Yesterday was difficult for much of the day with the same old familiar feeling of unrest and itchiness that accosts me quite a lot. It leads to a sense of failure and a long list of judgments about how below standards my life is and how old I'm getting and how time is running out and I still haven't done anything worthwhile. It's quite a wretched scenario and I get very weary of it.

Last night, after a couple hours of this, I poured a glass of red wine, put Leonard Cohen music on and sat on the porch swing watching the fire I'd lit earlier as it spent itself. In other words, I entered a state of just being. Something I've known about and toyed at practicing my whole life. There was a time I called it prayer. Then I called it meditation but both of those "activities" carry a tone of discipline with them that I have come to avoid. What it really is, for me anyway, is a sense of entering my own body without judgment or criticism and experiencing the moment. There is a ceasing of the reaching for something else and it is breathtaking in its simplicity. The muscles in my gut relax, my jaw softens, my shoulders lower and I am who I am rather than all the things I could be or should be doing. Being in the now would be another way to put it. It occurred to me after some moments that I was exactly where I chose to be. While there was an element of loneliness and an element of longing, I recognized that there was no other place I'd prefer to be except here, on this deck outside this home swinging on this swing listening to these tree frogs, with these firefly stars sparkling across the darkness, surrounded by these particular trees. The night entered the edge of the forest first…the darkness crept up the face of the trees slowly. The light left bringing the world closer in toward me. Eventually, not a whole lot later, I was in complete darkness with the dying embers of the fire and the soft strain of music and I was home.