I just spent the weekend working from one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. It’s an olive grove in Southern California, lit at night only by candles, fire, and fairy lights, with music playing and clever people around white tables. Thirty-five hackers, their partners, their children, and me. Total number: just under sixty. Almost everyone wears black. Almost everyone has a custom flask. I’m probably the only person present who doesn’t own a t-shirt.
William Blake said that there is the land of the living and the land of the dead and the only bridge between them is love. The only survival. The only meaning.
I am relatively new to this particular tribe, but I am loved enough to pass. They drink and they swear and make fun of me for having to work while on vacation. I reply that my office is too pretty to possibly complain about and that seems to settle the topic.
The sounds here are different than I’m accustomed to, but I like it. I love how twisted the trees are, the delicate sounds of their leaves in the breeze. There are horses at the ranch next store and someone, somewhere, unmistakably has peacocks.
The olive grove is in the middle of the drought blighted lands, but where we are is green and luscious. There’s natural ground water here that makes for two little ponds, a small lake, and easy irrigation. Plus, however unlikely, it has rained every afternoon with a small roll of thunder and casual damp that crawls slowly over us during what otherwise would be the hottest part of the day. The light when that happens is unspeakably beautiful. I miss storms with passion like I miss my heart. Both losses ache inside of me.
We sit in camp chairs, circles of humming conversation chasing the shade during the day or around bonfires at night. We’ve been smoking an entire pig every night in a cement brick oven made for the purpose and making bonfires too big to jump over with the left over wood. (The pigs were progressively more delicious. We cut them open at midnight and sliced cubes of pork sushi out with combat knives and ate them with our fingers.)
Today some of us pulled a kitten from the wild litter of seven that’s underneath the robin’s egg blue vintage car that’s slowly rusting out next to the outdoor bar. It’s orange and soft and impossibly fluffy and I’m looking forward to visiting it later in Seattle. If I could have found other people to adopt the rest, I would have taken jacks from people’s trunks to lift up the car and pull out the entire litter. A silver lining looking for a cloud. Solving for fuffle.