June 2004 Collective Walk
On Sunday, June 12, 2004, we went for our second Sunday of the month walk to the Solstice Canyon national recreation area in the Santa Monica mountains. The participants were Komal, Mahesh, Dorian, Melinda, Connie, Ara (a poet friend of Komal's), Larry Buckler, Keka and Debashish. The walk was facilitated by Komal. Some of us met at the Center at 8 am and had a meditation and some tea and fruits before setting out for the venue. The site was north of Malibu in a beautiful forested area. Though it was sunny, the shaded forest path kept us cool. Great wizened kings of the woods, the trees attracted us with their unmoving presences. Dorian familiarized us with a number of species - the black walnut, the oak, the sycamore. Butterfiles and brilliant neon blue dragonflies flitted and frolicked past us. All along our onward journey, we were accompanied by a stream running beside us and often flowing over the path to small cascades below. There was a stately old mansion which got burnt in the Malibu fires of 1981 and we passed by the ruins. It felt very tropical, as if we were among the ruins of some temple in Cambodia or Sumatra. We sat here and had a long collective meditation. Opposite the ruins was a lone altar to the Virgin with a prayerful devotee before her. After steeping ourselves in the sylvan silence, we walked further and reached a beautiful waterfall which revealed itself to be the source of the stream. Some of us climbed the large boulders surrounding the cataract. Later, we relaxed among some more ruins and read from Sri Aurobindo's Ilion and from some of his Sonnets. From here, some returned the same way we had come to the parking lot, while some of us took a more strenuous climb up the mountain and past some horizonal views of the ocean back to the same parking lot. After the walk, we went to a shopping complex in Malibu where we sat outdoors and enjoyed some sandwiches. In this area, we spotted some beautiful snowy egrets nesting on a tall bare tree.
