Ray and I drove up to the orange grove in Ojai today to gather oranges for the holidays, and also to sort out furniture in our storage bins there to take to Texas for the 2nd floor turret room in Lyon House. We got up early and were on our way by 5:30 am. We arrived in Ojai at 7 am just as the sun was rising. Here are some pictures of that early hour.
The sectional couch we wanted to take was – of course – all the way in the back of the bin, which meant taking almost everything out to get to it. Two hours later, we had the couch out and ready to load in the van. That’s when we saw all the stuff that had to go back into the bin…Another hour passed while we put all that junk back in.
We decided to head into town to go to the junk store and have a look around. Yes, you are right to question this logic after reading that it took us three hours to deal with the junk we already own. This, alas, is what antique dealers/collectors do – ask any of them.
It was just as we were returning from that trip that we happen to turn on the radio and heard the news about the Connecticut school shootings. We listened for a few minutes, then turned off the radio to finish up our work. We had both heard enough to get the gist.
The orange grove was quiet save for the cawing of crows. There is a peacefulness there that is indescribable. We have no electricity so there’s no option to go sit and stare at the news coverage on television. Instead, Ray and I went in opposite directions and began finishing up the work that still needed to be done before we could head back to LA. I took down our tent, which has been up all summer and fall. The motivation: the ants that I spied inside. Never a good sign and, sure enough, once I pulled out all the bedding I saw the infestation. We would have had a very uncomfortable night in that bed.
As I pulled out all the mattresses and bedding, swept out the tent, hit it with ant spray and then began the process of shaking out everything that had been in the tent, I couldn’t help but feel the irony that here I was working quietly amid trees and birds while over 20 innocent children and several adults had been gunned down this very same morning across the country in a place that they had considered extremely safe until today.
Our country appears to be experiencing an epidemic of violence amid a small percentage of 20-something young men who are so disconnected from their feelings that they can kill randomly and with premeditation. I can’t sort out all the causes for this at the moment, but several seem obvious. One is the availability of semi-automatic weapons that are capable of mowing people down very quickly, causing massive injury and death. A second involves dehumanizing people to a degree that a previously nonviolent person is suddenly capable of murdering others at point-blank range. We must look critically as a nation at what are the causes and remedies of these situations. One would be gun control. The other, a hard look at the factors these young men share in common and then putting programs in place to address this type of societal alienation.
We all have work to do to help our youth to feel empowered and healthy. We have even more work to do for those who might fall through the cracks. They need the modeling and the relationships. That could make all the difference.
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