the glorious autumn sky

I was standing behind the front desk at the Channel Islands YMCA Thursday morning. Earlier, when I woke up and sat in meditation and drank coffee and read books and wrote Morning Pages, I was 76 years old. I live in San Luis Obispo, California, I’m nearly entirely alone, my best friend’s a cow, and hiking is not only a way of life – it’s the way of life. Me and the sun-shiny day, down by the schoolyard. Tumbleweed tramp.

When I was just getting sober in Somerville, Massachusetts in 1983 I would hear people suggest you stay sober a day at a time and try to picture where you’ll be in five years, and, they suggested, you will inevitably sell yourself short. I don’t know about that sitting here today, but for suresy I never would have guessed/predicted/hoped for any of the things I told you up there in the first paragraph. Not a single smidge of my life here today.

I love my life here today. I’d much prefer not being so all by myself, I don’t remember what I would have pictured about a partner at five years sober. But I live in a beautiful world, and have taken the path of immersing myself entirely in it. Like really all the way into it – like totally. The Y thing is just kind of weird, though it’s a door through which I bring my hip, funky self a couple times a week and get to serve and be kind and be generous to others.

And dig this – my best friend’s a cow. Like totally.