Building an Oasis with Friends

On my second weekend at Inkhaven, I hiked up Panoramic Hill¹, which lies on Berkeley’s doorstep. Plentiful panoramic views of the Bay Area are littered across the trail and each took my breath awayThis was also on account of the steep ascents..

The perspective quickly extracted me from a slump I was enduring from ten days of non-stop blogging; I’d spent the day before doing double duty² so I could use this weekend appropriately. While it seemed easy to conclude that Goodharting at Inkhaven alongside staying on top of my day job was taking its toll, I knew there was more to my unease. There were many other reasons why I felt this way; tearing away from my screen and up a hill exposed that.

This was my second trip to California in two months and this one felt remarkably different to the one before. The first trip was to visit my parents in Denver and then head to Burning Man, all of which was nice, but it was towards the end of this first trip that something incredible happened. Friends, from my Davis days—who were not in the desert and not interested in being there—came over from Los Angeles and Sacramento and converted another friend’s home in the Outer SunsetThe same one I mentioned in New Attachments. into a little oasis for ourselves. We did nothing extraordinary. We simply indulged in the mundane—cooking breakfasts for each other and doing dishes, rummaging through bookshops, coffee on the coast, wine at Zoetrope—over the course of a week. None of us work in the current thing—in fact, we are far from it—so our conversations were mostly about matters of art and heart. Even difficult conversations around politics—a kind that I feel is routine in the Bay Area—were diffused by the love and light of our oasis; this was not the place for it when friends were reuniting after nearly a decade.

Staring at the vastness of the Bay Area transported me through these moments; my slump was from feeling like I was not in an oasis with my friends. Walking around South Berkeley’s picture-perfect streets, I sense an isolation. I felt something similar when I lived in the hilly parts around San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles. It was unusual to see Berkeley in a similar light but it’s perhaps what happens when one lives in the smaller and more intimate cities of Europe. Closer to the UC Berkeley campus, I also witness homelessness—not as rampant as in San Francisco but the individual cases seem just as frenetic and sad.

All of this makes me feel a need to have some life breathed into me. Like was done in the oasis my friends built for a week.

I imagined being back at Burning Man, after over a decade, would feel like being in an oasis—it should. Maybe it did. But life in a city feels more like being in a desert these days. And it is in cities that oases are needed. From this vantage point on Panoramic Hill, I could see many potential oases.