Weathering the Storm

The lighthouse isn't the story. We are.

The hills around Point Bonita Lighthouse have become one of our favorite places to slow down together. It's funny how often the places we return to show us something different each time.

I’ve been to the Marin Headlands and Point Bonita quite a few times, yet every time it seems a little different. Ships roll in from the Pacific and slip under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco Bay. Others steam out into the wide blue sea, bound for destinations we’ve heard of but never seen.

Every ship carries something that will eventually become part of someone’s ordinary day. Food. Medicine. Building materials. Things that sustain lives we’ll never know.

We like to pack a little picnic and head up there to sit on the hill, listening to the crash of the waves below the point and looking across at the cliffs beyond, perfectly content to be exactly where we are.

This is one of the things I love about living in the Bay Area. There are so many places that remind us it’s good to stop.

Perched up there, we sat watching the ships instead of the lighthouse. Container ships edged their way into the bay. Board sailors grabbed the wind between vessels a hundred times their size. Tourists stop on the Golden Gate Bridge to admire the view, probably unaware that someone sitting on a hillside was looking back at them.

At Point Bonita, it’s impossible not to notice how many lives depend on people they’ll never meet.

We spent an hour mesmerized by the view, and then attention drifted back to the lighthouse.
I used to think the lighthouse was an emblem of strength, but it’s a symbol of something more important.

I read once that the keepers at Point Bonita were known not only for tending the light and foghorn, but for risking their own lives in rowboats in the treacherous surf and dense fog to rescue people from wrecked ships below. They risked everything without stopping to ask where those sailors came from. They didn’t ask what they believed. They didn’t ask whether they deserved saving. They saw people in trouble, so they rowed toward them.

That story speaks to me because lately, life in this world feels stormier than it used to. Some storms arrive as fire, flood, or wind. Others arrive as grief, uncertainty, financial strain, division, illness, or loneliness. It can be tempting to believe we’re all standing alone against our own weather.

From a distance, the lighthouse appears to stand alone too, but it doesn’t.
Someone built it. Someone maintained it. Someone kept the light burning and the horn calling through fog, wind, and darkness. Every ship that found safe passage was connected to that act of care.

It looks like it’s standing out there alone. But it’s not. Neither are we.

Thich Nhat Hanh called this interbeing, the understanding that our lives are woven together in ways we rarely notice. Standing on that hillside, I don’t have to work very hard to see it. It’s there in the ships, the bridge, the people, and the lighthouse itself.

When the world starts to feel like too much, I refocus my attention by asking: What is actually here, in this moment? Sometimes the answer is fear or uncertainty.

If I stay with the question a little longer, I usually notice something else too. A friend. A kind word. A bird singing. The fact that I’m standing on my own two feet. The storm hasn’t disappeared. I’ve simply remembered it isn’t the whole story.

The storm may be real. But it doesn’t deserve the whole sky.

Most of us will never tend a lighthouse, and we’re lucky that we will probably never need to row into crashing waves to rescue strangers. Still, every day we have opportunities to row toward one another in smaller ways. We can offer patience instead of judgment, curiosity instead of certainty, kindness instead of indifference. We may never know where those small acts end up, just as the lighthouse keepers never knew the names of most of the people they helped.

If kindness is reserved only for people who deserve it, it isn’t kindness. It’s a transaction.

We can’t calm every storm, and we can’t solve every problem. We can, however, hold a little light for someone else. We may never know whose course is changed by a moment of compassion, a listening ear, or a simple act of generosity.

Maybe that’s what visiting places like Point Bonita has to teach us. The lighthouse stands where it does because someone believed strangers were worth protecting.

Perhaps our mission in this life isn’t so different. We simply keep the light burning.