Finding the need to pull back a few paces -- to try to absorb all that has happened ... .

Am back at work, having checked in on Tuesday where a box from South Korea was waiting.  Staff had been impatiently waiting for me to return so that the contents  could be revealed.

Ranger Elizabeth Tucker insisted upon doing the honors and  quickly gathered up her scissors to snip through the wrappings.  Apparently protocol has been instituted by Homeland Security so that there is a designated "unwrapper" to do this, and Elizabeth was mine.

Mothering with Dorian and Bob at the beach at Asilomar

As she made her way through the artfully wrapped gifts; a lovely fan, a toy bear wearing a park ranger hat with Korean characters across the crown; a beautiful black teak box inlaid with abalone shells in the cover; plus 2 copies of the South Korean National Park Service journal in which two pages that hold a paragraph authored by me that was (apparently) created from one of those many phone interviews I've granted lately.  There is a small photo of a uniformed Betty in the lower left hand corner, and the words are printed in both Korean and English -- on facing pages.  What an honor!  The thought that this is being read in a faraway land by total strangers is inconceivable -- but obviously true.  I'm now international!

Wednesday I worked from home, catching up with mail and trying to establish whatever new normal we're entering into ...

Went back into my family photo album for some grounding, and found this ... taken on the beach at Asilomar, California, on the Monterey Peninsula, where the kids and I spent the third week in August of every year for many years ... as we participated in Stebbins Institute with other Unitarian Universalist families who became lifelong friends.

Let myself return to that idyllic place for just a few moments before getting into the rest of my week at the Visitor Center and the growing audiences ... and back to this unlikely late-in-life career with its growing public attention ... wish it had come earlier in the life cycle, at a time when I was still building a resumé and could benefit by it.  In my mid-nineties, it all seems inappropriate in a way, and rather out of place -- as an afterthought in a pretty ordinary existence 'til now.

This week there's another film crew (Scripps) coming to document my talk, and another (Nowness from New York) the week after.

I may find myself paging my way through my family album more frequently now, in order to try to find ways to avoid getting lost in a world of other's making ...

Maybe I'm needing to get back to making music ... .