The Majesty of Place
There is a line from America the Beautiful that we all know that goes “For purple mountains majesties…”. We all know the song written by Katherine Lee Bates in 1895 (originally called Pikes Peak). She was an English professor at Wellesley College and she wrote the song while taking a cross-country trip to Colorado. When she looked out at the wonders she could see from Pikes Peak, the words flowed into a poem and that poem was turned into lyrics for one of our great patriotic songs, added to the music of Samuel A. Ward. Sometimes music and lyrics just come together perfectly to evoke great emotions and this is one of those times. I cannot look out over a vista with distant mountains without hearing the words and the tune of America the Beautiful in my head. And yes, those distant mountains fade from green to blue to purple as the light diffuses with the added atmosphere between here and there. The visual layering has spurred many artists to paint layers of purple mountains in their majesty. I am, at this moment, in between expert witness calls, getting updated on the client needs on two separate cases and as I sit here in my office waiting, I am looking northward to the distant San Gabriel and San Jacinto Mountains, not quite equidistant, so slightly different hues of purple, but equally majestic in the distance. I will add that to the west, the Pacific Ocean is equally visible on this clear October morning and it too looks purple of almost the same hue. I will have to explore why the light spectrum equates mountains and oceans in the distance and makes them almost monochromatic. What it does not take away in the least is the majesty of their form in the distance. It all causes me to feel wonderful, both about the place where I am physically on earth and the place where I find myself spiritually able to embrace and acknowledge the beauty I am privileged to witness on any given morning.
There are some mornings when all seems right with the world. Today is Friday, which is always a good start to that sentiment. The Friday feelings are not mine alone. As a retired person, I should be indifferent as to the day of the week, but that simply isn’t the case. I have still retained the sense that Friday’s are particularly good days because there is closure on many fronts. Here I am tying up some loose threads with my part-time work as an expert witness. I know that when I listen to the news a bit later they will be tying up things from the week like the chaos in the House and the Trump civil trial in New York. News tends not to break on the weekends, though sometimes the Sunday press shows can drop a few bombshells on you. But for the most part things wind down to a crawl by Friday afternoon, even in the retirement world that I live in. I’ve had a good week. Of the five cases I am currently actively working on, I have had communications on four of them and it was all positive. I didn’t put in a ton of hours this week, but those cases have all proven that they still have lots of steam in them and lots of hours for me to put into them over the next few months and beyond. It feels like job security of a sort and that always feels good on a Friday. That too is a sort of privilege that I must acknowledge. To know that what one has to offer is respected and in demand, not to mention appreciated, is a wonderful feeling. It wards off all sorts of potential bad juju for a retired guy like me.
This has also been an interesting week for me in the garden. I don’t want to go too crazy with analogizing the garden as some sort of metaphor for something larger in life (Peter Sellers already did that so well in The Party in 1968). I just like the garden for what it adds to my nearby sense of place. It shouldn’t surprise me that all of my gardens are flourishing this year, since we have had plenty of water and plenty of sunshine, and that’s almost all they need to do well. But its actually more than just that. I have had a vision for my gardens and I have gone about working towards that vision steadily. Not with a precise plan, but rather an loosely structured plan, but one that knows what I like when I see it. By my calculation, I have not one, but 30 or so gardens on my 2.5 acres of property. That might sound like an exaggeration, but I can assure you I can rattle off names like Cecil Garden, Bonsai Garden, Fairy Village, Cactus Knoll, Bonsai Knoll, Rock Garden, The Gully, The Ridgeline, The Rose Garden, the Hobbit House Garden, etc., etc.. Given that I have 25 irrigation zones, it is less difficult to imagine that I actually do have 30 or more separate and identifiable gardens. I have spent time over the last six months working to improve at least half of them. This very week, I would say I shaped up three of them in one way or another. I used to say I inherited the front hillside, restructured the side gardens and started putting in the gardens on the back hillside. But now, after almost four years of hands-on work, I can honestly say that almost all of the gardens on the property are clearly imprinted with my revised or updated vision. I can wander through or sit in any of them and get lost in their individual majesty, and I feel that it is a majesty of my own vision and nature’s bounty.
Ever since I bought my first starter home in 1977, I have known and felt that pride of ownership one gets when looking out over one’s place. But it was not really until I bought three wooded hillside acres in Hillsdale, New York, on the edge of the Berkshires in 1986 that I found myself thinking about the majesty of place. Seeing that cabin amongst those tall pines or standing on that deck looking out into the wooded meadows below was my first awareness of the majesty of a place that I was lucky enough to call my own for a moment. Since then I have had many more opportunities including several in Utah that had the majesty of big sky, purple mountains, snow-covered peaks, western alpine meadows and high desert chaparral. I had a spot in Ithaca that was surrounded by verdant golf holes designed by the acclaimed Robert Trent Jones (without the snootiness) and that sloped downhill towards the glacial lake beyond the horizon to the west. But none of them prepared me for what I have happened upon out here on this hilltop. I believe I have described the serendipity of our finding this hilltop a dozen years ago, and I would claim no greater insight than perhaps a good instinct for its majesty. But I will take some credit for what we have implemented over those dozen years. It began in absentia wanting more shade and places to gather or sit and admire the view. But in the last four years that has ratcheted up to a higher plane, less by chance and more by a desire for the maximization of diversity and majesty all at once.
The beauty of San Diego is that it is tropical yet dry. It is warm yet cool at night either from the sea or the mountains. It is breezy and still at various times. And everything grows out here and prospers. There are every shade of green imaginable and yet flowers of every color that blossom on a schedule all their own multiple times per year and with no discernible connection to what we know of as seasons. I am now the proud resident (you know by now that I do not feel any of us own this amazing perch we get to inhabit) that sets as high a standard for the majesty of place that I can imagine. I see it in every ordinal direction I choose to look and I see it nearby and far, sometimes at the same time. It does not get better than that. I only wish I could show it to Katherine Lee Bates to prove to her how right she was in her choice of poetic lyrics and that my little slice of America is about as beautiful and majestic as I could possibly want.