Just over a week ago, I kissed my parents goodbye for now, climbed into my overladen car, queued up a good dharma discourse, and struck out from Indiana on my three-day way to where I sit now, within moments of mountains. Barely a week before that departure, I had said goodbye to all my spaces at the monastery--feeling more fully than ever Tennyson's line from "Ulysses," "I am a part of all that I have met"--and headed westward to Ohio and then Indiana. And so it is that in the past two weeks I have relocated most of the way across the country to take up this new temporary residence.

I would not have guessed, when I was younger, that I would become as nomadic as I have done in the past few years. I am some 5000 miles west of where I sat this time last year. And yet the mysteries and revelations of it all are certainly worth the logistical complexity of repeatedly packing and shipping and schlepping myself and a more or less carefully curated set of my possessions over seas and mountains. Given that it's Valentine's Day, it feels appropriate to say that I'm feeling my way toward the love of my life, and that I'm even more deeply in love than ever with life itself, for better and for worse.

A couple more glimpses: