When John Muir, a wilderness mystic and founder of the Sierra Club, wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” he was reflecting on his profound relationship with California’s pristine alpine wilderness. But Erik Davis posits something further. In his kaleidoscopic history of spiritual California, The Visionary State, Davis proposes that Muir was also making room for an innovative, new “rootless tradition.” California dreaming, it seems, has it own dream logic.

Gangaji, a white woman with snow colored hair, turquoise eyes, and a soft, slight accent that reveals her Mississippi roots, travels the world year-round, telling people from Byron Bay to San Rafael to stop. When someone is on her stage sharing a tale of