Venturing Boldly: A Love Story

I have not fully understood the impact, if any, of the Occupy movement, but I admire the passion of those who believe it is a way for their voice to be heard. I pass the Occupy Raleigh island encampment on Hillsborough Street this week, as I have twice every weekday through the fall and the winter and the spring, and observe that they have folded their tents that provided shelter, piled up the remaining wood crates that fueled their fires against the cold over the winter, abandoned the cut logs they sat around the fire on, locked up the port-a-potties, and gone home. I am amazed by the passion that kept them there for so many months. They ventured out of whatever places they had been holed up in, and lived out loud.

On Tuesday, North Carolina passed a constitutional amendment that states for the record that all people are not created equal; that all people do not have the right to pursue happiness−at least not in a legal sense. In short, there is only one way to be. The love and marriages some North Carolinians might have if it were allowed, would make, apparently, a mockery of those of other North Carolinians; and the majority of voters are afraid of what that might mean for their own marriages. I guess. I don’t understand that; but the passions on both sides of the issue have flowed liberally for the past many months. People who had been minding their own lives, ventured out to speak passionately for the lives of others, and what should or should not be legal under the constitution. And that speaking out, that dialogue−even when it sounds more like the rant of crazy people−is what changes the world; eventually for the better, but not today. Today we are a little bit worse off, but love and justice will prevail. It just takes such a long time.

For the past five years, my passion has been my garden. I have dug into the depths of the earth. I have pulled weeds and pruned the overgrowth. I have rescued plants buried under ivy and returned them to the light. I have hauled bricks and flagstone and stones, many of which I also found buried, relicts of a previous life. I have planted new life. I have watched things grow; and I have watched some die, either because their time had come or because they didn’t receive the nutrients they needed to thrive. I have taken pictures and seen in the photos on my computer what was not evident to the naked eye. I have discovered the joy of watching and waiting. I have hurt, and I have healed with the garden’s help. I have written about my garden and the lessons learned from it, and in that I have uncovered new passion in myself. In writing, I begin to find out what I know, and give it a voice. I have shared my garden and my home with friends. I have loved passionately.

When I bought my house, and its overgrown gardens, I had no idea of the venture I was about to embark on. I wasn’t looking to become a gardener. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. In fact, I believe had I gone looking for some particular place, I never would have found this place. It found me. And now I find myself ready for a new venture. But this time I am going to a particular place. Home. Though it has been 35 years since I left the Pacific Northwest, it has never ceased to be the place I love with unequaled passion. The Northwest is the love story of my life and it is calling me home.

I have known for many months this time was coming, and I was not ready until now to write here about it. And it still feels like a bold venture to say it out loud. It makes it real. Remember my One Little Word from the beginning of the year? “Venture.” My word is venture. So, in 2-½ weeks I will leave my home and garden. After some time with dear friend Laura, Smudge the Cat and I will leave Raleigh on June 24 and head into a bold new venture.

Leaving friends, who have made a valued place for me in their lives, is the hardest part. There will be another home; there will be another garden. Yes, there will be other friends. But friends are not replaced; only added to. When one leaves a place, they leave also that which has been their heart. I can’t even talk about that yet. There is much that I will miss about North Carolina, and there is much that I won’t. I will save both for another post.

Pico Iyer said, “I left one kind of home to find another, to discover what resided in me and where I resided most fully.” My friend, Charly, who returned to her native Colorado a few years ago, said, “I returned to who I am and more.” I think I was most fully alive in Washington, with its “verdant forests green, caressed by silvery stream,” (the Washington State song); and of course, its snow-capped mountains. Washington is what the color green smells like. Blue comes into its fullness in the sky and water there. But I was barely an adult when I left. I am different now. The venture, what I look forward to, is rediscovering−or perhaps discovering for the first time−who I am and can be in my heart home.

Venturing boldly. Finding what you are passionate about and living it. Isn’t that what it means to fully be alive? Isn’t that what it means to love?

don’t ask yourself what the
world needs; ask yourself
what makes you come alive.
and then go and do that.
because what the world
needs is people who have
come alive.
    -howard thurman

A Thread Runs through It

I consider myself a flight risk. I used to think it a liability; an apology for my flitting-from-one-thing-to-another behavior. I have recently come to embrace it. My way of being in the world. My way of experimenting with things I will never have expertise in, just desire to delve into new ventures. I can't hang on to everything--there isn't enough space--so I dabble and move on. I admire people who are maestros in their field; who stick with it through thick and thin and learn their music backwards and forwards. But it's not who I am, and I am going to stop making excuses for it. Perhaps that is the gift of the sixth decade.

I have lived in four states and nine towns; all but two of the latter as an adult. I count sixteen dwelling places (not including the orange VW van I lived in for one magnificent rambling summer). As a university student, I lived in three dorms in four years. I won't even count the number of jobs I have held; but except for my current job of ten years, they lasted just four months to four years. I have flirted with playing musical  instruments. Under my parents' influence, the piano lingered--though I no longer play; the flute, organ, recorder, and violin did not. I dabble in art forms until I tire of each and jump to a new one. Currently I  am a gardener, a writer, and a photographer. (Yes, I do, therefore I am. I don't believe one has to be an expert to name oneself fully.)

Sadly, I seem to be a relationship flight risk, too. I do have regrets in that arena. Two primary relationships that lasted many years, but are no more. Many friendships that were fully with me, and now are past tense. I am sorry for their loss. And without their endings, I would not be parts of me that I most love. Some things are hard to reconcile. They just are. Motherhood and family are relationships that are with me always; but are, of course, ever-evolving.

Last Sunday's beautiful sermon, given by Mahan Siler, helped me make sense of me. He spoke of the thread that winds through our lives, that we hang on to, even as the beads change. I would carry it a step beyond, and venture that the beads are kept on the thread with a knot on either side. As the thread wears and stretches, the beads may slide off over the tightened up knots and be lost; but the knots remain, keeping the thread strong. The knots are the part of us made strong by where we have been, who we have known, the experiences we have had.

The Way It Is

There is a thread you follow. It goes among
Things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what things you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
Or die; and suffer and grow old.
Nothing you can do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.
             --William Stafford

My thread is creativity, adaptability, curiosity; dare I say, courage. Maybe I have a fear of being held hostage to attachment. I think that fear has the potential to be unhealthy, but I will venture to say that I live on the light side of it, not the dark. I examine it often to keep my thread curious, not afraid.

Back in the garden: this week has seen snow, 77 degrees, thunderstorm, torrential rain, and wind. The banana tree continues to astound. This is the first year I haven't had to cut it back to the ground. Instead of new stalks shooting up from the hard ground, the leaf fronds are emerging straight out of the dead-looking canes; like the phoenix rising. The single hyacinth my friend Porter gave me, is five plants this year. The snow drop leaves have, as they do each year, threaded themselves through my garden goddess. In looking for photos that represent my One Little Word, I find a goddess on the stump of a cutoff tree limb. The limb is gone, and beauty remains. The lenten rose--in ice and sun--the rain and the dawning of the day, like the thread, are constants.

One Little Word for 2013: Possibility

I have seen several exercises for starting a new year on my friends’ FaceBook pages and blogs this week.

❧ A list of what you want to do more of and what you want to do less of.
❧ What you do on New Year’s Day sets the tone for the year; choose wisely.
❧ Check in with your map (have a map!).
❧ A list of what brought happiness and what brought disappointment or sorrow in the year past.
❧ Choose a word for the new year; and, if you had one, review how your word in the old year informed your living.
❧ Set intentions, intentionally. Create your new year.

I have done, or am doing, all of them. They seem more helpful for creating intentional living than random "resolutions." I hope looking back isn’t restricted to December 31 and looking forward doesn’t have to be completed on January 1. If it does, I’m behind. The way I see it, the first half of 2013, for me, needs to be spent in this way. It is the second half of my gap year. Time to assess life past and dream life future into being.

On New Year’s Day, I didn’t know it was the day to set the tone––to touch on, in one day, all the things I wanted more of in my life. Still, I wrote a poem that I liked, I went for a walk up the snowy road, I went to a two-hour yoga workshop with my sisters, I read, I tried to be nice. And at the very end of the year I had gone exploring into new places in the mountains. Not bad for not being intentional.

My word for 2012 was Venture. It was a little bit of a cheat, because I already knew I was going to sell my house and move across the country. I even knew in my heart of hearts that I was going to drive with my cat in an old car (though I was still considering options). That right there had pretty tremendous potential for a big adventure. (And just as an aside, it turned out to be the second best time I ever had in my life; and the other best was also spent driving cross-country). But in choosing the word, I explored many ways to venture into the new and unknown. It was a perfect word. It gave me courage to keep moving forward through the fear and doubt.

In the yoga workshop on Tuesday, I got my word for the new year: Possibility. The future is before me, and the possibilities are wide open. They will not be the last choices for where I live and what I do with my living. But they are the next, and I want to choose carefully. Also at yoga, after we considered in two breaks from asanas who we are and if the manifestation of ourselves is in alignment with our deepest purpose, the teacher said one of those things you have heard before but suddenly hear again for the first time: “You are already the person you want to be.” She is in there, I just have to let her out. As I told my sisters, I only need to get out of my way.

After dropping my sister off at SeaTac on Thursday, I stopped at Tacoma Mall. The day was crystal clear––Mt. Rainier sharply silhouetted against the cerulean sky in the east, the snowy Olympics glistening in the sun  to the west, acting out the gloriosity of the PNW. I had planned to drive to Steilacoom, a historic town on Chambers Bay that my local sister had heard might be a possible fine place to live some day. The western state psychiatric hospital is close by, too. I might need to check in there. I came out of the mall and headed back to I-5. I knew there had to be a closer way than the way I knew, which entailed circling the mall; how hard could it be? I got lost. I finally turned on GPS Phoebe who got me there.

To get to Steilacoom I had to go south and then back north, past miles of razor wire and camouflage of Fort Lewis/ McChord AFB, then more miles of soaring stately fir trees that lined the road and tickled the blue sky; then down the hillside above the Puget Sound inlet that sparkled behind the ferry terminal in front of the stupendously spectacular Olympic mountains' backdrop. Not much of a town, I can remove it from my Possibility list for living in; but that is not the story.

I thought I would let Phoebe lead me out, maybe there was a better, or at least different, route than the back yard of the military base. Like the wisepeople of old, I was open to returning home by another way. Where she took me was ridiculous. I kept saying, “Really, Phoebe?” I even saw the sign to I-5; but I was curious, so I went with Phoebe, heading farther and farther north when my destination was south. I finally smacked my hand against my forehead in realization that she was following my first “get me out of here” request. The one that started at Tacoma Mall. She was taking me through Lakewood (the biggest, ugliest strip city I ever saw; and where the mental institution actually is––of course it wouldn’t be in a healing environment like Chambers Bay), back to the mall and then to I-5, instead of starting from where I was. I had failed to put a new search. I had listened to another's voice instead of reading the road signs in front of me.

So now I am wondering: what are the possibilities if I start this year from where I am right now? A fresh start doesn’t have to mean forgetting who and where I have been, but it is so easy to get stuck there. “I can’t [fill in the blank] because [fill in the excuse].” If I think about that, the excuse always circles back to who I have been in the past. Who and what can I be starting right here and now? I can put in a new search.

It seems overwhelming to have the whole rest of my life spread out in front of me with the only real restrictions being my own fear and self-doubt. But in yoga a couple of weeks ago, Mo led us through asanas by breathing into release then exhaling into a little bit deeper place. “Micro movements achieve micro adjustments,” she said. Micro adjustments add up to significant change. That awakening was reenforced on NPR the day after New Year’s when a caller into the program I was listening to extolled the idea of making “one degree of change.” One degree, and then one more, that’s double the change. Two degrees is just that easy.

I pulled up to the coffee shop today, thinking about small steps and the map I sort of drew for myself a year ago, and returned to one of things I had wanted to do, just for the fun of it: learn how to be a barista. Never know when that might be a useful skill here in the land of all things coffee. Why haven’t I done it? All I have to do is ask someone if they would teach me, and offer something in return. As friend Amelia said in her recent blog post, “My map! I had forgotten to check my map.”

Possibility is achieved in small steps forward, not giant leaps that might land you in a crater out of which you will have to slowly extricate yourself. But first, the map. I don’t have to know the whole route, I don’t have to know the exact roads. But let the exploration begin. Where do I want the next stop to be? What do I want to pack from my past into my suitcase? What do I want to give to a thrift shop, or bury in the landfill? What new clothes do I want to pack? And is my map in my front pocket where I can check it easily?

A dear friend sent this Blessing for Epiphany by Jan Richardson. I am studying.

The Map You Make Yourself



You have looked

at so many doors

with longing,

wondering if your life

lay on the other side.



For today,

choose the door

that opens

to the inside.



Travel the most ancient way

of all:

the path that leads you

to the center

of your life.



No map

but the one

you make yourself.



No provision

but what you already carry

and the grace that comes

to those who walk

the pilgrim’s way.



Speak this blessing

as you set out

and watch how

your rhythm slows,

the cadence of the road

drawing you into the pace

that is your own.



Eat when hungry.

Rest when tired.

Listen to your dreaming.

Welcome detours

as doors deeper in.



Pray for protection.

Ask for the guidance you need.

Offer gladness

for the gifts that come

and then

let them go.



Do not expect

to return

by the same road.

Home is always

by another way

and you will know it

not by the light

that waits for you



but by the star

that blazes inside you

telling you

where you are

is holy

and you are welcome

here.

Drenched with Possibility

On the first Sunday of the new year I shared my word for 2013: Possibility. This week I began my formal exploration of my word. There are many more definitions of Possibility online than there are in the family Random House, the dusty oversized dictionary that has resided for decades in my family home on a special slanted shelf my dad made for it. There is the common one: “the fact or condition of being possible." But my favorite is: “Potentiality for interesting results.” That one beckons me into a wide open future. It peeks, mostly hidden, from around the corner with hooked index finger. It teases me toward exploration. It sets me dreaming.

Next I pull out synonyms that roll on my tongue and bounce around in my heart: plausibility, potentiality, feasible, achievable, realizable, attainable.

And then my favorite beginning exercise: finding quotes about my word. I love the internet. I find several to record in my notebook, to pull out when I need inspiration, or a kick in the butt. Again, I have a favorite, by a woman who proclaims herself an "idea-whisperer," which is pretty cool itself: “I have a habit of letting my imagination run away from me. It always comes back though...drenched with possibilities” (Valaida Fullwood). Drenched with possibilities. Wow. That is how I want to live. Drenched, like the valley on Wednesday when the rising sun turned its winter drab to gold. Drenched, like the first rain in twelve days left the trees and moss smelling green again.

Six years ago, at about this time, just before Lent (the season that I still my busyness and make space for whatever it is I have been ignoring), I thought about Possibility. What if I bought a house? I made a list of what that would mean for my life. I didn’t so much consciously decide to do it as I did follow the beckoning finger to the garden that changed my life. Neither a garden nor a changed life were on my list. A year ago, having turned that possibility to reality, I set my sights on returning to my soul home. It was a Bold Venture. It isn’t time yet for my next venture, and I don’t know when it will be; but it’s always time to be drenched with possibility.

I just read a friend’s blog post about her annual
week-long gathering of a group of women. At their first day check-in they each shared what their busy and productive year had held. Until the talking stick reached the group’s 86-year-old elder. Contritely she confessed that she didn’t know what good she was doing in the world. Everyday she goes to the coffee shop and tries to be friendly, “to make sure everyone gets a welcome as they come in the door.” One day she rocked a fussy baby so his mother could enjoy a cup of coffee. “You know,” she went on, “people just need to be seen. Just need someone to look up and say, ‘hi; glad you walked into the room.’ Mother Teresa said the greatest disease in the world is loneliness, that if she could heal anything about being human, it would be to cure loneliness with love. I try to be like that, to bring a little love into the space around me. But I feel old. I don’t have the hearing, the energy, or the big ideas I used to. That’s all I got to say.”

Selah. I invite you to breathe deeply and read that again, slowly.

Wow. Wow. I can imagine it was hard to speak in the room after that. After a selah, my friend, with permission to comment, offered this: “You are doing exactly what the elder in the village is supposed to do! You are tending what’s right in front of you. This is the fulfillment of your days—the capacity to slow down, to see what needs to happen next, right here, right now—with the young mother, with the baby, with the barrista, with the regulars from town, with us in the circle. Through these gestures of kindly attention offered into your daily surroundings you are a messenger of your deepest values. Every one of us who is moving faster, who is busy beyond managing, who is hooked into the necessities of technology, is counting on you being here amongst us moving at the pace of guidance and paying attention in the ways that you do.”

My mother is this elder to me. Because I am her family, with all the history that comes with a parent-child relationship, I don’t always see it. But everyone she meets is enchanted by her. People tell me all the time, “I love your mother.” She embodies kindness and hope and grace. She is proof that you don’t have to do anything earth shattering to change the world. Her nearly sightless eyes smile behind her dark glasses as she straightens her ever-so-slightly bent body and speaks a kind word to a restaurant patron. That person smiles at the child at the next table, because kind attention begs to be passed on. The child stops fussing and shyly smiles back, before giving her mommy a hug. And on and on into limitless possibility.

My mother and my friend’s elderly friend are preparing our elder places. Through them I see the possibilities for my own old age. But first things first. Right now I have today. Today I can dream about the possibilities in my still-energetic years. What I choose today will pave the way for tomorrow. And tomorrow’s possibilities will set the course for the next day. And all the while I will remember to smile at strangers. It could transform their day. It could call them to possibility.

My sister recently sent me this poem by Rabbi Yael Levy:

What is it that calls us forward,
To lift our eyes
And see that everything is possible?
Just for a moment to feel a strength beyond ourselves,
A love beyond ourselves,
And imagine we can step into the river
And change its course?

Perhaps it is remembering
That everything we do
Shapes the future
For the children we will never know.

Everything we create
Fashions a world for the people who will
Some day call us ancestor.

Netzach (victory) teaches
Raise up right action
And aim toward love and generosity.
Eternity exists in each moment
There is no separation between us
And what will be.

Drench yourself with possibility today. Selah.

Finding the Rhythm, Learning the Words

It has been exactly three months since I left my North Carolina garden and its bloom of friends, meaningful work, and familiar places and routines. It was just after the summer solstice; and now we have celebrated the autumnal equinox and the northern hemisphere is halfway through its long exhale. I am exhaling, too; and trying to feel the beat of this new song.

The summer was chaos. I should have been sweating through the North Carolina heat, watering the garden (or not), harvesting tomatoes and summer squash, watching the banana tree shoot its broad leaves skyward, having wine on a friend's deck, taking pictures of baby birds learning to eat from my feeder, doing Julie-yoga, writing on the porch at Cafe Carolina with the Fresh Market blueberry scone (until they stopped making them), throwing my windows open to hear the thunder and the pounding rain then slamming them down before the humidity slithered in, visiting my grandsons, and pitching my tent beside a murmuring mountain stream in the gentle Appalachian mountains.

But I wasn't doing any of those things. I stepped off the edge of my familiar life into this chaos where I don't know the words. I drove across the country with only my cat for company and moved into a house with another human being for the first time in more than eight years. There has been no thunder, nor much rain of any sort－certainly not pounding. I have not been able to lure the shy birds to the feeder; and my writing place is a few steps from my living room, having given up on coffee shops. My yoga class is, well, different from my familiar and beloved. My new grandson will be nearly a year old before I see him a second time. Dear Vee took a picture of the bigger than ever banana tree and its first ever flower and fruit, that I missed; it is no longer mine.

We think we know all about the song of our lives, then over time the tune doesn't quite fit anymore, and we tumble into chaos or despair. But there are many songs in the universe and I am finding the rhythm to this one and the words are beginning to come; I make up some and adapt others. I am slowly letting go of what was and letting in the wonder of what is. I guess we are all always doing that.

 "Wonder and despair [order and chaos] are two sides of a spinning coin. When you open yourself to one, you open yourself to the other. You discover a capacity for joy that wasn’t in you before…. As far as you are willing to venture into shadow, so far may you venture into light” (Christina Baldwin; Life's Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest).

I have had wine in my sister's courtyard with her friends and camped at the foot of a mountain in lush greenness with my daughters. My windows are always open and the cool night air wafts in around the bedclothes; I wake to morning fog in the valley. Cows bawl in the valley and coyotes howl in the hills beyond my window. I have harvested my tomatoes finally, this week. Cooking for someone else is becoming a little less onerous. I am discovering new friends and reconnecting with old ones. I bought Washington-grown Honey-crisp apples at the farmers' market－in Washington! My writing was published in the local newspaper this week. I have explored from the mountains to the sea and all over the enormous county that is my home now. I am rediscovering life in a small town; it has its challenges and its beauty.

Perhaps it is because it's autumn that I am settling into a rhythm finally. On the Native American medicine wheel, the season of autumn lies to the west. Since I can remember, autumn has been my favorite season. The west is where my soul was born, and where it has always resided－in spite of long seasons away.

Autumn is a time of introspection and manifestation. In autumn, I travel inward to the center of the spiral, my favorite symbol, after hanging out on the edge all summer. From that place, seeds of renewal and new life germinate. Through our chaos we receive the world’s calm. I will learn the words and rhythm of my new song in time, as I step from the chaos of summer into the calm of the earth's center. 

Weaving with New Colors

I have struggled in recent weeks with what to write in this blog. My garden was my inspiration, and gardening is in my past for now. I wonder, not for the first time, if the blog has also run its course.

I lamented to my friend Katherine this week that I didn’t know what to write about. She gave me a quote for inspiration, “If I want transformation, but can't even be bothered to articulate what, exactly, I'm aiming for, how will it ever occur?” (Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love). That is a starting place for January. But first things first; it’s not the new year quite yet.

You know those toy cars that you put on the dining room floor and pull backward toward you several times before you let go and the car careens across the floor and crashes into the dining table leg? They can’t go forward until you pull them backward. I don’t think you can move forward in life, either, until you pause to look at where you have been.    

Can you stand a metaphor that compares life to a piece of woven fabric? A blanket of all one color is functional as something to keep you warm, but it isn’t very interesting as a piece of art. A weaving that abruptly changes color, as if the artist had paid no attention to what came before, is not pleasing to look at. But one that weaves complementary colors in and out of the warp of consistency, can be looked at and into and remain an ongoing source of joy and beauty and depth forever. I aim to continue the colors that worked for me this year, perhaps pick up some that I dropped from previous years, and then add some new hues; while staying true to my core. The first step to keep the color moving is to look at what I wove this year.

I look back at my January 2012 blog post as I ponder the year past. After a too-warm December, it is full of photographs of the emerging garden. The sedum poking up through the dead old growth, a black-eyed Susan, the Lenten rose. I am swiftly overcome with longing for the life I planted in that garden, for the greedy squirrel eating the birdseed outside the door of my sweet house, for the sunrise over Oakwood Cemetery. It is a bright spot in the fabric of my life. I hope it is being loved.

Last January I began the One Little Word Project. I chose a word to focus on for the year: Venture. I certainly ventured, though I only did the OLW exercises for five months. My Venture (selling my house, quitting my job, leaving my friends, moving across the country, living with my mother) was so bold, I couldn’t really focus on the subtle colors I want to weave into my life. And yet, as I look back, I see that the colors of mountains and ocean, of sunrises and sunsets, of stories from Mama and learning about how to be in this relationship with her, of new friends, of writing about and photographing this new existence are weaving through my fabric. But it doesn’t feel like it’s hanging together yet. This week I will sit, with my pen as the shuttle and paper as my loom, and consider what new threads need to be added to my 2013 fabric to make it pleasing.

But first, the sun is shining. Time for a little road trip exploration over the hills and dales with my new camera. Perhaps as long as my life has not run its course, neither has writing about it. I am going in search of new colors.

Cobblestones

My camera and I venture out on a lunchbreak walk on one of the week's warm Carolina spring-in-February days. We are looking for snapshots that speak to me of my One Little Word for the February assignment. I get sidetracked by cobblestones that pave one of the Cameron Park alleyways. I spend the rest of the week noticing what a linear world we live in.



Modern brickwork is of identically-sized bricks; and, unless the designer chooses to mix and match, they are all the same color. The patterns, though varied, are symmetrical; and they are tightly bound one to the other. It takes a jackhammer to dislodge them. Though I am sure the creators of cobblestone roads laid them out with some
kind of a plan, cobblestones are not all the same size or shape or thickness. They had to work with what they had, so the pathways are not linear. The stones are not mortared into place. Over the decades of time and weather, and the pounding of horses hooves, they have shifted; some have come out, leaving holes that no one bothers anymore to replace. Generations since they were put down, they appear haphazard in their beauty. I have to slow down when I walk on them, which is why I notice them.

My life is more cobblestone than brick. It didn't start out that way. I had a plan, one set before me by my parents' example. There is great comfort in having a plan; one that doesn't require

much thinking or decision-making, other than maybe at the beginning of the journey. Not to trivialize the traditional get married-have children-follow a career path up the symmetrical ladder that is missing no rungs-life, but the GPS is programmed and works well as long as the driver makes no off-grid mistakes (or choices) or the battery dies. There are of course, detours that the nice voice in the unit's box didn't anticipate, and she has to redirect. It takes a few moments to get back on track. Sometimes I long for a brick road life. Well, not really.

So all week I notice the straight lines: crosswalks, fences, power lines, buildings, walls, ceiling tiles. And I notice the contrasts: a cobbled together wall; a newly-blind woman learning to walk with a white cane tap-tapping back and forth and forth and back, unable to see the dangers that lie just ahead of her feet and her cane (perhaps it's better that way), but thankfully with a friend

walking with her as she learns to navigate; a vine wending its way around the linear fence in its way, and the square-cornered path of my passion flower vine. Like me, the passion flower began on a linear path, then it erupts into randomness, going this way and that and popping up in odd places, but always growing and blooming.

I pause on my early morning walk and watch the asymmetrical jet streams slow dance across the sky, glowing pink and gold in the dawning sky.

Linear, symmetrical paths are easier to race through life on; it's easier not to stumble and fall, or get lost. Cobblestone paths have bumps and can be unpredictable, often ending before reaching a destination. Connecting paths are not clearly marked, requiring some off-road walking and searching and path-cutting. Perhaps my side-tracked observations this week do tell me something about my One Little Word, after all.

"Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use." -Carlos Castanada

Happy Valentine's Day to all my dear readers. May your journey be paved with at least a few cobblestones.