Tossed between too many options ... .

All I need is a good 45 hour day. Fitting my life into the current time frame just isn't working. No matter how I arrange my days, each midnight I fall into bed leaving behind huge pieces of work incomplete or barely begun. Maybe that's true for everyone. I don't really know. It's either that, or it's that I'm spread too thin at a period in life when there's simply not enough of me left to go around.

Work goes well. The sense of urgency grows with each day and is accellerated with each death of one of my contemporaries. Among the most recent losses were Lucretia Edwards, credited with leading the struggle for public access to the Richmond shoreline, and Mary Otani, whose path through life connected with my own in political activism. We were both active among the Unitarian-Universalists and with Consumer Co-op members in Berkeley years ago. Most recently Mary and I were founding members in the very effective collaborative, Vision-2000, which successfully worked toward a living wage for all city contracts and is currently working hard on the issue of just-cause evictions. Both these activists will be sorely missed by the communities so enriched by their dedication to guaranteeing the quality of life for us all.

Mortality is now palpable -- a constant fact of life. But it's not particularly morbid for some reason, just more demanding now than before. I'm less concerned with when or how the end will come, but with an occasional fleeting hope for an easy exit. Maybe this sensitivity to the relentless passage of time will lessen as days go by. But meanwhile, there's work to do and it doesn't appear that my replacement has turned up yet ... at least I haven't yet noticed her lurking anywhere in the background.

Talked briefly with son, Bob, last week and said to him in passing that I was (as usual) doing too much and that I seem to have reached a place in life where so many of my wildest visions are now being realized ... and that I've finally accumulated the skills and the contacts and the experience to make real things I'd only dreamed of over a long lifetime. I'm being entrapped by the seduction of the possible. I said to him, "...there is so much happening that I feel sometime that I'll simply explode into the next dimension at some point -- from the sheer excitement of that realization!"

His answer was, "...but, Mom, what a way to go!"

Yes!

Photo: These three seeds were sent to me years ago by our friend, Lama Wangdor, in a note from Rewalser high in the Himalayas on the occasion of our marriage. They've always held a mystery for me. Have never known what would grow from them. They've served as a metaphor for all of life -- complete in their being. They represent both the beginning and the end of life -- as we all do. As fragile and as delicate as they appear to be, they as we -- are star stuff.