Suddenly my life exploded. Within one month of returning to San Francisco in May, I sat a 5-day silent meditation retreat, bought a home, and moved…in addition to working with my business clients, meeting friends, celebrating birthdays, returning to yoga, and dancing all day on the beach. This is what happens when I’m in harmony with the world.
New home (with someone else’s furniture) and moving day antics.
The rest of the summer only accelerated–visits to Key West and Tampa, enjoying the heat of summer with family. Next to Grass Valley to help build a Burning Man art car, which turned into mostly 4th-of-July boating on a turquoise lake and grilling everything from salmon to pork belly. A week of work in Aspen, CO included enough trail running, hiking, theater, and live music to make me entirely fall in love with the town. In between travel and work, I engaged in Serious Material Acquisition, the kind I haven’t done in a decade. Moving my new home towards functional, I bought a couch, dishes, pans, shower curtains, spatulas, rugs, hardware parts and pieces, a lamp, glasses, cutting boards, scissors, can opener, coffee table, an endless array of everyday items…and did I mention small hardware? Still my place feels half empty even as I’m a little queasy from the amount of purchasing that has gone on.
With my cousin & uncle in Key West and squeezed on a small boat with friends for 4th of July.
More? Oh yes, more. My brain has been rapidly filled with information about double-paned versus laminate glass, about vinyl versus wood window sashes, about sealing and painting a front door, about rekeying locks, about steam boilers, about medicine cabinets and faucet parts, about gas mains and clogged drains… In the midst of all this home learning, I’ve been deeply engaged in other learning–about myself, about relationships, about the nature of mind, about business coaching, about finance, and about being on your path in the world. I feel like my understanding is expanding exponentially this summer, about everything from wood screws to the meaning of life, and I somehow have the space to take it all in.
Maroon Bells–Aspen, Colorado
Work becomes ever more rewarding as I watch my business clients increase their stability, capacity, confidence, and enjoyment. Productivity trainings expand into new modules and workshops. Guiding work grows: the group size for September doubles at the last minute, bookings start rolling in for Patagonia in 2015, enquiries for interesting trips in Bhutan pop up. And still there is time for play: cooking dinners, deepening friendships, hanging out with my favorite nearly-three-year-old, returning to Burning Man after a few years away, visiting museums, catching a hip-hop show, watching movies in the park on a warm(ish) summer night in the city. Life feels rich and full.
Friends dancing on the beach and at the Jurassic 5 show.
I am acutely aware that I am living in abundance. Living with an ease that continues to engender internal shock and awe, even as it also makes perfect sense. Everything is cycling upwards, outwards, in synchronicity. It doesn’t mean that life is perfect or that problems don’t arise. Unexpected home repairs crop up at inconvenient times. An uninsured driver changes lanes and runs right into my car. I break my car door mirror by pulling into my new narrow garage too quickly. Stuff still happens, but I glide through it to the next good thing.
I am filled with gratitude every day for the grace and abundance of my current existence, yet I consider it no coincidence or random occurrence of luck. I think of it as the result of practices I cultivate, what Buddhists might call “skillful means”: meditation, mindfulness, energetic opening and alignment, good diet, regular exercise, open-heartedness, compassion, purposeful work, staying on my path and offering my gifts into the world. Somehow, in that mysterious way of the universe, it all aligns, it brings me into harmony with the flow of existence, and this is what happens: BOOM!