To assure you all that I am, in fact, alive, I'm going to share some of what I've been writing elsewhere. I'm taking a creative nonfiction workshop this semester and I am supposed to produce a short essay every week. To begin, here's a definition piece, the subject of which corresponds nicely to the title of this blog.

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What is California?

Is it Alta, or is it Baja? Is it American, or Mexicano, or something in between? Is it oranges or mangos, milkshakes or horchatas, In-n-Out burgers or carne asada­? Is the border the end of California, or is it its core, its very essence? Well, maybe California is avocado ranches and flour tortillas, French fries and burritos, Spanglish, cerveza, a shared coast.

Maybe it is both, in every way – North and South, new and old, mythic and shockingly modern. Maybe it is Haight-Ashbury and psychedelic and hand-made and organic, and maybe it is bright and healthful and materialistic. Maybe it’s the colorful faith of our Lady of Guadalupe, and evangelical fervor, and militantly secular progressivism. Maybe it is Sutter’s Mill and El Camino Real, and maybe it is the Hollywood sign.

Maybe it’s a place for the sojourner, the refugee, the migrant, displaced from another land – snowy cities or wheaty plains or somewhere more foreign, with different tongues and customs. Maybe it’s the place where the wanderers find a temporary home, where flavors and sounds intermingle, where accents are lost and new identities are formed.

Maybe California is the first glimpse of the ocean or, more truly, that first smell of salty air, an aroma that excites the soul long contained in a truck or moving van or Conestoga wagon. Maybe it’s that sense of possibility, that gasp that goes along with confronting the unknown, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the enormity of the ocean, the mountains, the rolling hills, the desert. Maybe it’s the absurd joy of reaching a new frontier.

Maybe California is a collection of marvelous natures – sand and rock and pine tree and snow and silver water and golden poppies. Maybe it is hot and cold, rugged and mild, breathtakingly beautiful and aridly stoic. Maybe it is the coyote, the mother bear, the soaring bird, the intrepid human. Maybe it is a land torn apart by violent tremors, turned to black ash by ravenous fires.

Maybe it is that golden land immortalized in popular art, sung about by Mamas and Papas and Ramones and Eagles and a Joni Mitchell or two, flooded with sunshine and temptation and summery joy. Or it’s a newer California, dripping in wealth and youthful discontent, the birthplace of teenage melancholia fueled by The OC, Laguna Beach, The Hills and all of their unhappy compatriots. Maybe it is a place of longing, maybe it isn’t real, maybe it’s too close to the sun, its people melting like the wax that makes feathers into wings.

Maybe it disillusions, it shows people what they cannot have. Maybe it encourages distortion - scalpels cutting into healthy flesh, clouds of semi-legal smoke, tanned bodies, blonde hair. Maybe it breaks dreams, maybe it promises fame but does not deliver, or ensures bountiful harvests but instead watches its fields go up in selfish flame.

Maybe it is Steinbeck’s lost paradise, where the unkind are banished, east of nothing; a could-have-been utopia, a garden of wonders. Maybe we disrupted its savage beauty with our greed, our hunger, our Manifest Destiny, maybe it is a land broken by human existence. Maybe its skyscrapers and housing developments and fields of produce are ugly, maybe they mar its pretty face, maybe they are wrong.

Or maybe California is nothing more than the mustard flower growing along the coast, along the highway, its yellow blossoms singing against the azure sky and the grey-blue waves. Maybe it is a weed, with gnarled, determined roots, hooked onto the face of seaside cliffs and sprouting out of cracks in the asphalt, out of the most unlikely soil, lovely in its lowliness. Maybe its seeds hold an explosion of faith, of vitality and hope and adventure, maybe it could move mountains. Maybe it is just this flash of color as the car speeds by, yellow and green and blue and the brown of the sacred earth, a kaleidoscopic glimpse of what it means to be a Westerner; maybe this is California, maybe this is what flows through my veins.