When I first planned this trip to visit my kids in the States, I thought of dropping by to see my “spiritual brother” Bruce Davidson. Together with his partner Linda Reimer, and the gathered companions at Sirius Community, he had been carrying an inner light for decades, even through the past few years of declining physical health, after a fall from a tree had physically broken him.

He passed in November, and my desire to meet him again in this lifetime were ended as well. Since Sirius is not far from the Pioneer Valley, where both of my adult children are in residence, I took an evening to drive up into the hills, to add my presence to his lingering presence.

The rustle of the river over the hill and behind the trees is constant, time’s current, and fills the emptying vessel of the day with sound. I am walking barefoot up the road from friend Bruce’s hilltown home toward the community of dancers, whose annual retreat here is part exploration, part homecoming: everyone arrives ready to listen, ready to speak, the conversations made of movement and trajectory, and geometry and the (morphing) architectures of bone and sinew, intention and opportunity, lift and release.

Four-and-one-half years ago I sat on a hill in southern Vermont with my daughter Bela​. I had a check in my hand to the Phillips Exeter Academy, where she had been accepted with nearly a full-ride scholarship into their “Leader-Maker” high school program. A gateway to the best schools, PEA promised amazing education, discussion-based study, and intense, laser-focused learning.

She had pretty much decided, though there were some misgivings. Then she had a meeting with her favorite Montessori teacher, who heard “Philips Exeter”, and said “Have you ever thought of the Putney School? The environment there might fit you better.”

The Gardens of Poblenou

I’ll tell you how I discovered them.

In September of last year, when Catalina was making her tour of European research groups, I was similarly engaged, researching the cities surrounding those research groups on foot, by bus, by tram and by train. The focus of her search started large and ended in pinpoints on the map; my search began in the pinpoint where we landed and slept, and spread out from there, a personal Big Bang, encompassing as much and as varied a landscape as possible.

– The decision is hard enough, she said, without my friends telling me I am making a mistake, that a woman shouldn’t give up her dreams for a man.

There are the words that we speak, that make sound from thought; and there is the timbre of the voice that carries other, deeper truth.

– And it’s not just him. There is so much I would be missing, the last months here. This has been a home to me. I’d miss my little cabin, my friends preparing for graduation, springtime on the hill…

We brought her from the shelter at 1 month of age, and she has followed me from farmhouse to rented barn to mountainside home and back to the seaport where she began. Now, three months with a friendly caretaker; next, flight to a new home in Hilo, Hawaii. She loves people, and responds well to new environments – she seems to like to move around.

Travel well, fortunate Minstrel the Cat! See you in the Spring!

Those funhouse mirrors and glass alleys were gentle amusement. It only cost a ticket or two, and I didn’t have to sprint through, I could pause when one of those distorted images was particularly entertaining. I liked the one that made me look like a pinhead pyramid, or was I a pear? It was just weird enough I wanted to figure out how they did it. It was physics, of course, so I can blame the state fair midway for leading me straight to Northwestern University’s Integrated Sciences Program, similar to a funhouse mirror, full of twisted expressions and personal compressions and an enlightening attempt to force myself into a shape my spirit simply could not acquire.

My shoulder leans against the wall of the commuter car, my head rests on the window; below my seat as we pass I see the brown rushes of the salt marsh blur by, and lazy fingers of the coastal rivers reaching inland and taking what they find seaward. A hawk on a pin-oak branch, both bird and bough wearing winter dress, and equally impassive and we clatter past. Salt marsh, wood lot, salt marsh, wood lot. These are my favorite scenes.

With fifteen days remaining before I travel. the pressure both increases and is released: as there is only so much one person can do, it becomes abundantly clear that the list of tasks not only will not be completed (oh no!) but truly cannot  be completed (ahh, ok).

It is a superficial drama. It affects this little constellation of cells that is Me, and maybe a couple of nearby galaxies of other “Me"s, but in the grand orchestration of sun and planets, and other suns and other planets, there’s nothing much to see here. Move along.

The wind blew through new leaves, now completely unfurled, southwest to northeast. That is the direction of the sun. I sat with my daughter and thought: “How I will miss my mountainside, riverside seat.” And then I thought, better: “How much I have enjoyed my mountainside, riverside seat.” One thought closed the heart, the next opened it.

When the night had fully fallen, I cooked myself a meal: I was contented with the vegetable flavors and the tiny torch of habanero. I poured the last of that bottle of wine. With glass at eye level (dramatically, for an audience of none) I turned and saluted my rooms. They were as they had always been: Buddha in the corner and Bible in the bookcase; a banner for the Earth in the window, while a guitar dreamed against the sill; the successful house plantings overflowing their containers; and chairs set casually away from the table where visitors, late for their homes, had pushed them. What I have watered, I have been.