Late afternoon light spills over the bluffs at More Mesa, gilding the grasses and tracing long shadows toward the sea.
The surf murmurs below, and the scent of sage and salt mingles with sun-warmed dust.
Every time I walk here, I feel something loosen inside me — the chatter of news, the drone of traffic, the hum of screens.
Crossing the trailhead gate is a small act of pilgrimage.
For decades, I’ve come to this 325-acre stretch of coastal mesa west of Hope Ranch not merely to walk, but to listen — to the wind, the soil, and the quiet persistence of life.
More Mesa is one of Santa Barbara’s last great open spaces, a mosaic of grassland, oak woodland and bluff-top habitat where raptors wheel and coyotes sing.
This month, a 36-acre parcel on its northwest edge was permanently protected under a new conservation easement — a quiet victory in a long struggle to keep this sacred landscape whole.
From Alienation to Awakening
We moderns are restless. Much of our life unfolds indoors, surrounded by the artifacts of our own making.
The ecological alienation of modernity leaves us dizzy, as if we’ve mistaken the hum of electricity for the pulse of the world.
More Mesa offers an antidote. Each time I step onto its trails, the world comes back into focus — light, air, motion, presence.
“Knowing a place is an act of intimacy, and intimacy breeds responsibility. That, to me, is the heart of ecological consciousness.”
My first epiphany came decades ago, when I saw a red-tailed hawk hovering motionless over the bluffs, its wings taut against the wind.
For an instant, time stopped — the city, my work, my worries — everything suspended.
The hawk was not performing for me; it was simply being, and in its being I recognized a wholeness I had forgotten.
Learning the Land
Since then, I’ve studied this mesa as one studies a friend. I’ve learned the plants — coyote brush, coast live oak, hummingbird sage — and the seasonal rhythms that shape them.
Knowing a place is an act of intimacy, and intimacy breeds responsibility. That, to me, is the heart of ecological consciousness: the realization that knowing is a form of loving.
More Mesa’s history is one of vigilance. Once envisioned for housing and luxury estates, it has survived through decades of citizen advocacy.
The More Mesa Preservation Coalition and The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County have worked tirelessly to ensure its protection.
The new easement serves as an “insurance policy” against development — a recognition that love of place must be institutionalized to endure.
The Sacred in the Everyday
Walking this land is not recreation for me but participation. There is something profoundly sacred in the wind off the Santa Barbara Channel, the scent of sage, the cry of a hawk.
I do not mean “sacred” in a supernatural sense, but as the reverence awakened when we stand still before life itself — when we recognize that the living Earth is not background scenery but the ground of our being.
More Mesa reminds me that holiness is not confined to steeples or scriptures.
It is the shimmer of dew at dawn, the sudden flash of a lizard in the brush, the intricate choreography of clouds.
To walk here is to pray with one’s feet, to listen to the world breathing.
The Covenant of Stewardship
But reverence alone is not enough. Every pilgrimage must return to the polis, where devotion becomes duty.
The privately held portions of More Mesa remain vulnerable. A Saudi Arabia-based real estate group currently lists the surrounding bluff-top parcels for $65 million.
Love of land must therefore become public policy — a covenant between citizens and the more-than-human world.
To preserve such belonging, we must act: advocate, donate, teach, restore. Conservation is not charity toward the planet but fidelity to ourselves.
Protecting More Mesa is not only about saving land; it is about safeguarding our capacity for wonder.
Returning to Wholeness
Each time I leave More Mesa, I promise to return. I pass back through the trailhead gate carrying the mesa inside me — the scent of sage, the cry of a kestrel, the knowledge that beauty endures only through attention.
More Mesa reminds me that ecological consciousness is not a belief but a practice — one that moves from epiphany to study, from devotion to action, from the personal to the planetary.
The work of preservation continues. The Land Trust for Santa Barbara County and the More Mesa Preservation Coalition stand as guardians of this sacred landscape, rallying the community to defend what remains.
More Mesa’s remaining parcels face an uncertain future, and only sustained community action can ensure that future generations will know the hawk’s hover, the sage’s perfume and the ocean’s eternal song.
Your support matters. Whether through membership, donation, volunteering, or simply showing up to walk these trails and bear witness, you become part of the covenant between past and future.
The mesa has given us so much. Now it asks something in return: our care, our voice, our commitment to keeping this place whole.
At sunset, when the last light burns gold across the bluffs and the sea turns silver, I stand still and listen. The mesa breathes — and I breathe with it.