A spiritual path, I am learning, is a discipline. Meditation, considering ideas like anger and judgement, calming, slowing down. Book tours are intrinsically antithetical to a spiritual discipline, so my spiritual work came undone, and I was quickly back to sleeplessness, bad dreams, disorientation. I have been meditating again, taking time out, centering, reading. Resetting. Book tours are like performing, several performances a day requiring attention, energy and intense interaction. And exhaustion. Airplanes, time changes, people very focused on me almost every minute.

At the same time, I love book tours and am grateful for them. I travel, see other parts of the country, talk to people, take my photos and videos, listen to other ideas, to readers. Very good, very healthy. I am enjoying the challenge of  posting photos and videos from my small camera and the Ipad2 and meeting and talking with my readers. I learn so much. But I am tired, and tomorrow, we return to the farm for a day or so, and them I am off on a three day meditation retreat. To work on my spiritual path.. The blog will be still for three days. Several people have grumped that they miss the daily photos of the dogs. People are funny. This afternoon, an inner-city school reading (books donated by a non-profit group to the students) and then, at 7 p.m., Third Place Books. The book tour will resume in New York City next weekend.