I very much like the idea of permitting life to happen, rather than running around trying to control it. Sometimes, life reveals itself. Two years ago, I sat at this table, angry, terrified, depressed, hanging on by my fingernails and nothing that happened after that was anything I imagined, predicted, or even understood, from my divorce to my photography to my fiction and children’s books, to  Maria.

Today I am in a different place. My life is not perfect, but I have come a ways and learned some things. I hope I never stop doing that.

Life cannot, I think, be produced, even by Boomer parents driving their kids to soccer games. It does, in fact, reveal itself in its own unpredictable time and way. I am not in charge of the process. Joseph Campbell’s Heroes Journey always shadows me on my odd trip up to Bedlam Farm and the country.

Tonight, I felt a sadness, a sense of mourning perhaps, for these last few exhausting and exhilarating years. I have a few days off and I want to use them to mourn, I think, the things and people that I lost and left behind, the people who left me behind.

I want to sleep late and read more (reading Michael Lewis tonight and Peter Kessler’s wonderful book about China, “Country Driving.” And a book of short stories about Haiti.

I am lucky to have gotten through these times, sometimes awful, sometimes wondrous, and thus feel very obliged to be open about what I have done and seen and share as much of it as I can, keeping very much in mind some other soul sitting as his or her computer, angry and terrified, and hanging on by their fingernails.

I get their messages all the time, every day, and I know them and they know me. And now, we are a community, bonded in a shared experience. And hopefully, in the knowledge that there is help and hope and love and promise. And there is no glory in quitting or running away.