Solitude.

There are few things more beautiful than sitting alone in a house, after everyone else is asleep, sipping tea, listening to relaxing music, and burning a candle that smells like Christmas.

Live Your Way to Answers

"I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer." - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

Taking It All In -The Ups and Downs

In many ways, I am living the life. I quit my job to travel the world, and left everything I knew behind to step into the unknown. It's had some pretty severe ups and downs, but at the end of the day, I know this is all a learning experience, and I know that I am being refined in ways I can't even see yet.

From the outsider's perspective, it may look like my life is easy. Write from home when I feel like it, go on road trips or other vacations whenever I want to. Hiking, camping, rafting. But amidst all the adventures and trips, I'm also on the brink of disaster at any given second, and I'm in the center of a midlife crisis. So while I am having the time of my life, and having more fun than I ever have before, the lows are just as deep as the highs are high.

Making the decision to live an adventurous life was the best decision I've ever made. I've learned and seen more in this past six months than in several years, and I love it. Yesterday I found a poem I wrote a year ago, at the end of an uneventful summer that I spent in an office, sitting at a desk. Here's an excerpt:

"I see a V of 22 ducks flying in a row in the sky
and their freedom of flight makes me want to cry.
Birds are so free
and then there is me
at a desk as my life passes me by."

Clearly, summer of 2011 was not a great one for me. Now it's mid-September 2012, and I can't even believe all the things I've seen and done this year. I'm dealing with some pretty hard stuff right now, but looking back at this makes me grateful. I'm dealing with life changes, some of them not so pleasant, but at least that means I am progressing! Last year I felt like my life was passing me by and I was stuck where I was at. Today I feel like my life is changing so quickly I can hardly keep up with it. Some days are unbearably hard to deal with, but I'd take too much change over no change, any day.