San Luis Obispo

Neighborhood magic: an interview with Tom Neuhaus

Eve Neuhaus 16 Comments

Every now and then I’m planning to introduce you to some of the people who live in our neighborhood. My husband Tom kindly agreed to be my guinea pig for the project, so here he is!

I asked him a series of questions beginning with “On a routine day in your life, what give you the most pleasure?”

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He takes a sip of his wine and spreads some camembert from Fromagerie Sophie on his cracker.

“The most pleasure? Eating cheese and drinking red wine,” he says.

“And feeling the wind whistle past my ears when I ride my bike. I’m very fond of that. Just feeling the air. And I like the soft light of the evening.”

He eats some more cheese and considers.

“Just simple creature comforts give me the most pleasure.”

After enjoying some of the wine and cheese myself, I ask, “What activities in general give you the greatest joy?”

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“Diverting water,” he says without hesitation. (This is a guy who spent most of the last few weekends repairing a gray water system he built in our backyard. Lots of water to divert).

He continues, “Walking on the beach, eating great food, sex, GREAT music, oh, listening to great music like Rachmaninov’s 2nd and 3rd piano concertos, oh, I love that!

“All the sensory stuff. I’m not real big into thinking grand thoughts. I’m more emotionally driven than cognitively driven, more into senses than internal cognitive states.”

We finish off the cheese and wine. I ask, “What experiences in your life changed the way you see the world most dramatically?

He barely pauses. “Camping, being outdoors and realizing it doesn’t have to be thought of as God’s creation, but whatever it is, it’s damn beautiful. Canoeing across a lake in upper Minnesota or hiking up in the mountains in Colorado. You just can’t beat that.

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“That year in France, speaking foreign languages, meeting other people, eating their food, laughing at their jokes. Humans, I like humans a lot. That’s why I like teaching.

“Going to Africa, being in the villages.

“Reading great books. They open your mind, change how you look at things. It’s very important to read books from many different perspectives. That really opens your mind the most. I’ll read one book about how Europe underdeveloped Africa and then the next book is about the human body. I like that, I really like that.” He pours himself another glass of wine.

“What do you like about the way you make a living?” I ask.

“I love the variety. Running the chocolate business, Mama Ganache, you’re constantly running into all kinds of problems and challenges. Teaching, you’re always trying to be on the edge, trying to do a good job.

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“I remember buying some antiques from an old farmhouse in Texas and there was a sign that said Ich will streben nach dem Leben: I will strive to live. I like that Germanic idea of striving. I like trying to do as well as I possibly can. Without being a type A personality, just for the heck of it, just for the variety and the challenge. I like that, I like that.”

I continue, “What was your favorite job?”

“Huh. My favorite job? I liked them all. I liked playing the pipe organ because I like the challenge of making good sounds and the preachiness of organ music; collecting rat urine, well, I wouldn’t say that was my favorite job, but it was fun hanging around scientists. I liked baking, I liked working the line in a French kitchen, getting into arguments with the chef, running a restaurant, having a fun time with Puerto Ricans – the restaurant industry is full of Puerto Ricans in New York, great people, fun to josh around with, I learned a lot of Spanish. Ah, every job has so many good things about it – as long as you stay open-minded – stay curious about the world.”

We drink the last of the wine, a very nice cab from Vina Robles, as the sun goes down behind Bishop’s Peak. Am I fortunate or what?

Neighborhood magic: walking the dog

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

This is Lily Bear. Normally she’s a fluffy chow-type with a good four more inches of fur. In this picture she’s sporting a three-day-old, very short haircut. She’s eight or nine years old, a chow mix (golden retriever?) who came to us from the pound five years ago.

One of the many wonderful things about having L. Bear around is the joy of walking her in the neighborhood. In the morning, Tom, Lily Bear and I go together, and then later in the afternoon she and I go on our own. Watching the landscape change, talking to the neighbors, developing real relationships with them, building community – trying to be in the place in which I find myself as fully as I can – it all feels so good.

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Because she’s getting older, the Bear is happy enough to stop wherever I want her to so I can take pictures. She’s done with tearing over the hill into the chaparral after anything moving. The horses in the Cal Poly pasture no longer drive her nuts. Now she sniffs around a bit and then she lies down to wait till I’m ready to move on.

Every so often I’ll share some pictures and reflections on our walks here.

Our neighborhood, Monterey Heights, occupies the northeast corner of San Luis Obispo, a college town, population 44,000, equally distant to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Our house is five blocks from the entrance to Cal Poly, a state university best known for its architecture, engineering and agricultural programs. We live in what’s called a “mixed” neighborhood here: students and permanent residents.

IMG_4149Right now, the moment you step outdoors you  take a deep breath. The enchanting scent of mock orange is everywhere, a delicate, complex citrus so delicious it stops you in your tracks. Breathe! it says. Breathe again! The scent’s source is Pittosporum Undulatum, a messy, invasive Australian tree guilty of dropping sticky red berries which get tracked into our house year-round unless they’re swept up. (Thanks, Tom).

The week or two of bloom is worth all the trouble.

IMG_2655From the top of our hill, you can see the freeway winding its way up Cuesta Grade on its way north. Between here and San Francisco is the extended metropolitan area of San Luis Obispo, including Paso Robles, and about 300 miles of lightly used land, painfully dry ranch land interspersed with military properties: Camp Roberts and Fort Hunter Liggett, and the mountainous Los Padres National Forest. The highway crosses the mountains in the graceful way it does because of one brave, good-hearted man, a true conservationist, Harold Miossi. I’ll tell his story another time.

Though the name Monterey Heights covers more area today, our house is not in the original 1925 Monterey Heights subdivision. It’s half a block into the Slack tract, a softly sloping grid of oddly wide streets and mostly small 1950’s houses lying between Cal Poly and the older neighborhood. Of the original Monterey Heights, the city’s Cultural Heritage Committee writes:

In designing the new neighborhood, MacRorie-McLaren Company used an innovative design approach, much different from conventional neighborhood designs elsewhere in the City. Their approach reflected a more “naturalistic” approach to creating neighborhoods, a movement pioneered by Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmstead and popular in the 1920s and 1930s. The Monterey Heights neighborhood features pocket parks and curvilinear streets, a layout which deviated markedly from the traditional street grid patterns common at the time.

Many of homes in Monterey Heights are as beautiful and unconventional as its design:

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The woman who lives in this beautifully painted house paints houses for a living.

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 Swanson house detailThe man who built this fairytale of a house built whimsical walls of misshapen bricks all over town in the 1920’s. I think there are about six.

Needless to say, Lily Bear is is more interested in homes belonging to animals than those of humans. This got a good long stretch of her attention.

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It’s a gopher hole, one of many thousands in the area. Last week’s rain washed this one out.

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Grace, grace, grace.

Slowing down in SLO

Eve Neuhaus 6 Comments

Not long ago I changed the name of my Airbnb listings to Slow Down in SLO. It took a while for me to decide if SLO, San Luis Obispo, really is slow, but I concluded that it’s actually true. Located halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, SLO is a too far away to commute. Imagine: 44,000 people, virtually no traffic, everything you need a few minutes away, year-round access to an extraordinary outdoor environment, and a culture of kindness rooted in a Franciscan heritage and enhanced by a mild climate. I feel immensely grateful to find myself here – it is grace – but slowing down doesn’t happen from the outside. It’s internal.

Nature does not hurry.

Yet everything is accomplished.

– Lao Tzu

It was Lao Tzu’s poem that brought the deeper truth home to me a few years ago. Since then I’ve been reflecting on the virtues of slowing down, so it seemed like an obvious topic to write about  – except that the entire week I gave myself to put this together disappeared into a whirl of activity.

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Necessary activity. Did I consider slowing down in the midst of the hurly burly? I did – but only for the time it took to laugh at myself and at the lila, divine play, of life – and to refocus on slowing down.

Internal slowing down doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing whatever you’re doing more mindfully, more passionately, more fully, giving it the full focus of your attention. In the long run it’s more efficient – I’m sure your mother already told you this. Indeed, the benefits of being present to a task, whether it’s cleaning the wet leaves off the deck—which I’ve been doing in between paragraphs because a photographer is coming to take pictures of the exterior of our house, a sad mess because of the drought until this week when the rains came and now a much happier mess—or brushing your teeth or talking to your mother, are countless.

Hafiz says,

Time is a factory where everyone slaves away earning enough love to break their own chains.

The key that will let you out of slavery is to love what you are doing, whatever it is: catching your mind when it wanders into the future or the past, or to some place other than where you are, and bringing it home to the moment: celebrating the stillness of the center.

Tom and Lily Bear at the dog beach

Ganesh Baba talks about the four phases of our existence: the physical, the biological, the psychological and the spiritual. Slowing down involves all four: consciously releasing stress and tension in the body, slowing the breath and consequently the heartbeat, lowering the emotional pitch (“Don’t screw up the pitch!” he would scold), and using spiritual practices to find the still center within.

It’s the mind that’s moving too fast, rarely using the power of attention at its true worth, skimming the surface of experience instead to allowing it to be absorbed and processed at all four of the levels of our being. Unless we slow down we sacrifice the richness and beauty of life, of any life.

What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. – Plutarch

For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is just an illusion. – Einstein

All life is fleeting. Cling to that understanding, and seek, then, within yourself that which alone endures. – Yogananda