While the morning news tells me about the polls and the last frenzy before the elections keeps the messages in my inbox coming, I look outside and see that the first frost killed the tomato plants, the peppers, basil and tender marigolds. I take a stroll in the garden to assess to frost damage. The dahlias that struggled to emerge above ground this year but eventually formed a healthy green plant, never made it to bloom as the flower heads hang in sorrow. Do plants feel sorrow? On the other side of the fence, the frost colored the leaves of the deciduous trees red and yellow and put a smile on the world. 

The news tells me about 400 fresh cases of Covid in my state, 4 recent deaths, all seniors. (85,000 new cases nationwide, 923 recent deaths). These are seniors, past blooming. Did they want to continue to live? The prediction is that the pandemic will get worse as winter approaches. As a people do we have the will to turn this trend around?
Katie Mack, a PhD cosmologist, gives a lecture addressing the question: “Will the universe die?” She gives the scientific rationale and theories, nothing more than speculations about what we don’t know. The universe will continue to expand and contract. Our planet will most likely burn up as the sun gets hotter. Already the forests are burning up as the climate gets hotter. Can we avert this heating trend? Put off the inevitable for a while?

Wherever I turn there’s death. I walk and hike to talk with the trees, to feel nature breathing. It doesn’t feel as if nature is taking its last breath. I see change, movement from one season to another. I know the forests and mountains are morphing as some species disappear and new ones enter because of climate change. A nature columnist who’s been writing for the Audubon Society since the seventies, says that we have saved many species. They’ve come back from near extinction in the last 50 years, since we’ve created the endangered species act in the US. 
The Sand Conference on Dying and Living brings together science and spirituality. Smart voices point out the process of transformation we call death. There’s no birth without death, no individuality without the cosmic experience, no fear without hope. We cannot have a world without disease, without death, as we have developed into ever more complex creatures. The creatures that don’t die are regenerative; they don’t have sex to create offspring. Do you want to be a worm, and live forever? Death and disease is the price we pay for living with love, emotion, and awareness. We will dissolve and return to the universe, the cosmic being. 

While we need to accept our human condition we can know our connection with the greater universe. We can witness the amazing growing, expanding and contracting of forces around us, in the form of stars, galaxies, rainbows, plant and animal life, of water flowing in iridescent colors over rocks into the great oceans of our planet where plant life and water creatures live in a world of marvel. 
In my newest book “Fly Free” I describe the experience of being in a state of awareness of the growing, expanding, and transforming energy this universe comprises while sitting at the feet of a master. At the time, I would have exchanged living an ordinary life for continuing to be in that state of awareness. Luckily, I didn’t get the choice and so I learned to find the perspective in living that gives me joy.

How can we be sad or fearful when we can experience joy? If we stay in touch with, and renew our awareness of our place in the universe of things, we can feel the love that permeates all that’s alive. Not an earthy, from you-to-me, me-to-you love, but an endless emerging force of energy that creates and transforms all that is. My body as it ages and disintegrates will dissolve in that energy and my narrow body consciousness will expand and fly free. 
All death we see around us then is only a reminder of the force that keeps going, keeps transforming, keeps living. Living with the seasons and turning the frosted dead plants into compost is a promise for spring growth. Living fully, and taking the time to grieve when a loved one dies, to grieve the deaths that are happening around us everywhere - to be a grieving society at this time - is an opportunity to be part of the transformation this world is experiencing and find the life force that will emerge. 

The deeper we sink into the darkness of the unknown, the darkness of death, the greater the change will be. Our world is experiencing a time of darkening but like after a long, dark winter, the light will come back. We may not be here to experience it but we’ll be part of that energy that keeps on changing. Knowing this, eases my days and lets me step back from the craziness of pandemic ignorers, climate change deniers, the frenzy of the political scene as if the outcome of these elections can make everything okay again. The outcome of the elections will make us sink deeper, or turn the tide, but neither change will end or make a better world. One thing we can be sure of, there will be change, always.
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“Yes there is isolation
but there does not have to be loneliness”
             from the poem “Lockdown” by Br Michael OFM Cap, Capuchin Day centre



​The trees are breathing together. The trees are standing together. They’re not going anywhere, no Covid virus affects them and they accept whatever comes their way, even wildfire.
For two hundred miles I’m walking among them, day in, day out, alone, or better said, I’m hiking solo. Solo hiking has a unique ring to it than hiking alone. Solo hiking shows a choice, it has a notion of empowerment and being in charge. When I hike solo I’m in charge of everything I do, every action I take has a consequence - good, or bad -. No-one will reach for my hat when I drop it and walk on. When I notice it gone, I have to walk back since going without is not an option with the constant sun exposure. No-one tells me to look again when I take the wrong turn at the trail sign, and I walk on until something tells me I better look on my GPS to see how far I’ve come. No-one feels sorry for me that I have to backtrack and add 2 miles to a tiring afternoon. No-one says hurray when I make it across the river dry and safe. There’s no reward when I haul my 32 lb pack, filled with water for the night, up a steep slope and camp among the trees a half day further south of the fire that broke out that morning. My reward is I sleep better knowing that I’ve put the fire behind me. My reward is knowing my body can carry me up a steep slope when needed. My reward is that all’s well at the end of day and I can relax and sleep soundly in my hammock, possessions packed away, pack covered with a rain cover, food hanging in a nearby tree, and a rain fly at arms length in case the starry sky with its Perseus showers clouds over and raindrops fall. All’s well at days end and I trust that the next morning I will wake and do it all over again: make my morning tea, break camp, load the pack and start walking in the cool morning air, energized and curious about the day to come. 

We as people develop anxiety of the unknown, the wild, by living in houses and walking on streets. This separation from the natural world creates an existential angst and cuts us off from living intuitively, in tune with our natural environment. I let the natural world teach me and connect me with my primordial existence when I go on a longish solo hike. It doesn’t happen in a day; it takes at least a week to become part of the rhythm that rules nature, to hear the silence and read its messages, to know the light in that place as it moves through the day. The silence among the trees breathes with promise, is heavy with knowledge, doesn’t harbor fear. Dappled light falls on baby trees, nurturing them to reach higher. When the light is heavy with smoke it slants sideways, yellow, sucking away the oxygen the trees so readily give. Soon the wind blows the smoke away again. Everything changes, every mile I hike, every step I take. There is an end to an endless stretch of exposed rocky trail and after I accept that the change will come when it does, the pain in my feet lets go and I can just walk balancing from rock to rock until the duff takes me by surprise and the trees reach with their limbs to protect me from the sun. 

This solo hike during a Covid pandemic was especially solitary. I met maybe one or two people in a day, going the opposite direction. Some talked a while, others didn’t. After two weeks, everything around me became animate. In the morning I thanked my place of shelter. When I asked the trees questions I got answers. Looking through the hole in the lava rock I let it tell me about pouring across the land aeons ago. I sang with the rustle of dried leaves, announcing that fall was on its way. The abundance of cracked open pine cones told me it was harvest time. The light agreed and as the sun rose a little later each morning affirmed that soon it would be time to go home and tend to my harvest. Home, as in a house, sheltered from the cold weather that will come. Now that I’m home, it’s still 95F degrees during the day. The sun is still strong. Tomatoes and melons are ripening and the green beans are producing a second crop. But I know deep in my bones that the change is here. I have walked day after day digging up the strength I needed for the climbs and descends, for the long-mileage days to take me from one place of shelter to the next, one source of water to another. The water ripples, dances, keeps on giving even when I’m not walking anymore, even when I can just turn on the tap to get a drink, turn the stove knob to heat the water for a cup of tea. No daily packing and unpacking of my belongings, no bath with a cup pouring water over my dusty, sweaty body while balancing on a log at the end of day. When I step into the shower I can let warm water rain over me. I am clean and separate from the dust on the trail. Stacks of clean clothes, piles of clean dishes, an abundance of fresh food lull me into forgetting that I’m most alive when I use all my senses to guide me safely through a day on the trail. On the trail I never felt alone, even though I knew I was hiking alone. My simple belongings didn’t give me the illusion of being invulnerable. I walked with my vulnerability, just like the animals in the wild, alert but not anxious, observant but not worried, letting my strength carry me forward. As one of them, the creatures, rocks, trees and plants, I lived my part. 

I’m home to write, to share what it was all about. For 3 weeks I was intimately and rudimentary alive. I hope to carry that knowledge inside me and let it seep into and enhance my daily living. Like the squirrels, I am busy putting up food for winter because the season is changing.

Some hikes take you beyond yourself. My recent hike to Grizzly lake in the Trinity Alps has a wildness only imagined in fantasy stories. A place where the green is greener, the rocks craggier, the water purer, the trees taller and denser. A place where mankind hasn’t done its damage. Oh, it won’t be long before that happens. But it hasn’t happened yet. The access to the lake is difficult, enough to avert all but the courageous, the experienced, or the fools. 
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I consider myself an experienced hiker and didn’t give the rating ‘difficult’ much credence. I’ve done difficult in the high Sierras, on the Knife Edge in Washington, on Icelandic glaciers, in the high Himalayas, in Tibet, how bad could it be in my backyard, the Trinity Alps of Northern California?

It was the hottest day we had experienced yet, the start of summer, as we hiked out in 90F heat, our packs filled with water, food and comforts for 3 days. We started from the China Gulch trailhead with a 2000 foot elevation gain over 1.5 miles, a 14% incline, tough but doable if you go slow and steady and make frequent stops. Blow-down trees to climb over loosened up our muscles and got us into a “can do” mood. At the top of the ridge we could see snowy Thompson peak, backdrop for Grizzly lake, in the distance. Down we went, a 1500 foot drop over a 1 mile steep and a hard-packed granite slope with few switchbacks. The heat and exhaustion got to us and my legs started shaking uncontrollably. Time for a  rest and electrolytes. That helped, so we moved on to the bottom of the slope where we started following Grizzly creek up; up and still more up, a seemingly endless 2000 ft elevation gain over 4.5 miles. Luckily we had stretches of shade and moments of putting our feet in the cold, rushing water. We arrived exhausted at Grizzly meadows at 7:00 PM, having completed a 6.5 mile hike in 7.5 hours! A hike that seemed so innocuous when first reading about it.
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It takes skill to read trail descriptions, to listen to the story of other hikers who’ve gone before you, to ask the right questions and interpret what it means for you. When you are an experienced hiker you file the information; you know you’ve climbed up bigger slopes; you’ve done longer mileage in a day; you know your limits are fluid and you gloss over perceived difficulties. 
This hike had all the elements of hardship mixed into one hiker stew. Heat, lots of elevation gain, slippery descending terrain, rocks. But it was only 6 miles in to base camp, one day of hard work before the actual climb to the lake would begin, which we could do without our heavy packs. That first night I stood in the meadow, looking at the imposing rock wall around me, watching the waterfall coming from Grizzly lake up above, drop 900 feet. I knew I had to do a rock scramble with a 1000 feet elevation gain over 0.75 miles on a barely visible trail if I wanted to reach the coveted pristine lake at the top and I wasn’t so sure of myself. Recent injuries made me less surefooted; I didn’t want to injure my old knees again, sprain an ankle or tear tissue, all very reasonable possibilities with one misstep, one awkward slide on the rocky slope. The summer sun set in rose colors on the snow above, hinting at the unearthly beauty that would await us tomorrow. I knew I had to try for the top. 

Climbing mountains involves breaking out of your routine. Either you have to get up in the middle of the night to get high enough before the snow melts, or you have to mentally prepare for a slow ascend, counting each breath, each step as your lungs ache from lack of oxygen. This time we had all day to make the scramble up and back down; we had time, and temperature or altitude weren’t an issue. The issue would be way-finding and paying attention to each step, each handhold to make sure we wouldn’t hurt ourselves. When you have to pay attention for hours on end without being able to let your mind wander, it’s like having a loaded gun to your head, or as Castaneda would say, death sitting on your shoulder. Don’t look down at how far you can fall; don’t look up too far or you’ll lose heart as the chutes and rocks keep coming. 

It takes mental discipline and stamina to keep the needed focus. You have to be present, take it one step at a time, one foot of elevation gain after another, and then you’re there! You got to the top! The world of an alpine lake hidden by white granite rocks, surrounded by snowy slopes, dotted with wildflowers growing out of cracks in the rocks while holding on to granite soil, shows its aqua colored water. Water that is funneled by snowmelt to a lip, to flow over a rock that sends the water tumbling in a powerful rush of foam and rainbows to the meadow below where you came from that morning. The bottom of the lake is visible and showing its innards. You’ve arrived in a place where the gods whisper in the few trees that cling to the rocky shore, where the short summer lives at an accelerated pace and produces dazzling blooms, ancient fungi and cones filled with seeds that carry the life of trees of next generations. Can I be still like a tree on a rocky slope and endure the seasons life bestows on me? I will take the image of that tree with me when I descend, an image that will help me deal with Covid, with anguish over racism, with the suffering that is happening in my “civilized” world. 

I sit on the lake’s edge and draw the cirque, follow its contours with my pencil; outline the clusters of trees on its slopes, fed by runoff from the snow, each cluster following an indentation, a hollow in the rocky slopes, a place where soil can build up just enough to allow trees to take root. My hand feels the interaction between rocks, trees, soil and water, blessed by the sun as it rises and disappears. This world is bigger than mine, I touch the universal forces that keep the planet alive. Keep me alive. There is more to life than my daily housekeeping, my garden husbandry, my family’s love and my community problems. For three days I’ve stepped out of my comfort zone and touched the heavens and universal forces. I have put myself in the hands of fate, and survived. Hiking has connected me with the core of living: acceptance of what is, attention to what shows itself, and love for the world’s immense beauty.  
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The scramble down requires attention and trust. The safe return to the meadow produces gratefulness and the hike back out is infused with happiness, cooler temperatures and the knowledge that each hike brings unknown experiences and renewed confidence. 
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The tentacles of my bean plants in the garden have reached the top of the tee-pee I gave them for support and are waving in space looking for something to hold onto. This wild search in space reminds me of the outcry from African-American people: driven by a strong life-force, tired of fighting the current structure, they’re breaking loose.

Natural forces affect all of us. They say nature is the great equalizer. Natural disasters, such as smoke from wildfires, floods from hurricanes, destruction from tornadoes and earthquakes affect everyone. Even though they affect everyone, some of us are better situated than others when dealing with disasters. And now we’re in a pandemic, a natural phenomenon that doesn’t know borders, race, or status.

Pandemic and Inequality
The pandemic is transforming our life, transforming our thinking. Maybe the pandemic is affecting everyone, but it’s not affecting everyone the same. Poor people, and the non-white people are afflicted 4-5x as much, because they lack safe jobs, they lack the opportunity to work from home, they lack shelter, they lack access to health care. When the police murdered George Floyd, pandemic stress and racial tensions were the perfect storm that opened the wounds systemic racism has burned into our society. A cry of pain is reaching into the sky, suffering is visible and unmistakable.
As Hanuman Goleman, founder of More than Sound LLC, says: “Racism is fundamental to our power structure and benefits white people every day. There is a lot of work to do to before we arrive at equality.”

The Examined Life
While the pandemic rages, the doors to our racist societal structure have been ripped open. It is time for white America to examine their actions, language and policies. What can a white person who has been socialized in a racist society do to answer the cry?
This is what we can do:

1. We can acknowledge how our forefathers took this country from the Native people by domination and genocide. We can pay retribution. We can raise a tax to give back to Native Americans for what we took (and not in the form of Casinos)
2. We can respect and support the attempts to bring back and hold on to Native American cultural heritage. They dealt with this land much more sustainable than the white people have done. We can ask/require input from Native American elders, when we want to put in pipelines, clearcut hillsides, mine the rivers and mountains. Make it law; part of an environmental impact report.
3. We can acknowledge the racist decrees that established the white man as the ruler and change them. We can teach about our racist history in schools.
4. We must look at our language and the names we’ve given to places, roads, sports clubs, expressions and change the language, the names, the titles.
5. We can invite people of other cultures, black, brown and yellow to live in our white communities. Learn from them. If we acknowledge our ignorance of their cultural ways, a conversation and learning can take place. This will only take place when we share community. We can create favorable mortgage lending practices for people of color. They want houses too!  
6. We can adopt hiring policies and favor hiring people of color by creating hiring quotas for people of color for businesses, government agencies, non-profits. If we offer jobs, they will come!!

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Building a Functional Society
So here are the basics: money, communal input, education, language, housing, and jobs, the corner stones of a functioning society. We can work on creating racial equality through these cornerstones . What can I, an elder white lady who owns a house, loves nature, doesn’t need a job and has access to affordable healthcare, contribute to do my part?
I can speak up in my city council. I can write to my representatives, support and encourage legislation that opens the doors to people of color. I can ask people of color who live here to form a council if they haven’t formed one already, and let them tell us how we can invite and bring other people of color to this region. 

The Long Road
It’s a long road to make these changes. It’s been too long of a road to freedom and equality for African Americans, Native Americans, aspiring Hispanic immigrants, and Chinese escaping a totalitarian political system. 
We cannot sit still or walk for our pleasure on this land without sharing it with others. 
The pandemic is forcing us to shelter at home. It doesn’t force us to be silent, inactive, or non-caring. We can take advantage of the fact that there is less distraction and more opportunity due to Covid-19 to reflect and develop much needed compassion. 
If the pandemic hasn’t changed your life that much, lucky you! What will you do to change yourself and make a positive change for others? Pick one thing out of the list of options and get started. There is work to do before we reach equality.

It’s quiet in my house. Ordered to be on lock-down as we are, I don’t expect anyone to stop by for a visit. The sun is sending its rays to the garden where new life is sprouting. The garden has been on lock-down for the winter, but life was happening underground and the daffodils and tulip heads bursting into bloom attest to that. Frozen little bunches of green are expanding and growing as the weather warms. I even see a few seed heads sprouting: summer and a cycle of seed making isn’t far away. Our society’s lock-down is in sharp contrast with the budding spring forces. 

When the world is busying itself with production, travel, and entertainment, few think about the power of being quiet, the restorative value of retreat. The pandemic has forced the world into retreat, and societies are given an opportunity to rest, review and gather forces for a new season. Will it be a new season? Or will we hurry back to a world as we knew it? A world of "more is better”, a world of "survival of the richest”, a world where "alternative facts” are truths?

Things will be different after all this is over, they say. Like with most retreats, insight and experience will fuel a different way of operating. More people will work from home, if they still have a job. Schools may change and add a home-school component to let children be home more. Families may value each other and wish for more time at home with one another, working and learning. More gardens may produce home-grown fare. Seed companies have experienced a run on seeds this spring! We may vote for a better prepared health-system, health coverage for all. There will be changes. But will this forced retreat change people? 
Do people value the power of quiet, do they retain the new insights fostered by rest? I watch a young boy outside my window jumping up and down on a trampoline. He isn’t looking for rest and quiet!
Is it in our nature to be on the ‘go’ until we collapse with fatigue? Are the pygmies who ‘work’ only three days a week to gather food and create shelter an anomaly? Did people want the long factory work hours during the industrial revolution that drove up production, or was it what a few greedy industrialists saw as an opportunity for extravagant wealth? The story that everyone benefits from economic progress is in question. We have time to question. When is enough, enough? 
Will the billionaires give up their privileged status and start sharing their wealth? I don’t think so, the ones who do have been doing it already. Will big pharma and insurance companies give up their profits and allow for universal health care? I doubt it. Will our government make them? 

In 1835 while discussing the American political system(1), Alexis de Tocqueville said: “There are certain epochs in which the changes that take place in the social and political constitution of nations are so slow and imperceptible that [people] imagine they have reached a final state; and the human mind, believing itself to be firmly based upon sure foundations, does not extend its researches beyond a certain horizon.”
There will be a shift when we get through this pandemic. There will be a reset of how we do business, how we value each other. But unless this virus opens the eyes of evangelicals, corporations, power grabbers, the die-hard individualist hanging on to their constitutional rights, the ones who believe in a system of small government, every-man-for-himself and trust-in-god, the system that produced America will still be there. The people will vote against their own interests because the beliefs they adhere to will explain away the cause and mistakes made during the pandemic. They will go back to business as usual. 
Except for a few. Millennials who have dropped out of the American dream to live a simpler life with their loved ones in a rural small town, will feel confirmed in their views that a slower life is a "good life”. The teachers, who have had a chance to experiment with novel forms of education, will not want to return to large classrooms with standard testing. Small business owners who’ve had to re-create their business to survive may become like craftsmen and shopkeepers of long ago, who wove the fabric of the communities they lived in. We can support them if we value our communities. 
And then the children. What will they remember of this time? Will they have a long breath out - time to think, watch the flowers come into bloom, find snails and salamanders on neighborhood walks? Will they learn the pace of keeping house and playing together, and refuse to be shuttled from activity to activity?
​I hope so. Because these children will be the adults who will change the system. A system that has failed them. ​

1. Democracy In America, from a new translation by Arthur Goldhammer, published by Library of America 2004

"Science is a powerful, exquisite tool for grasping an external reality. But within that rubric, within that understanding, everything else is the human species contemplating itself, grasping what it needs to carry on, and telling a story that reverberates into the darkness, a story carved of sound and etched into silence, a story that, at its best, stirs the soul."
Brian Greene, Until the end of Time: Mind, Matter and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe

I’ve been a traveller most of my adult life, but when people ask me, “Where are you going next?”, I have no answer. There is no next. I’m here for now, and it’s a freeing feeling. No need to plan complicated travel schedules to take me to adventurous places, no need to train my body for changes in altitude, and tough hiking schedules. All’s quiet in my world. I’m paying attention to my needs: how much movement do I want and need to feel good; how much wildness do I crave in my day-to-day doings; how much time do I want to putter? My days have an uncanny emptiness. Few need my help. I only go places when I chose to do so. Even the commitments I made to do presentations are far enough away that I don’t have to feel pressured to produce. 
The dust gathering on my window-blinds in the sun don’t compel me to a cleaning frenzy. I’m just watching the soft down lie there with its crinkly tiny white hairs hanging on a sloping surface. Someone is singing a melodious song on the radio, titillating small waves of feeling in my chest, making my body sway while my brain is finding words to write this piece. The new ring on my finger holds a stone, found on a faraway Tibetan plateau where I went to experience the outer edges of self.
These days I’m looking inward and am exploring the inner edges of myself. One way is no better than the other; one may be cheaper than the other, but money doesn’t hamper or determine my travel. What then holds me in this moment, this place, without great plans to explore the world? 

They say the universe turns in on itself. The ever-expanding cosmos collapses into a black hole, and the whole thing starts over again. I guess a winter of hibernation wasn’t enough of a turning-in. I know to listen and watch the surrounding forces influence me, and right now they don’t pull me outward except for a short jaunt into the mountains around my home now and then. Last summer I let my vegetable garden lay fallow, I only put in cover crops to enrich the soil, while I was traveling. Maybe now is my fallow time, uncultivated, inactive, not producing. We know the importance of letting the land lay fallow, to allow the soil to rebuild its microbial structure.  Not that we adhere to it in our current production-oriented society; we add fertilizers to make up for the exhaustion the soil is experiencing. So it goes with our bodies and minds: we drink coffee or red bull to give us energy, we peruse the get-away offerings to stimulate our tired minds. More money can be made by offering a product to enhance our exhausted selves than just plain rest. You may remember the days when a bout of the flu was a week of being sick and a week of lying around, aka healing? I remember my mother sending me out for a walk in the watery spring sunshine when I was recovering from the flu. How strange it felt to go for a leisure walk by myself while everyone else was in school or at work.

The roots of who we become are generated in our youth. I was born a wanderer. My baby wanderings took place out from under my blankets in frigid temperatures and out of my clothes as I stood naked on the tray of my highchair, my arms stretched out like the leafless winter tree outside the window with its branches reaching. As a result, my parents tied me in my bed at night so I would stay warm, tied me in my highchair so I would be safe. 
At three years of age I went in search of frogs my brother had told me about. We were living on the outskirts of a medieval town in the southwest of Holland. A bulwark and a moat surrounded the original town, with sixteenth-century city gates and bridges to allow entrance into the town. A police officer found me, as I was standing on the edge of one of those bridges peering into the dark water in the moat. After that incident, I was staked out in the backyard like a goat, rope around my waist, rope connected to a pin in the ground. I saw a picture of myself, leaning my face into my four-year-old boy cousin’s ear. Was I whispering something about pulling up stakes together and exploring the world? 

I became a walker, an explorer of the world. There was so much to love about life and living in all these different places. But being tied down every now and then, I also learned about being in one place. I came home last fall from the Himalayas with a renewed love for life and I’m loving the living daylight out of my days right here for now. If the microbes of lying fallow do their work, a healthy base for producing new ideas, a new story will come about.

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