An anniversary

So exactly one year ago today our family was a makeshift convoy composed of four cars and a Budget rental truck, loaded up with everything we owned, heading to this new life on the Central Coast.  It's been a full, joyous year, filled with outings, concerts, new friends and neighbors, as well as fixing up our new place.  

As I write this, our home has been unpacked for quite awhile, is relatively neat, and currently filled with the smell of the sea, brought in by a strong on-shore wind blowing straight from the Pacific.  This is part of what we came for. The changes to the house are almost done, as far as renovations go, with just the kitchen to go, tentatively on calendar for early next month. The vegetables, vines and trees we've planted are flourishing.  The livestock is, too.

But more importantly than the changes in the house and property are the changes that have happened to us, internally, since we moved here.  Basically, we went from a kind of hermitude to being active and involved in what's happening in the county, everything from charity work to concerts to winery events, parties and dinners.

Sometimes you hit a point in life where you venture inward, in order to retreat from stressful or uninspiring surroundings or circumstances, and it is within the deep green reaches of our solitude that we first imagine a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.  Then, if we allow it, the images surface and begin gently moving us toward that future, like a gentle current, unimpeded as long as we don't begin working against the flow, paddling back in the direction we came from out of either fear or disbelief that we deserve a change for the better.

Today I pause and reflect on these things, and read again a truncated Bible verse I kept pinned to my mirror the two years it took us to plan our move and make it:

"For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land; a land of vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey."  (Deut. 8: 7 - 9)