For those of you who believe that I'm gone to join the ancestors ...

Not yet.

There has never been a time -- since this blog was created in 2003 -- when so much time has been allowed to elapse between posts.  There also has never been a time when life has been so all-consuming.  It takes everything I have to keep up with the rhythm that my life has created -- and I've begun to fall into bed each night content to just savor time ... .

Work goes well and I've never felt so complete.   Questions still rise and answers have begun to become tantalizingly, teasingly, awesomely, near.   And it all seems to come back to that axiom that I ran across long ago -- quite accidentally -- embedded in the middle of the page in some ordinary magazine; "there are two simplicities; one that comes before -- and one that comes after, complexity."  Somewhere in that hauntingly lovely sentence is the essence of truth.  I think the words can be attributed to the Monk David Rendl-Nast, and may be one of the most elegant secrets of life.   Mine appears to have broken through to the second -- slipping silently into a dimension where I'm finding myself having outlived my rage without losing my passion, which appears to be a forerunner to that ultimate simplicity.  It isn't so much that important things don't matter anymore, it's just that they matter differently now.  More about that later.

Celebrated my 91st birthday two weeks ago, and it was a non-event.  Not that my world ignored another milestone, it was just that there is no way to ever surpass my 90th, celebrated with the "Road not taken" concert with Bob and Margaret, and surrounded by a warm blanket of friendship that exceeded all of our expectations.  Hardly anyone mentions it, but I have the feeling that the event ranks for us all as one enchanted evening.  However many birthdays are left to me will be simple markings of the passage of time.  I need no more celebrations. 

In this new space and time I'm finding as much newness as at any other time of life.  I'm still waking to challenges and still slaying an occasional dragon; still awed by dawns and sunsets; still thrilled by the magical glint of sunlight on the waters that lie ahead as I round the corner of the Visitors Center each morning  -- and pause just long enough to appreciate my beautiful Bay's expanse across my universe ... .