Big Sur California Quotes

Out yonder they may curse, revile, and torture one another, defile all the human instincts, make a shambles of creation (if it were in their power), but here, no, here, it is unthinkable, here there is abiding peace, the peace of God, and the serene security created by a handful of good neighbors living at one with the creature world.

This morning I saw a coyote walking through the sagebrush right at the very edge of the ocean ― next stop China. The coyote was acting like he was in New Mexico or Wyoming, except that there were whales passing below. That’s what this country does for you. Come down to Big Sur and let your soul have some room to get outside its marrow.

California, Labor Day weekend...early, with ocean fog still in the streets, outlaw motorcyclists wearing chains, shades and greasy Levis roll out from damp garages, all-night diners and cast-off one-night pads in Fricso, Hollywood, Berdoo and East Oakland, heading for the Monterey peninsula, north of Big Sur...The Menace is loose again, the Hell's Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the center stripe, missing by inches...like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with a fiery anus, flat out through the eye of a beer can and up your daughter's leg with no quarter asked and non given; show the squares some class, give em a whiff of those kicks they'll never know...Ah, these righteous dudes, they love to screw it on...Little Jesus, the Gimp, Chocolate George, Buzzard, Zorro, Hambone, Clean Cut, Tiny, Terry the Tramp, Frenchy, Mouldy Marvin, Mother Miles, Dirty Ed, Chuck the Duck, Fat Freddy, Filthy Phil, Charger Charley the Child Molester, Crazy Cross, Puff, Magoo, Animal and at least a hundred more...tense for the action, long hair in the wind, beards and bandanas flapping, earrings, armpits, chain whips, swastikas and stripped-down Harleys flashing chrome as traffic on 101 moves over, nervous, to let the formation pass like a burst of dirty thunder...

Even when Meister Eckhart writes as a Christian about suffering—the topic where we should least expect common ground with Buddhism—he finds this common ground with sleepwalking sureness, as long as it is the mystic in him who speaks. Take this, for instance: “Our Lord says in the Psalms of a good man that he is with him in his suffering.” With him! This is not the God above the clouds, enthroned in immovable detachment. This is a lover who suffers when we suffer. I ponder this mystery, and a word of the Dalai Lama comes to my mind; it shall stand at the end of this foreword, since his name stands at its beginning. “Your Holiness,” someone asked, “your Buddhist tradition has so wonderful a way of overcoming suffering. What do you have to say to the Christian tradition that seems to be preoccupied with pain?” With his compassionate smile the Dalai Lama gave an answer that went straight to the common ground of the two traditions. “Suffering,” he said, “is not overcome by leaving pain behind. Suffering is overcome by bearing pain for the sake of others.” (Christ and Bodhisattva embraced at that moment. Across seven hundred years of history I could hear Meister Eckhart laughing with joy. Or was it God’s eternal laughter?) BROTHER DAVID STEINDL-RAST, O.S.B. Big Sur, California Summer Solstice 1995

Whether it was “consciousness expansion” or “intelligence amplification,” something was afoot in Northern California at the beginning of the 1960s that would be instrumental in both the creation of the sixties counterculture and, in the 1970s, the formation of Silicon Valley. The spectrum extended from the spiritual, mystical, and chemical—“instant mystic”—paths to mind expansion, to the pragmatic access-to-tools philosophy that Brand pioneered in the Whole Earth Catalog and that would be best expressed by Steve Jobs in the 1980s when he described the personal computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” Brand’s Big Sur weekend would point him in a radical new direction, a path that ultimately contributed not only to the emergence of the counterculture in Northern California but also to the birth of a new environmental movement.

Renée promised to show her the state of California. She drove like a truck driver in her Mercedes, straight down the middle of the freeways as fast as she could get away with. Delilah had expected they’d see a lot of museums, but they never went close to one except once, when they got lost and ended up in L.A. by the La Brea Tar Pits next to the Los Angeles County Museum. No operas, no concerts. And the international wonders – the giant sequoias and the coast at Big Sur – were never on the agenda. They did drive to Yosemite Valley one Saturday, parked near an old apple orchard by a campground. Delilah started to get out to look for the waterfalls. “Don’t,” Renée said, looking at her watch, “you’ll ruin it,” and they headed back to S.F. after five minutes.

This is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked out on from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the creator intended it to look.