Recently I met with a doctor who asked me what I did for a living. When I said I was a counselor he replied, “Thank you.” I must have looked at him quizzically because he immediately followed this by looking right at me and saying, “Thank you for doing that work. It’s so important.”

Standing in line at the market I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. I watched intently as she negotiated the checkout, toddler at her side, young baby in her arms.  What was it like, I wondered, having two? I was filled with curiosity, much as I once had been about pregnancy itself.

I love baseball. Okay, I love the San Francisco Giants. (I especially love it when they’re winning, which they are.) I think I most appreciate that, in baseball, each player has his unique style and contribution to make and his moment at bat, but his talent is only seen, is only really useful, in the larger context of playing as part of a team.

The other day when a friend asked me how I was I had the disquieting experience of hearing my response. What I heard was a well-worn repetition of a tired story–how I am (okay), how my husband is (not so okay), what the kids are doing, where my book is in its publication odyssey (otherwise known as Limbo)–and I thought, “I’m really tired of this story; it’s boring.” Then I thought, “I need a new story.”

The French, it is frequently noted, take the entire month of August for a holiday. Unlike Americans, they are not sensually challenged: their language is gorgeous, they treat food as a worthy pleasure and not some glob to be mindlessly scarfed while driving, they drink wine at lunch and dinner and they don’t blink at the idea of a mistress.

First, I want to thank the many kind people who have inquired about my well-being since last month’s column. Here’s the update: I’ve tried everything from shaman to MRI and I’m still in pain, the cause of which remains a mystery; but I did discover that I have three disintegrating joints in my neck, so at least I got something for my trouble.

Two weeks ago my daughter and I had a nasty little tumble from my bicycle, which plopped us rudely onto Third Street and left us battered and bruised. Being five, Sophia recovered at the speed of light. Being some decades past five, I am still purple and in pain.

“The pursuit of happiness” is an odd phrase in our Declaration of Independence. Like Justice Scalia, I imagine that I know what the founders meant by it, but it seems to me that the concept of “pursuing” happiness is wrong-headed.

Five hundred years ago cartographers, imagining what lay beyond the known borders of the earth, poetically wrote that beyond a certain point in the uncharted seas “there be dragons.”  Dragons are the mythological, metaphorical expression of our innermost fears; the sea they inhabit our unknown future.

My quiet little life of writing and drinking too much tea has lately given way to a crash course in social media as I prepare to move my book into the public eye. While I love being in the middle of a creative blitz, the cramming of technology as a second language (TSL) has me feeling slightly stupid, excessively amped, and generally off-kilter.

Winter is arrived, wrapping us in the deepest darkness.  The sun sits suspended on an invisible threshold, its solstice marking both an end and a beginning, a tipping point.  The power, the crisis of this moment, was keenly felt by our ancestors. 

In an effort to entertain my small, beloved progeny on a hot summer’s day, I devised a brilliant plan to take them to the Oregon Caves. The last time I’d been there, I was seven years old; in my childhood memory, it was fun. That was a long time ago.

My last return to Jacksonville closed the loop of a thirty-year meander that took me from Jacksonville to Chicago, San Francisco, back to Jacksonville, Ashland, Portland, San Francisco again until it siren-songed me back in 2002. By then l had accumulated a lot of stuff, most of which did not fit into a modest, circa 1889 house.

When I was a little girl, I loved searching for caterpillars on the milkweed plants that grew in abundance around our house. I would pluck one from the underside of a leaf and place it in my hand, stroking its smooth body with a tentative finger, carefully carrying it home in cupped hands to be re-homed in a mayonnaise jar, along with a stick and some leaves

On May the second, I drove through our little town early in the morning taking my son to school, and was greeted by a display of American flags along California Street. I wondered what holiday it was, but quickly realized it wasn’t a holiday; it was a celebration of Osama bin Laden’s death–or killing to be precise. And since that time I have been consumed by a deep and abiding consternation and a heavy heart.

We recently journeyed to San Francisco, an amazing place for any number of reasons, one of the more obvious and unique ones being its habit of providing a haven for those who do not always fit neatly into proscribed boxes.

Spring has officially arrived at our house, heralded by the arrival of yellow daffodils poking up under the walnut tree and six fuzzy, baby chicks peeping away in our bathtub-become-brooder. I am surrounded by Life, by the clamor of two children, eleven chickens, two rats, a Golden Retriever and a newly inherited, deaf, mostly toothless terrier named Henry, and I’m loving it.

A couple of years ago, I came across an idea that completely changed the way I view human evolution. What it said was basically this: that all spiritual growth and unfoldment comes from letting go. This simple little sentence was, for me, revelatory.

My husband and I were recently having dinner at a lovely, intimate restaurant. Seated next to us was a forty-something couple in the early stages of love. They were leaning in and smiling, holding hands the way you do in the early days of romance. Then I noticed the phone in his right hand.

What do monkeys, the new year, and spiritual growth have to do with one another? Amazingly, quite a lot.