Tasting an Egregious Slice of the Pie

Gail Varga
Apr 3, 2018
4 min read

I suppose, like most people, I keep running in life at least partly under the steam-power of my own pocket theories about how things are, about what makes everything all right and gives hope, even when such theories are suspiciously irrational. There is nothing wrong with this strategy- we all need our own ´story´ with which to navigate our experiences- but sometimes pocket theory collides with another reality and I am brought up short! Such happened when I arrived in California, bombed out from plane travel, somehow believing that moving from one first world modern country with which I have only an casual connection to another did not require any mental preparation for change... And the change can be mainly stated in one word: Money.

I mainly hung out in Marin county, just north over the Golden Gate bridge, in an area known as the ´burbs (suburbs). Here anyone can see endless ´nice´ houses in ´nice´ gardens with a collection of ´nice´ cars outside each, strung together by shops that mainly fall into the ´posh and useless´ category for me. Frankly, the ´burbs made me feel totally overwhelmed by a gluttony of possession and consumption which, seeing itself in its own context, lacked awareness of what an egregious slice of the pie it was taking. Life in such financial bubbles is out of touch with the realities of how things mostly are on the planet, and seems to increasingly invent a rationale which allows for its own excesses, eg pat-on-the-back ´Green Shopping´ equals loads of pricey organic speciality foods shipped in from far away in excessive single-use plastic packaging, finally shipped home in the boot of a huge SUV to be placed in what looks to most non-US people like a walk-in fridge... to give a small but pervasive example. It is well known that folk in this area are politically left-leaning. Residents pride themselves on their liberal views and tolerant attitudes but at the same time live in neighbourhoods which are sheltered from crime, have almost no ethnic diversity (ie they are all white), flourish on an average household income which is going on three times that of the national average (and the US has the highest national average income on the planet), and where some six-figure US dollar salaries have begun to be called ´low income´. ´Need´ perhaps takes on different meanings in this setting than in economically depressed areas? ...As I have seen, ´activism´ here can mean something like protesting the use of leaf-blowers on Thursdays...

This is not to say that there aren´t wonderful people in this area and wonderful initiatives happening, there are. But, looking back at my photos I realise that I felt so oppressed by the wholesale, normalised expression of over-affluence that seems to be the bottom line in Marin that I did not even have the stomach to raise my camera to capture it.

Luckily a few things saved my equilibrium. The first, unsurprisingly, was the countryside. Dawn took me quite a few times to my magic bench on the hill where I oversaw the gods´ choice of sea fog or sunshine for the day over San Francisco, the SF Bay Area and the hills to the north.

There were longer day adventures around Marin too, where I witnessed the first splitting buds on the dogwood trees,

aligned with the plants and wished for more water for thirsty California,

visited an extra special rocky place just once,

and got the thrill of being a puny human in redwood groves again.

The second leveller came in the shape of careful and intense work designing and executing another stencil project, this time on a rather pleasantly flawed polished concrete floor. The garden outside was wild with abundant orchids, so I brought them in (figuratively), thus giving the space a new floricultural vibrancy.

The third was being around one lovely human being in particular and hanging out with a few others more fleetingly. As it turns out, I can love even the odd person who has a tendency toward shopping...

Lastly, and yet again without my even asking for it, in my last days on Californian soil I was invited to step into the shoes of Ms Privilege herself to stand in one of the amazing places of the world, this time on my birthday. Influential naturalist, highly respected environmental philosopher and gloriously bearded wilderness activist John Muir called it ´...by far the grandest of all the special temples of Nature I was ever permitted to enter´: whisked away to Yosemite Valley at the snowy tail-end of winter (when almost nobody is there) was dreamy and filled me with emotions as elevated as ´el capitán´, its most famous rock face.

You can see more pictures of my orchid floor on this website under the OTHER STUFF drop down, then INTERIORS, and this gallery below offers you larger versions of the pictures in the post above and a few more sumptuous ones of Yosemite and Marin landscapes to whet the appetite: