A foreigner at home with the spirits of Montecito

When I was a junior in college, I studied in South India, in a steel town called Vishakhapatnam. We were seven American students living in a place that most tourists (understandably) didn’t visit. One day an old man and woman came knocking on our door. They seemed about 115 years old to me and they mumbled in scratchy little Telugu voices that they were having problems moving into a house next door. They were stymied by a particularly intimidating image of Durga, a multi-armed warrior goddess, whom the previous owner had painted on the wall. Apparently they were looking for a godless foreigner to come over and earn the ire of Durga by painting over her likeness. I volunteered. “Do the eyes first,” the old man advised me, hovering with his wife at the threshold of the door, looking in. Sometimes I feel like a foreigner at home in Montecito, too, forever intrigued by the beliefs around me. Spiritual beliefs, in the culture of Montecito, can be like eating out. Shall we have Chinese or Indian tonight? In early March, I went to hear a woman named Lea Rosen talk at the Montecito library about a spiritual journey she took to Tuva, in Siberia. Previously, for five years, she had studied Tibetan Buddhism, but eventually she became dissatisfied, feeling it was too sterile and dogmatic. During a process of “spiritual renewal,” Rosen had a dream. “I was in a very dense forest,” she recounted, “and I came upon a huge tree and under the tree, hibernating nestled inside of the tree, was a white bear. I was able to look inside and we kind of acknowledged each other.” Further dreams, subsequent research and “shamanic journeying” eventually led her to Tuva, where there is a sacred site, which, as luck would have it, is called Bear Mountain. People in Montecito can be like the Caodai in Vietnam, who blend all major world religions (and — parenthetically — speak, on occasion, to Victor Hugo and Winston Churchill). Just last week I sat on a white leather couch in a Montecito home to view a Mexican silver orb that catches bad spirits, hanging above the fireplace. “Evil spirits and mischievous spirits are very vain and they love shiny objects. So when they come in, they go right to the shiny object and this particular orb sucks them in. So all the evilness is in there and it leaves space and time for good,” said the woman of the house, who didn’t want her name used (“I don’t flash my orb around,” she said). Does she really believe it? When you ask her, it’s hard to know. She laughs and becomes, perhaps, a little shy about it. She’s Jewish by faith, ghost believer for fun, with an underpinning of seriousness. “I don’t live my life by it,” she said, although she thinks spirits and ghosts are undeniably real. “It’s my recreation. I believe in shopping, too, you know?”