About a decade ago, I left my life in urban America – where I was helping raise a daughter, and writing non-fiction and media criticism – and bought a cabin near Cambridge, N.Y. I was supposed to be writing a book about technology, but instead wrote about my rebirth at mid-life, a book called “Running To The Mountain.” The book was an account of a personal breakout, external and internal, the search for a meaningful and spiritual life. It changed a lot of lives, I was to learn, especially mine. On every book tour, I meet a number of people who say it changed theirs as well.
 I did not imagine when I bought that cabin, about 10 miles from where I now live, just how much change I was opening the door too. Everything changes. How I lived. Where I lived. Who I lived with. What I wrote, and some years later, the seeds of that experience – photography, Maria, fiction – were still growing.
  The experience led to enormous growth, and staggering pain. A nervous breakdown of sorts, a re-examination of life, the search for love and help, the purchase of Bedlam Farm, a successful series of books written there, a life with animals. That process is still very much underway. I am still searching for a lot of things, and I have found some of them and not others. I doubt the process will ever end. I don’t really want it to. Buying that cabin was the best thing I did, and the worst.
 So was buying the farm. Both metaphors for life, and the duality between stasis and change, loss and gain, pain and growth. I know unimaginable joy, and have experienced great sorrow and loss.
  I am  richer, wiser, growing still, changing always. When I ran to the mountain, I had no idea, really, how extraordinary a trip I was understaking. It’s a process, a good friend always says. And I’m in it.