Negligence! No, paranoia.

Somehow, I felt like I hadn't blogged in a long time. But I only missed a day. Which is good; my new mission for my life is to calm down. Impossible, you'd think, I'd think, for me! But after evaluating my health and well-being in Wyoming, where my biggest scheduling stress was when and where I would walk (the road? or the hills?), and comparing it to my state of being everywhere else, I realize that overscheduling is not doing me any favors. It exhausts me and makes casualities of everyone else around me. In the obsessive quest to create really long TO DO lists and then cross everything off the list in record time, I've sacrificed a whole lot of the good life.

This is the view from the grave of my very good friend who died of leukemia in 2003. I had never visited it before, and my trip to Cali was spurred by the sudden desire to visit. It was pretty uneventful on the outside, except that the weather shifted suddenly and was rainy, windy, and cloudy, to the shock of my Californian host. But big things shifted inside, and I realized that

1. dead people's bodies don't go anywhere if they're buried in the ground
2. your life goes on even if someone you really love is buried in the ground
3. I don't have to live in California! [This is huge, for anyone who knows of my long-standing desire to live there.]
4. if I don't have to live in California, then I can be HERE, NOW! Hey, what a concept! I can just be happy with where I am now and not freak out about not being somewhere else!

and so on. I am happily shedding all the useless things, people, ideas, and dreams that I have been holding onto for a loooong time. I don't want anything that doesn't serve me anymore. What I do want: to read this, prep a really good class for Oberlin, and renew my commitment to a daily meditation and yoga practice. That's the short list. Wait, no more lists! Haha. Clearly, I'll need to recruit more help on this road.