…and I think you’d like to meet her as well.

Her name is Christine Kane, and she’s an inspiring artist who does a phenomenal job of keeping in touch with her fans and friends through her blog and through email.

She’s a reminder to me of just how important it is to stay grounded in your relationships. Taking the wild, great trip to stardom–even in your own little community–means little if you don’t remember that it’s people who bring love to you, to others.

I often find myself “too busy” to keep up those contacts. I see people like Christine and I think that, if she can do it with the schedule she has, I can too. Really, there’s never a good excuse to not put people first.

The other day I was at the pool and I heard “Cat’s in the Cradle” by Harry Chapin. I remember when my first daughter was born, how I swore that I would never be that kind of parent to my children. Hearing that song again made me do a 12-year check on my promise to always be there for my kids. For the most part, I’ve kept to it. But I realized something that saddened me a little. In my efforts to be there for my own family, I cancelled too many times with my own mother because the “new job’s a hassle and the kids got the flu.”

It’s hard. No doubt about it. I’m not beating myself up about this, because Mom and I had plenty of wonderful times together. But there’s a danger in not keeping in solid touch with your family, your friends, and yes–your fans.

We’re all striving for more love in our lives, and the recent economic challenges are putting us all in a situation where, if we’re not careful, we’ll be hamsters on the wheel (thanks, Christine) doing everything we can to stay afloat, driving ourselves crazy in the process.

I, for one, would rather be driven crazy with love. :)

When we moved into our new house last May, Spring had already consumed our small, quarter-acre lot. The azaleas in the front were in full, brilliant bloom–an explosion of pinks and reds and whites that distinguished our home from all others along our quiet street. In the back yard, where our property line kisses the Goucher College woods that extend deeply, well beyond any vanishing point discerned even by the tallest of rooftop dwellers, early-summer greens greeted us, a curtain of colors rich in nature’s hues. A few deer, rumored to be part of a population exceeding 200, were in our yard grazing as we did our best to silence our grunts, lugging box after box from our hatchbacks and minivans.

To put it simply, we were enveloped by nature’s childhood quilt, so young, so new, so alive.

Autumn’s demise has left us with a different view of our yard. For the first time, we can see the dead azaleas once covered by the other, thriving bushes. And in the back yard, we have learned that there are no evergreens. The Goucher woods are completely deciduous, and it takes little effort to see completely through the bare branches to the other side of the woods, where the hustle and bustle of campus living is still in full swing as students prepare for finals. When you stand still at the fence that separates civility from the wild, the faint rustle of the remaining leaves clinging to the brittle branches finds you, whispers to you, that even in all its dulled grays and browns, an energy remains that cannot be whistled away by the coming winter winds. The deer seem unaffected by all of it, though; they come and go as they have all year, bringing a sense of calm to the community. In these woods, we are reminded of the things that are most important.

And in these same woods, soon the hunters will walk.

Last week, Goucher announced that an aggressive campaign would be launched to “thin the herd” of wild deer on the campus grounds (you can read the carefully worded press release here). According to Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, the size of the campus grounds can provide a healthy habitat for 40 deer. A deer kill of 160 over several years seemed to be the logical solution, not taking into consideration the births of two fawns per doe (on average) every year. MDNR and Goucher president Sandy Ungar agreed on an initial hunt of about 50 deer soon after finals conclude.

I am reminded of several literary works where a society functions on a strict management of its community and its population. The Story of B, the sequel to Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, addresses this issue in a disturbing way where he writes about people as a food source. Ungar, who has talked about the importance the deer have to the entire Goucher community, using words like “family” when he talks about them, follows his comments with how the meat of the deer will be donated to homeless shelters.

I find this both disturbing and somewhat cannibalistic that he would suggest enjoying the deer’s presence on the Goucher grounds to create a more friendly and natural collegiate setting. But every year or so, we’re going to slaughter 25% of that family and share their flesh with those who are hungry.

This is the problem, though, when we interfere with the natural life cycles of the animals that are native (or once were) to our region. We don’t manage the lives of rabbits or squirrels. We don’t need to; there are larger animals to take care of any concerns of overpopulation. We’ve scared off the bigger predators, though, and because the deer remain very high on the food chain, we’ve created an unfortunate situation where we want to keep them around for their cute factor, as long as we assume the role of their predator.

Goucher is not unique. Several companies in and around Baltimore have welcomed deer herds on to their land for the natural and caring image they bring to their corporations. Eventually, though, slaughters are scheduled there as well to “manage” the herd.

We can’t have it both ways. The Goucher president was wrong when he commented sarcastically to a local paper that we’re not dealing with a bunch of “Bambis” on campus and that the general population shouldn’t view them as such. We’re not doing any animal a favor by providing a nice, secure habitat for them solely for our conveniences, only to hunt them down and kill them when they’ve procreated to sustain the existence of their species.

In the meantime, I have to figure out what I’m going to tell my children when they see the hunters in the trees, just on the other side of the fence, the one separating civility from the wild.

Last night, as I made my usual 9:41 p.m. Starbucks run (grande soy chai latte, if you were possibly wondering), I was stung by the sudden fragrance of fresh honeysuckle that has just bloomed in the middle of our yard.

For the longest time, we wondered what that bush might be. Well, last night, it let us know in a full fragrant song that filled my night with a whirling merriment I have not known since I lived on a farm in southern Maryland.

Smelling that honeysuckle reminded me of so many things in my own life, but as I inhaled deeply time and time again, I tripped well beyond my own years and knew–just knew–that what I was experiencing was exactly what William Wordsworth or Henry David Thoreau had experienced so many years ago when they wrote their poetry and their prose about the romantic beauty held timeless in a newly blossom’d flower.

These are the moments when I get a greater sense of being a part of something much bigger than the world that surrounds me today. Such scents as bursting honeysuckle on a late spring evening connect us to something that we can only begin to appreciate if we take the time to inhale deeply, let the fresh scents fill us fully, and see the possibility of what beauty flows in the air, unseen to the eye, timeless to the mind, yet strongly passionate with the heart.

I shall keep these windows open to let the sweet smell of honeysuckle and the other dewy flowers fill this house, this soul, this heart with a song sung for centuries that reminds us all what glorious miracles are ever-present, if we awaken enough to let them find us.

Greetings, all:

First, let me thank all of you for your kind words, your emails, your cards, your everything. I am honored to know all of you, whether it be in person or online. All of you have made this passing much easier to bear, and I am very grateful.

With each day that has passed since the funeral, I have felt the rush of emotions coming and going with no rhyme, no reason, no warning. But today, I immersed myself in myriad projects that made me feel good. I constructed the trampoline for my kids. We bought various yard ornaments and bird feeders to bring some new life to this once-tired yard.

In other words, I began my return to living fully with my family, to writing genuinely for me, to working on the final production needs for my book.

I’m emerging from the sorrow and am living my life a little more simply, a little more purposefully, a little more beautifully.

It’s a good feeling.

I’m taking a step back, though, and taking inventory of a few things. My health, my career in education, my general workload, what brings me energy and what takes it away….I’m taking a step back and thinking about how all of these things work together–or don’t.

I don’t know. It’s a good time to do this, though. It’s not like when I was 24 and my father died and I went charging through this life barbarically yawping Carpe Diem up and down the east coast. Times are different now. I’ve got a family, and I’m 42. When Dad died I could have thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. Today, I struggle to make it around the block without feeling some kind of pain in my back or my legs due to my excessive weight.

So, times have changed, and they continue to change. But, it doesn’t mean that it’s too late to make a shift in my thinking and in my actions to bring about a better life for me and for those around me. I’d like to think that I still have a lot of living left to do, and taking care of myself is the first step in making it easier for me to do everything else.

So, I’m back. Back to the blog, back to the daybook, back to the classroom. I’m back to living, and I’m back to loving. I’m resurfacing with a new look on life, and with a greater appreciation for this time we have here on earth.

Let’s all enjoy it together as peacefully and as fully as we may be able to do in the coming days, months, and years, God willing.

Love to all,

Rus

Ugh.

Earlier this year, just after Winter Break, I and a few of my colleagues were looking at the semester ahead of us. February allowed its usual breaks for Presidents’ Day and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. But then we all looked at March: a string of five straight weeks of teaching without a break until the spring holiday began on the last day of the month.

We knew it was going to be a long stretch. And, teaching seniors this time of year is especially challenging. Most of them have been accepted to their first or second college choices, and their minds are on graduation, Senior Week, and one last summer vacation–a nonstop party with friends before those sleepless nights roll into a fresh dawn of bittersweet good-byes and I love yous.

We still have two weeks to go, and it seems like that last day of March will never get here. It’s as if the days drip steadily with Mollases, slowing everything about the day, the night, the wait for break to arrive.

And then there’s Mom.

Most of you know the story. Nearly two years ago she was told she had a few weeks to live, and she was determined to fight it. And she did. Admirably. But now the cancer’s reached her brain, Diabetes has set in, and the strength that she had a few years ago to fight seems to be weakening, as if she, herself, is now caught in a mollases that compromises the passion she has always had to live, to fight, to believe.

Now, she rests most of the time, unable to do much of anything without the fear of stumbling, falling, or passing out. She’s on so many drugs that it dizzies my head to imagine how anybody anywhere near her age could figure out when to take which pills, and how many times.

My brothers and my sister and I will be having a meeting very soon about her condition. What are our options, what is best for her, what does she want to do. . .and the list goes on.

But for now, all my kids want to do is take her to Build-A-Bear one more time, to place tiny hearts inside freshly stuffed animals, and pick out perfect outfits that bring their new friends to life.

For if this wonderful woman of nearly 81 years will hold on to one thing until the day she passes on, it is the magical power of love that she shares with her grandchildren, the giddy smiles, the laughter, the experience of life, enjoyed fully, as if no moment could ever compare with the one being lived, loved, precisely now.

You are surrounded by love, Mom. From all five of your children, your sons- and daughters-in-law, your grandchildren, Charlie, the members of your church, and all who have come to know you.

We’ll care for you. Just as you have always cared for us.

It’s a pretty dangerous thing to rely on the reactions of others to gauge where you are in your life or how you might even feel about yourself. I’ve always been a person-pleaser. I’ve struggled with finding the right words to elicit the right responses at the right times. It has become almost an obsessive game of control in believing my words, my actions will have this reaction from or that change in a specific individual.

In the past, it has made me feel superior, as if it were something on a list I needed to cross off to ensure I had a good day.

The flip side of this is taking inventory of every word that might be shared with me or be about me. What do these words mean? Why did they say that? What am I doing to cause that person to say those words? What can I do to change me to control what they might say in the future?

All dangerous thoughts, I now understand.

Hugh Prather, in his first book titled Notes To Myself: My struggle to become a person, writes:

If someone criticizes me I am not any less because of that. It is not a criticism of me but a critical thinking from him. He is expressing his thoughts and his feelings, not my being.

Before, I thought I was actually fighting for my own self-worth; that is why I so desperately wanted people to like me. I thought their liking me was a comment on me, but it was a comment on them.

This is an important thing to remember, although it is hard as anything to hear another person’s words about you and keep them on their side of the fence and not invite them over for a nice game of dress-up to make them into what they never really were in the first place.

What if we were to appreciate those other comments people give us for what they are: thoughts shared by a friend who is struggling to become his or her own person? By sharing those thoughts, aren’t they themselves trying to understand and process his or her own feelings about something that has happened?

Perhaps if my reaction is not filled with motivation to change that friend, they will have the room to work through that emotion without trying to figure out why I would react in the way that I did. When that happens, the conversation is no longer about working through an emotion but about the misdirected reaction to the words that were used to express that emotion.

So how does this translate into what I might be able to do today? Whenever I am in conversation with anybody today, I will breathe at least once before responding and try to remember that their words are not about me but about them. And if I don’t work at trying to change them with the words I offer, then I’m doing a far greater thing for them by simply giving them the space they need to understand their words and their feelings in the safety of my presence. . . .

Where there are no desires, all things are at peace. . .

This passage from the Tao te Ching has stuck with me for nearly 8 years now, but not without good discussion from friends and family members who believe we must have desires to propel us forward in our careers, our lives, our everything. They argue (quite well, I might add) that desire is simply a part of what makes us human–desire to love, to be loved, to give, to receive. It’s hard for me to refute any one of these arguments.

Perhaps the revision to this phrase, at least in my life, should be as follows:

Where there are no expectations, all things are at peace. . .

That’s more like it.

Letting go (i believe) begins with a cessation in expecting something in return for anything I might do, even when it is not directed toward any one individual. And when I do let go of those expectations, I genuinely find that all things in my life begin to settle down into a nice groove of peace deeply within, allowing me to resonate that peace more clearly to those around me.

Hugh Prather, author of many of my favorite books including Notes To Myself, wrote a book about 7 years ago called The Little Book of Letting Go, where he details “a revolutionary 30-day program to cleanse your mind, lift your spirit and replenish your soul,” according to the promo blurb on the front of the book. For years, I have picked up this book, toyed with reading the first chapter, and then left it lying on my desk to be eventually reshelved on the top shelf, a little to the right, behind my desk.

Needless to say, I’ve never really made it past day one on that that revolutionary 30-day plan. Another typical example of avoiding the truth about my need to harbor the past to protect my present and prevent my future.

So yesterday, I plucked it from its usual spot, dusted it off, and cracked the spine one more time. In this latest go ’round with Prather’s book, though, I picked up a pencil and started interacting with the text, something I teach my kids how to do on a near-daily basis at school.

Practice what you preach, right?

Prather writes:

When we become preoccupied with what we want or don’t want from someone, or what we do or don’t approve of, we fail to see that person’s goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness, or anything else thatis present. This habitual reaction to other people and to everything else in life needlessly complicates our lives and blocks simple enjoyment and peace. . . .We can cover that person with whatever thoughts we wish, but that won’t get us a different individual.

As important as this is for the way we perceive others, it strikes me as being just as important for how we perceive ourselves.

Let me rephrase Prather’s words to personalize it:

When I become preoccupied with what I want or don’t want from myself, or what I do or don’t approve of I fail to see my own goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness, or anything else that is present. This habitual reaction to myself needlessly complicates my life and blocks simple enjoyment and peace. I can cover myself with whatever thoughts I wish, but that won’t get me a different me.

Letting go of those expectations has to begin with letting them go for myself. Prather has these “release” exercises throughout the book, and I found myself practicing one of them yesterday before reading the suggestion at the end of the first chapter. In “Release 1,” Prather encourages us to pick out one, two, or three individuals over the course of a single day and imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes. I did this while I was watching the news on tv. As a reporter interviewed a few people who had been affected by a tragedy that had happened in their neighborhood, I realized how important each person’s life really is, how complicated it is, how beautiful it is. Each one of us has our own moments of goodness, malice, gentleness, sadness. And placing an onion-skin filter of my own emotions over any other person’s life is not only unfair to that individual, it’s just another layer of protection against my own fight to let go of my own struggle to be my own person. Every time I turn those emotions toward others, I am simply using them to protect myself from living fully. It’s not only dangerous, it perpetuates the lie of who I really am.

Now, understanding”who I really am” is not deep or dramatic. There’s no breaking news that goes along with that. It simply means a cessation in worrying about everything and everyone else and simply “being” me in all that I do, all that I say.

I find it everywhere with me, though, and Prather’s 30-day plan may have to be repeated monthly until it really begins to kick in autonomously.

One thing is clear to me right now, even after reading only the first chapter: I’ve got to be my own friend before I can genuinely be that friend to others. I can make the changes to stop sending those negative messages to the ones I love (one friend wrote me and told me how much it hurts when friends do the things I do to them), but for it to be totally genuine, I need to let go of those expectations.

And just be.

Namaste.

For those of you who are still checking in every now and then, I appreciate your loyalty more than you will ever know. I have not written in five weeks, and yet, you may still be stopping by. I believe that one or two of you may read this in the coming week. Know that, when you do, this entry is dedicated to you.

I have been away for various reasons. As is true with my other absences, the reasons have been, for the most part, all good. I have decided to self-publish my book, Journey to Cold Rock, and that has consumed much of my time. I have also played around with the possibility of applying for a new position in the county public school system, which would pull me out of the classroom and have me working with English teachers in all 12 county high schools. The experience would be phenomenal in so many ways, but in the end, I realized that I could not leave my students, or the classroom–at least just not yet. We’ll see what happens with Cold Rock in October when we launch the book, but until then, I have no other plans of leaving the classroom. One of the determining factors was, simply put, energy. I give a lot in my classroom, but my students give me a great deal as well, and so there is this nice balance of energy that flows between us. Sometimes it’s a little more giving than taking, but it all works out nicely by the end of the day, the end of the week, the month, term, year. Everything always works out.

And…I’ve been busy working out and losing a little weight. For the most part, I have remained dedicated to my vegan lifestyle, with the exception of a small diversion this weekend to celebrate the 13th anniversary of my 29th birthday. I am more focused than ever, though, and I write these words just minutes after returning from the gym for a good aerobic workout on the elliptical trainer. In these past 2 months, I’ve managed to shed 14 1/2 pounds, so I figure that is a good beginning. Now the workouts and the diet and the weight loss are about me and not about some good biggest loser competition at school. That was fun, but now it’s time to focus on why I’m really doing all of this. I’d like to drop another 15 1/2 pounds by the end of spring break, which I believe ends April 10. That would be 30 pounds in just about 90 days or so. I’ll gladly take that.

For the most part, that’s what I’ve been up to. At least on the surface. It’s what’s been going on under the surface that brings me to my Back-To-The-Blog entry about friendship.

You see, on Friday, a few friends took me out for a drink at our local bar to celebrate my birthday. On my right was K-man; on my left was K-girl. Two of the best friends anybody could ask for. But I didn’t know that, really, until the bill came, and I reached into my pocket to pull out some money. Immediately, K-man stopped me and told K-girl to make sure that I didn’t pay. Now, that by itself is a good thing, but nothing worth returning to my blog about (at least not to reopen my blog-writing season). It’s what happened afterward, and then a long time ago, that made such an impact on me.

K-girl said she got it, but K-man was relentless. He said something like, “I don’t think you understand what I’m saying. This is his day, and his tab is on me.” He leaned in to me, looking at K-girl, and I could tell how serious it was for him to make sure that he covered my tab. Not because he owed me this, not because it’s what you’re supposed to do, but because K-man’s just about the best kind of friend a guy could have, and he wanted to take care of me. He wanted to make sure that he expressed his friendship in a way that he knew how to do, without question or without missing a single half-beat of his heart.

I know it might sound ridiculous to you that such a small thing could mean so much, so let me tell you the rest of the story.

Last May, when it was K-man’s birthday, and the usual crowd had gathered at the bar to celebrate his day, I was running late at school, and one thing led to another, and I left my classroom and headed straight home. He was well taken care of by the others, I convinced myself. Who was I to him in this celebration anyway? I knew he wanted me there, but it wasn’t like my appearance was going to make or break the gathering.

It hurt him, though. It really did. The next Monday, he stopped by my room, and he walked in, looked at me, and said, “Where were you?”

I offered my usual dish of apologies, but he just looked so angry, so disappointed and hurt. He waved me off and walked out of the room without saying anything more.

I immediately got defensive and told myself that K-man had to grow up. It wasn’t a big deal. Others were there, and it certainly wasn’t anything personally against him that I did not show up. I was tired…I wanted to get home…I…I…I didn’t think I mattered to him so much.

For the longest time I thought this. In fact, for the better part of this year, our relationship has been strained. He’s knee-jerked a few responses to me that have hurt, and I know I have been less than kind on several occasions when I could have taken a step back and not been so defensive.

So when we were at the bar on Friday, and when I heard him make sure K-girl understood that he was covering my tab, this definition of friendship just hit me head on. It all made sense to me.

The relationship that I have with each of you is very special, and I have done the same thing to you that I’ve been doing to K-man for so long. I’ve ignored our friendship, and although it has never been anything personal toward any one of you, I am tired of running from friendships, from genuine friendships whether they are in person, on line, or on paper.

I want to be done running. Running from all of you.

Running from me.

I’m working on a new piece about “the lawn” at Merriweather Post Pavillion, where I spent my teens and my twenties with good, good people and James Taylor, the Doobies, and a strong line of other great performers. What I remember most about those days are the relationships that I had with those good, good people. I have always been a person with great empathy for individuals struggling to become their own person. But unlike the balance of energy in the classroom that I and my students are able to strike, I have found that those individuals with whom I have such a great affinity for never receive me for who I am. I never really give me back to them. This has been an unbelievably huge complaint from nearly every one of my friends, where we get into a groove, and then poof! I’m gone. Or I can no longer play. Or I’m *secretly* afraid of this or that or him or her. It got old a long time ago, but now I think I’m beginning to understand exactly what friendship is all about.

I know. It sounds crazy. You befriend somebody. You hang out. You be there when he or she needs you. Done. So very simple, I know.

But not when you throw in the rest of the baggage. The self-doubt, the inability to differentiate between being yourself and being a whiner, the need to wear that mask as often as possible in fear of what people may really think of you.

I’ve had this problem for years. This is nothing new. What’s new is that, through understanding friendship, I am beginning to see that there is a simple solution.

Let go.

Letting go of all of the stress and the anxiety and the fear and just being, just existing, is the best thing I can do for me and for the ones I love.

So I’m letting go.

and I’m scared as hell.

Tomorrow: What I believe “letting go” really means.

When I was in college as an undergrad, I spent a great deal of time studying William Wordsworth’s romantic works. He wasn’t an author I was assigned to research and analyze. I think it was more of an affinity that I felt for his writing and his passion for love and for life. I focused on his Excursion and Prelude epics, as I was caught up in the whole idea of journeying to a greater place, both physically and spiritually.

The other day, I picked up (and dusted off) one of my old copies of Wordsworth’s poetical works. Immediately I was drawn into his wondrous way of capturing life in such beautiful words and lyrical notes. Even his early works, as the excerpt from “An Evening Walk: Addressed to a Young Lady” shows below, Wordsworth portrayed the journey almost as another character, where so much of that experience was part of getting to that intended destination.

FAR from my dearest Friend, ’tis mine to rove
Through bare grey dell, high wood, and pastoral cove;
Where Derwent rests, and listens to the roar
That stuns the tremulous cliffs of high Lodore;
Where peace to Grasmere’s lonely island leads,
To willowy hedge-rows, and to emerald meads;
Leads to her bridge, rude church, and cottaged grounds,
Her rocky sheepwalks, and her woodland bounds;

Where undisturbed by winds, Winander sleeps
‘Mid clustering isles, and holly-sprinkled steeps;
Where twilight glens endear my Esthwaite’s shore,
And memory of departed pleasures, more.

Now, the Lady he was walking to was not a woman he was wooing; it was simply his sister, and he was no older than 14 years old when he composed these lines. Yet, it was in the journey that he was able to share so much with us about the total experience.

This is, I believe, what is missing sorely from so much of our writing today, especially our poetry.

We spend so much time holed up in our rooms, going over life in our minds, contemplating, conjuring what-ifs, lamenting what we don’t have, and wallowing in our own self-pity. Few are the On-The-Road pieces that Kerouac wrote. Instead, we’re reading volumes and volumes of woeful pieces where there is no movement, no journey. It’s all in our heads, our dreams, of what may be, but–most likely–probably never will be.
Maybe the Grateful Dead recognized this when they wrote “Truckin’”:

Most of the cats you meet on the street speak of True Love
Most of the time they’re sittin and cryin at home
One of these days they know they gotta get goin
out of the door and down to the street all alone

I think we all know that we got to get goin’, but we find it so tough to take that first step out the door and into the real world.

The Indigo Girls, as well, wrote of this in their song titled, “Least Complicated”:

I sit two stories above the street
Its awful quiet here since love fell asleep
Theres life down below me though
The kids are walking home from school

Some long ago when we were taught
That for whatever kind of puzzle you got
You just stick the right formula in
A solution for every fool

I remember the time when I came so close to you
Sent me skipping my class and running from school
And I bought you that ring cause I never was cool
What makes me think I could start clean slated
The hardest to learn was the least complicated

So I just sit up in the house and resist
And not be seen until I cease to exist
A kind of conscientious objection
A kind of dodging the draft

So now, when I’m reading Wordsworth’s poetry, there’s a new melancholic tug that makes me wonder why it’s just so hard now to get out and journey. We’ve become so focused on our thinking that we’ve forgotten to live life a little dangerously without all of the pregame analysis and the probable percentages for failure to meet the targeted objective or goal.

In Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” he writes about what it means to be a saunterer, and he looks closely at the possible origins of the word. According to Thoreau, Saunter comes from people who were walking to Saint Terre, to the holy land. Children would exclaim, “there goes a Sainte-Terrer,” and thus the words blended to become “saunterer.” He suggests also that the word may be derived from “sans terre,” meaning without land or home, thus concluding that such a person would be equally at home everywhere he or she went.

I like to blend the two possible origins and think of myself as a journeyer, comfortable most anywhere, on my way to a more spiritual place.

Thoreau recognizes, however, that sauntering is not cherished as much as it might have been in Wordsworth’s day. He writes,

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least–and it is commonly more than that–sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say a penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and the shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them–as if their legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,–I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

So let’s go. Get out there. Take that journey. Walk toward your sister, your love, your friend, and embrace each step as fully as you might embrace the one you are destined to meet.

Even Wordsworth himself recognized the dangers of not living fully. In his Sonnet titled “The World Is Too Much With Us,” he warns us in the beginning of the poem that we are already succumbing to the unnatural pulls of our industrialized society:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.–Great God!

Great God indeed! Right now, I don’t think that it even matters how traveled the road is. Just take any road, for goodness sake, and take the time to look around.

Saunter.

It may just be the greatest idea you’ve ever had.

An interesting few days, to say the least.

DW and I feel as if our house has had the 48-hour virus complete with the runs, for the rains that we have been experiencing since Sunday have hit us above and below virtually nonstop.

DW’s been handling the flooding upstairs (we can’t stop the rain from seeping flowing through the “sealed” windows, and I’ve been pumping out the ankle-high water that keeps rushing in from the basement door (also “sealed”) and the old concrete foundation.

Our poor house. It just cannot wait for a little sunshine to make it feel better….

Amidst all the disaster and the destruction, DW and I have maintained a very peaceful calm, even at the height of the storm late sunday night when we were taking turns with the wet-dry vac between floors. When such situations occur, you can waste an awful amount of energy in fighting it, resisting it, complaining about it.

Instead, we chuckled. We have joked for weeks about getting to the ocean….We figured that, if we weren’t going to it, it was going to come to us. And it did in biblical proportions…

The truth is, we knew that the only way to resolve the problem was to care for it, as if it were ailing. Ask it what it needed to get better, and then serve.

And serving we’ve been doing this whole time.

We lost many books, all the carpet, plenty of pictures…and we’ve learned a few things as well about what can stay on the ground and what can’t.

But most importantly, we learned that it’s always about attitude and how you approach any situation, any event that you don’t necessarily invite into your life. Sometimes, the floods just come, and you need to flow with them to see the sun on the other side of the storm….