Catch-Up (Huevos!)

Sometimes I feel most at home on the road. Windows down, surfing the warm air with my feet tucked up beside the window. Map on my lap. Taco-search commenced. Nothing to do except hope for a perfect camp-spot and a place to lunch with the sea-creatures.

I thought I would share some-photo-highlights from a month or so of beautiful travel times. How lucky to have so much free-time to chase the spring green up and down our gorgeous coast! How silly not-to have hiked the Sierras or dove into the grand-canyon, but, cest-la-vie. Can’t do everything all at once, even though it is tempting to try.

California and back with Faron. Glorious eating-exploring time in San-Fransisco with Nellyda. Prince-george with Kate. A super-fun Washington trail-race with the van-fam-clan (hurrah!). Saskatoon to see family. And finally, a spectacular solo trip to the Tassahara zen centre, where I sat still for the first time in a long time and realized that those thousands of kilometres were teaching me something useful after all. At the centre a monk named Mark spoke much about how one could consider the source of home to be the in-breath. Home understood as the essence of breathing in without control, of simply noticing being alive. It was good to hear other wander-lusting folks talk about how a grounded life doesn’t have to be located in stuff, or an address, but can be found within the basic inhale-exhale that allows us to feel the wonder of the road.

Made It!

The letter came in the mail today. We made it; real registered midwives. Legitimate baby-catchers. Members of a long-standing-century-spanning tribe. How surreal that the single day I’ve been waiting for, sacrificing sleep and friends and fun for, arrived in the form of a mail-man walking up the porch stairs while I sipped green tea and avoided packing my life into boxes again.

How strange that it is simply the passing of time that results in these milestones of our lives: before I was one thing, now another. Before I could run one kilometre, now twenty. It’s not really effort and ego, but the movement of the earth around the sun. In the winter I was a student struggling and grumpy and now it is solstice time and the trees are green and I am somehow transformed. Boundaries between one-time and another marked by stamps, thin paper, and long days of sun and light.

I am a midwife. Despite my efforts to control the transition and mark the occasion my way through party planning, gift-appealing, and targeted red-wine drinking, the true passing of time occurred just now, quiet and alone at home. New life defined by dogs barking and house painters laughing. The letter carrier has strolled away down the street. Is he aware that today his job was to deliver change into my arms?