A man was telling his friend about his new home. “I have a beautiful place on a San Francisco hill. In my living room, wide windows look out across the bay. Why, I can see all the way to Oakland and Berkeley. It’s wonderful.”
His friend replied, “I have just a small home in the flatlands. But when I go out into my backyard and look up — I can see the moon!”
Morning Light
Every year in late fall and early winter, a vertical ray of morning sunlight slants through the blinds and slowly crawls across the carpet and the altar in the room where I meditate.
I sit and watch the morning light move, illuminating the blue incense burner, the golden candle, and the curling smoke from the incense. After 15 minutes, I have settled into the stillness and am no longer watching the light show. I sit in stillness. I hear a dog bark. A bird sings.
And I smile inside.
Sitting With My Wife
In the evening, we sit, share wine, and talk about our day. And it hits me how miraculous I am with this lovely woman in this place.
We met thirty years ago at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. She was on vacation from Germany to take an art workshop, and I had decided to spend Thanksgiving week there taking a spiritual healing workshop. Her art workshop was canceled, and she chose another one — the one I was in.
And now, 30 years later, we are sitting together in our house on a hill in San Francisco, talking about our day.
Chances are a million to one that Marina from Mannheim, Germany, and Gary from Miami, Oklahoma, would find themselves together and married in San Francisco.
But we did.
Think about your life and how you ended up where you are right this moment. We might imagine that we planned our lives, but we planned nothing. If my mother had decided to go to a movie instead of to the dance where she met my father, I would not be here writing this story.
I don’t know how I got here or where I came from, and I don’t know where I’ll be going when I…