, and identification that takes us further away, rather than closer to our connection to Source.
We can start with exactly what is in front of us, here and now, and be intimate with Life as it is.
Perhaps the collective changes we face, alongside loss and discomfort, are inviting us to clarify our understanding of who we actually are, what is important, and deepen our trust in Life. This is a time for all of us of letting go of expectations we didn’t even know we had. We don’t, as an example, know the exact ways climate change will impact us. But we can show up in ways that affirm our trust in emergence, in the reciprocal circle of interconnection, outside our bubble of separate self. We do know that there's an opportunity to come home to ourselves and to each other through each breath and each moment… and to invest in our connection to Source, which is real and can be sustained through everything we will ever experience. That is what is real.
As we approach the year's end, I feel evermore present to the teachings of Zero. I feel more gratitude than ever to simply be alive. Sometimes this post-hurricane journey has been uncomfortably bumpy, and I’ve found myself exhausted from living out of luggage for so many weeks or triggered by not being able to find socks in my suitcase. But we have not lost sight of the liberating nature and spiritual invitation of this time. Our desire is always to be of service, to deepen our connection to Source, and to trust in Life.
