A Glimmer of Light?

Trying to go to sleep last night, listening to the hauntingly, actually achingly beautiful music of Hawaiian singer/songwriter Keola Beamer, I was thinking serious thoughts about my life situation. Over the past couple weeks I’ve spent considerable time not just thinking about it, but talking with family and friends who know me well, who know well my hopes and dreams as far as the life I’d like to lead, who understand the journey I’ve been on, and it’s pretty much been a consensus: what the hell are you waiting for… you know what you want, this obviously isn't it, go after it.

But, it took the HVAC man telling me that the reason my house isn’t cooling down is because my air conditioning unit is simply too small, plus how exorbitantly expensive it would be to run a bigger one, to get me over the hurdle. Right then, sitting in my hot living room with him, he pretty much disappeared from view while in my mind, I took the expressway through the disappointment, fear, and potential embarrassment, to arrive at my already known but couldn’t quite admit destination: the emphatic and unemotional knowing that I simply don’t want to live there. Period. It’s not even a question of can’t, but of want. Don’t want to live a place where two to three months a year it is flat out too hot to function.

And the heat is not nearly all of it. The thing is, I thought I knew what I wanted. I even thought that this move was going to help facilitate it. Except that I was wrong. The intentions were there… go somewhere I could afford to buy a house, be “secure,” use that house as my home base, and travel. When I first learned how hot it was up here, I thought, no problem, I’ll just go somewhere for the summer. The only problem is I didn’t foresee many things, including the expense, in terms of time, energy, and money, of owning an old and needy home on a totally un-landscaped quarter of an acre. Short-sighted probably, twenty-twenty hindsight and all.

I’m pretty sure that in my last post I wrote that now was not the time to be making any big, life-altering decisions. Yet here one is. Except that it didn’t feel at all like I made a decision. It just happened. No agonizing, no back and forth, no pro and con list. Or, maybe I should say, the truth revealed itself. And I was apparently ready to see it. And that day, that afternoon, I felt better than I had in weeks.

What that means, I don’t know. There are options that I’m exploring, all of which will require more upheaval. I trusted my intuition and it brought me here. Was it wrong? Was it all a big mistake? Who knows. Some people say there is no such thing as a mistake. For years I’ve bought into the idea. And maybe it is true. For all we can see is what we can see. The tip of the iceberg, really, and all the rest, the bulk and mass of it, why we're here, what we came to do, learn, experience, the people we came to meet, etc., etc., all lie safely concealed beneath the surface of our knowing.

Anyway, that’s all for now. Except here are a few pictures I took a couple of days ago down near Santa Cruz. So much beauty in the world…