Tuesday was the four year anniversary of David's death and I remembered that "I used to write."  I went hunting for the blog and spent part of the day reading through it.  Some of it wasn't bad, some of it felt very pitiful and painful, which I suppose those days were.  I am grateful to all the people who listened to me with such great love.  I wonder why I stopped writing.  I do remember feeling like I had nothing left to say. And then life starting changing so quickly I couldn't keep up.  I woke up one day realizing I didn't need to stay, I sold the house and bought a new one in Florida.  I worked for a year and a half, turning it into the home I saw myself inhabiting for years to come.  I worked to make friends, to be a good neighbor and to begin to belong to a new community.  That did not come easy and then the country began to fall apart and I realized that I couldn't stay in this new place. I had fallen into a rabbit hole and I did not like the woman I was becoming. Once again I gave up a house and a small dream and moved somewhere new.  It's been three months in the new place and I am coming up out of the rabbit hole.  I am no longer thinking of forever homes and I am comfortable here for now.

And maybe I have more to say.  We'll see.  

 I realized last week that my life has taken small steps over the last couple of years, toward something new.  Each step so small as to be almost unnoticeable but now, culminating in what appears to be, suddenly, a new country.  I crossed some invisible line, wholly unaware of it in the moment.  Now looking up I realize that this is not the same landscape with a few changes and additions, this is new.

I met someone recently who, when visiting my house for the first time, brought me two perfect oranges picked an hour before.

One night we went to watch the bats leave their houses.  That's a thing here.  750,000 of them and at one precise moment in time they flow out in waves; moving as one out of the house and into the sky, they wheel and disappear.  And one very wise hawk sits watch, occasionally diving in and climbing away with that "one small beating heart that tries with all it's might to live."  Nature is not a gentle mistress, but she does have magic at her disposal.

We went to the art museum and there were smiling children proudly holding paintings while parents took way too many photos.  We painted roosters on rice paper, made an origami good luck hanging, and designed a Japanese rock garden.  And then opening an almost  hidden door, we found ourselves in a miniature water garden.  Water fell from rocks and the bones of a Japanese Maple made living sculpture. Small azaleas bent over a stream and ferns and moss tucked in around a pool of water. Leaving that space we took the opposite, equally hidden door and found ourselves in a rock garden where we were given rakes and allowed to make our own meditative design in the stones.  More proof that life really is all miracles and magic.

How can you not love someone who brings you gifts like those?

 The world is hurting and I am often lost and confused but "I am learning to walk with grace in the dark and I am learning to fly with hope in my heart."  It is only when the old moon dies that a new moon appears and I feel my soul lifting once again toward the light.