So, it’s been a while. I wish I had some wild stories of everything that has happened in the last year, or year and a half. The reality, though, is that life has just been life-ing. I am still aboard Quantico, as the locals say it. Life has been good to me, yet not without challenges.

In May, I said goodbye to a huge chunk of my heart.

The muppet was with me for 16 years. And, I still can’t type this without crying. The night we said goodbye a good friend took me out for a distraction dinner, and when he brought me home, I saw that the “only blooms once a year” cactus had bloomed for the very first time since it came to my house.

The fragrance filled the house and gave me the smallest measure of peace. Since then I have been distracting myself, keeping busy traveling and volunteering. Bet you’d never have guessed I would become a docent at a museum in my spare time. 🙂

After the election this month, I started to re-read Pema Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart. It’s a great book, if you haven’t read it already. It started poking at me from the introduction, where I received the instruction to “relax and write.” And kept at it in Chapter One: Intimacy with Fear, where I realized my failure to write was becoming a fear of writing. So … here I am. No promises about the future or trying to hard to catch up on the past, just the intention to “relax and write.”