After weeks of rain, the skies in California are cloudless and achingly blue. The seasonally dry stream that marked the periphery of town when I moved here 25 years ago is running full. But the first meditation of the year there brings sorrow that only a complete meditation can transcend.

This place, with a breathtaking view of the fields, foothills and canyon beyond town, is rapidly being “developed.” Which is to say trashed by cheap apartment blocks and poorly designed houses, businesses and civic centers.

The magnificent sycamore, with its twin spires, fell last year. Its massive trunk lay on the bank to my right, while the bulk of the tree lies like a white whale along the edge of the creek.

I had many tremendous meditations under that sycamore over the years, but after a fire swept across the fields over a decade ago, it slowly died, losing its limbs like a leper until it crashed to the ground. I felt, seeing it slowly die, was a bad sign every time I went.

This place, a sacred place to indigenous people, was wild when I moved to this small city. Many animals made the habitat their home, but the pheasant, long-eared rabbits, raptors and rattlesnakes are all gone now. The growth of the city was inevitable, but did they have to trash this beautiful place with tacky buildings?

Trash in the form of garbage bags, tarps, bottles and other junk has also been washed down the creek, and lies around me. I pick up what I can, and take my seat on the bank for the last hour before sunset.

For a half hour the descending sun is fairly warm, and despite the ugliness of man, I can still see the hills. Reactions to the darkness of man become the vortex of one’s own darkness. Watching one’s reactions without identification as ‘my reactions,’ the general darkness I felt all day dissipates. The mind quiets, the heart grows tranquil, and a meditative state begins.

Just then, a pair of Canadian geese swoops in low from the direction of the hills. When they see me, instead of landing in the creek with the current, as it appeared they were going to do, they turn sharply and glide to a halt across the stream.

Minutes before sunset, there’s a brief alpenglow on the hills, followed by an even briefer lavender light that suffuses them as if from within.

Immediately after sunset, a sudden chill fills the air, heavy with dampness and redolent of rich smells of earth. Dusk descends quickly as I bike home, lighter and freer despite the loss of a favorite meditation place.

As I pedal back, an egregious sentence I read earlier in the day by a prominent boomer comes to mind: “We’ll help turn back the clock a little, toward the world we actually built in our youth.”

The last of the baby boomers will be 65 or older in 2030. “The Who’s” anthem, “My Generation,” has become a dirge. We boomers have contributed to making the world a hellish place.

Did we end war? After decades of more “wars of choice,” the world is one cross-border strike away from world war. Even the conceit that our protests and marches ended the Vietnam War is false. There was no way America was ever going to win that war, and we pulled out at the end, when we could and should have pulled out much earlier.

Did we halt the destruction and decimation of the Earth? As the world shoots beyond totally destabilizing warming from burning fossil fuels, and the Sixth Extinction accelerates, the question is ludicrous.

Did our counterculture bring about a true culture of comity and compassion? California, the most progressive state in the USA, with the strictest gun laws in America, just endured four slaughters within a few days.

As much as I agreed with many of the premises of the counterculture regarding the rot at the core of America, even as a sophomore in college I didn’t subscribe to the prescription, which is as superficial as mass marches and doing your own thing.

The notion that there are only perspectives, and that what is doesn’t exist since it’s all a matter of opinion, devolved into “my truth” on the left, and Q-anon on the right.

This is the world boomers largely have built, the same old world we inherited, only worse. So it’s annoying as hell to hear the leading voices of my generation blithely utter delusional fantasies like, “We’ll help turn back the clock a little, toward the world we actually built in our youth.”

Not only does such a sentiment indicate an utter lack of cultural and global awareness (not to mention self-awareness), it perpetuates the lies with which boomers have boxed and bollixed the next generations.

It isn’t that we were too radical; it’s that we weren’t radical at all the true, root meaning of the word, which is to go tothe root. Can we still do so, thinking together with the generations we’ve heretofore hamstrung, before it’s too late?

Martin LeFevre

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