Help. Thanks. Wow!

As our ride share was heading through the mountains of northern California, we veered off onto a sad almost deserted town, Hornbrook, to drop off a woman rider. The geography there is spectacular, it is a beautiful valley high in the mountains. The homes are badly in need of something. I suppose it is money. Someone asked the woman about a nearby town called Hilt. She said that Hilt had been a mill town. Hard to believe (or I guess, really easy to believe) as there were no trees around. When the mill owners had taken every tree possible, the mill shut down. The mill had built and owned all the houses in town. Some of the families who had lived there had been loggers and mill workers for four generations. When the mill shut, no one had the money to buy their houses, so the mill bull dozed them down and the town officially died.

Holbrook had had a stage coach inn, then later a railroad stop. There was some agriculture around. I asked the rider how she came to live out there in the middle of nowhere with the great views all around. She explained that she had lived much of her life in upstate New York. In the late seventies, she and her husband decided to move west and live on a commune. Sadly they arrived in that valley just as the commune was breaking apart.

They arrived when there were only four families left on this huge property. They stayed with one of the families. Big discussions were going on about how to sell and who owned what and who could sell what. I assume that the commune had been there since the late sixties. Big discussions finished off a lot of communes as did the fact that many such ventures had a few people who had staked all the start up cash.
Trouble in paradise.

One night they were sitting around after dinner and were having a discussion about their collective feeling that they wanted (needed) to find a spiritual path. Most of us had already done so by then. After the Vietnam Occupation ended, many of the hippies turned to enlightenment paths. They concluded that they really didn't know how to go about looking, but that after they sold the land, that would be a next step.

THE NEXT DAY someone drove up to the house and said that a Tibetan Lama and a group of his followers were seeking a site for a temple. Could he come and see the land. Yes! Yes! The little lama arrived later that afternoon by helicopter and there began the negotiations for and subsequently the building of a great temple complex.

The thing is, this lady on the ride share became a Buddhist. She is still involved with the temple. She said how could she ever wonder if that was the right path for her when the next day it arrived in a helicopter in the middle of nowhere.

I really dig this. She and her husband worked and lived in a nearby city for thirty years and are now back to the same land they came from New York to live on. They are still happy Buddhists. "Ask and you shall receive."