You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

There is no good.

And there is no bad.

There just is.

There is a season, though. The earth breathes, the birds migrate.

My roommate Jared and I went out to the Humboldt Bay National Wildlife Refuge a couple of weeks back. We took a walk along the slough at lowish tide. Here at the bay, the tide also changes the landscape daily. So we get the seasons yearly and the tide recedes and advances twice daily. Nothing is ever the same. It doesn't stay stagnate, like the Houston skyline. There is an ebb and flow to life here where nature has not been so obliterated by commerce and man's dominion.

We saw lots of birds, mostly pipers, but no geese. It's not the time of year when they are here. They just stop here on their way somewhere else.

I'm not doing that. This is the end of the road for me. I have made my migration. This is the end of the line.

The path begins on another bay, another coast very different from this one, where my children live. I will feel that tug to return as long as they are there.

I started this journey, this leg of my life, four years ago. I started this blog on a yoga weekend that I had gifted myself as a respite after signing the divorce papers.

I wrote hard in this blog, while I tried to find my feet in the stream, gave in, and let the current take me.

I tried to catch the wind but kept my kite string tied down near the capitol of Texas, and then, last February, I untied the knot, waved goodbye to Jim and Val and began the journey here.

And still we ran all summer, back and forth across the continent, so much to do and learn that I haven't had the energy to unravel it all.

And now we are here, and I have been busy these past few weeks digging in and putting down roots. I don't want to get swept away again.