I am on the Monterey peninsula for the month of July–a return to family, friendships and a slower way of life, and 3 days into it it feels pretty good. Life is not linear, a friend told me recently, as I struggled to make sense of my path and where it was leading. Should I take this month off or not? What will I be coming home to? Etc, etc. You can hear the drill. As much as we think life is a singular pursuit or want it to be, I am reminded time and again that a rich and interesting life, is not. Yes, we lay down the stepping stones that hopefully lead us to the next thing, and then the next, eventually and perhaps getting us where we want to go, but what about all the detours? The pitfalls and derailments? Stops along the way? Certainly they are not all bad, but offer up something to sink our teeth into, making life that less predictable, and more colorful along the way. As you can surely detect, I’m sifting through my past and present, trying to imagine the future, sort out what it holds, where I want it to be, what I want it to look like. Mine has been a journey of many places, many stories, a crisscross path that is deeply imbedded in food, family, color, poetry, the sea. None of it can be taken away, but it can be hidden, by choice, if desired, and all of it, regardless, informs where I am at this moment, and where I will be in the next.  So, I still ask myself, if I take this step here, will it take me that much closer to where I want to be tomorrow, will it offer up a whole new perspective, a new view that I had not imagined before? Or do I allow the cards to fall where they will? It’s that new view, in fact, that is always luring–what brings hope and imagination into my daily world. I heard an interview a few weeks back where a woman talked about the power and necessity of dreaming, that if you take the ability to dream away from someone, they lose everything. That it is in the imagining something more or different or beyond our current stories, that gives people hope, that makes life worth living, beautifully in the present, and ever informing our future. 

On that note, I am heading to Tassajara on Thursday, and if you don’t know about it, it’s a buddhist retreat center hours into Carmel Valley and at the base of the Santa Lucia’s. It’s heavenly.