LETTERS FROM HOME: THE POSSIBILITIES OF SETTING THE WORLD BACK IN BALANCE

Sept. 2, 1999

Dear Leslie,

Living in Southern California, you don't think about rain because you rarely ever see it. Water is piped in from the mountains and from Arizona, so who cares if it falls out of the sky.

We do. We are parched. Less than an inch of rain fell in August. Plants and bushes are visibly wilting, leaves seem to be falling prematurely from trees. The effects of too little rain are physical and psychological. The sky is blue but life feels a bit dry.

The current wisdom holds that we'll only have to wait a few more weeks for rain because it always rains to spoil a day or two of the district fair. Once the rain fell so hard on the fair when I was a boy that our family car filled with water and had to be towed out of the parking swamp.

In golf, one key to improvement is the ability to visualize the shot in your mind before hitting it. It's like a mental rehearsal.

Starting today, I am visualizing rain and encouraging everyone I know to do the same. At odd moments, think of luscious drops of water pouring from the heavens, nourishing the plants that sustain us animals.

I'm not kidding.

While the Vietnam War was still being fought, John Lennon had a newspaper front page printed proclaiming the end of the war. "War is over." Once a thing can be imagined, achieving it is only a matter a working out the details.

It's the art of the possible. But lives don't have to be at stake. When my landlord in Huntington Beach decided she wanted a Corvette even though she had no financial reason to consider the possibility, she put a picture of a red one on her refrigerator door. Many times each day for two years, she looked at the photograph and imagined the Corvette being hers.

She looked good in that car.

The results might not be so literal. A 22-year-old cousin I'd never met stopped in town for a visit this week. Her family lives in Seattle, and there are many more cousins like her I have never met but hear tales of periodically.

She was headed for Washington, D.C., to finish off her political science degree with an internship. Her mission: Help out the Speaker of the House of Representatives. No problem with visualization here.

After that, who knows? She was heading into the unknown, a heady adventure.

I told her about her dad in the 1950s, making rocket ships out of match boxes and blasting them off in the stairwell leading to the basement of their house in Indiana or Kankakee or wherever they were that year. He made his own gunpowder for fuel. I was six years younger and thought he was a genius, that it was possible he could do anything.

But he didn't grow up to become a rocket scientist. He joined the Air Force, fell in love with an officer's daughter, married and raised a squadron of children who are flying out of the house and into the universe in all directions.

Every two years, the Yurok tribe in Northern California performs a ritual called the white deerskin dance. A section of the Klamath River the Yuroks have named "the center of the world" is closed to the public so they can dance and sing the Earth back into balance.

Certainly, the world would be the better if we all danced and sang more.

We help put the world back in balance when we put ourselves in balance. When we live with a joyful sense of the possibilites.

Love, Sam