Life in Chicago

Another Life Lived

I'm back to the thinking about the present moment. I'm generally pretty good at staying present but sometimes I really forget about even trying.

Yesterday I went to visit one our patients who lives in an apartment building by the lake. She's in her 90s and lives all alone and has no family. She's quite content. She was married for many years and very in love with her husband, so much so that she let her family disown her without putting up a fight when they decided that she shouldn't be with someone outside of her religion of origin. And now he's gone and she's all alone and has no children or other family to speak of.

And she's incredibly open and present and gracious. She sits softly across from me in her favorite chair when I visit, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed like a little girl, and she tells me that she tries to remain open to everything that comes into her life. She reasons that there must be a purpose for her still being here at this age. She tells me that she simply chooses to spend her time in the present moment.

Sitting across from her, not at all in my own present moment, I tried to imagine myself in 60 years, all alone in a high-rise condo somewhere. It doesn't seem lonely. Just far away. 60 years sounds like a lifetime. And I guess it is for some people. I've only been alive for 30 so to think about living for another 60 sounds kind of wondrous. I already feel sometimes that I've been through so many incarnations of self and life. Sometimes when I look back on some of the things I've done and places I've lived it seems as though I'm thinking of someone else, not myself, another life lived entirely.

I struggle sometimes to grasp this concept of the present moment being all there is. It simply makes sense and when I really sit with it I can understand it quite well but I find it challenging to hold on to for but moments themselves at a time. I found this quote last night in A New Earth:

On the surface, the present moment is "what happens." Since what happens changes continuously, it seems that every day of your life consists of thousands of moments in which different things happen. Time is seen as the endless succession of moments, some "good," some "bad." Yet, if you look more closely, that is to say, through your own immediate experience, you find that there are not many moments at all. You discover that there is only ever this moment. Life is always now. Your entire life unfolds in this constant Now. Even past or future moments only exist when you remember or anticipate them, and you do so by thinking about them in the only moment there: this one.

Sometimes I think about this when I'm in an elevator standing next to a strange man that I don't know, or at work filling my cup of water in the kitchen next to a woman who works downstairs in billing, or when I'm all alone on an airplane with my temple resting against the edge of the window, and I think to myself this is the only moment and sometimes that makes life feel so lonely and so quiet.

Right now, in this present moment, I can hear the leaves rustling outside the window, a breeze shifts my hair and the faint sound of a lawnmower whirs in the distance.

Ways to Be

Last night Tarek and my friend Cat joined me and Greg for dinner and we had the nicest time out on the deck in the warm breeze under the moonlit sky.

I made the best homemade pizza I've made yet with spicy chicken sausage, my special red sauce, ricotta cheese, mozzarella, parmesan, and kalamata olives on a whole wheat crust with big heaps of fresh arugula to finish. And we opened a beautiful bottle of Beckman Rosé to start.

(I couldn't believe this but yesterday I came home to a shipment of wine from my favorite vineyard in Santa Ynez Valley -- Beckman -- that was an engagement gift from Lien. As if her presence over the weekend wasn't enough. And when I emailed an immediate thank you she informed me that there's a second shipment coming in August -- just because she knew it would make me ridiculously happy.)

So last night was just such a nice evening. The weather was finally that perfect summer warm and it was so good to catch up with Cat who's been living in Bali for the last 6 months. The last time we all saw each other was in December when I cooked dinner for us in my old apartment in Lincoln Park. It was cold and snowy and we all crowded into my little kitchen to eat together.

Cat is a yoga instructor and craniosacral therapist and she and I met on an airplane last summer, almost a year ago, on the 4th of July. We were on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and I was on my way to meet Greg for only the third time ever so that we could spend the weekend on Cape Cod with my family. Everything in my life felt so heightened and electric and I distinctly remember wondering who I would end up sitting next to on the airplane -- my life felt so alive and interconnected that I knew it might be someone interesting. And of course, it was Cat. And of course now we're friends.

Cat has the most amazing energy and has been all over the world and had us all simply enchanted last night with her stories about Bali and the work she's been doing. We talked late into the night, opening more bottles of wine and eating yummy engagement cake that Greg's mom made.

At one point we were talking about the afterlife and what we think happens when someone dies and finally Cat said, "For as many ways as there are to live, I think there just as many ways to be dead." And we all leaned back, struck by this idea. It was a new thought even for her, occurring to her as she said it, and it hung in the air, this simple yet profound idea. For as many ways as there are to live, I think there just as many ways to be dead.

We all closed our eyes shortly after that and for a few minutes we practiced simply being. We listened to the wind in the trees above us and felt the warm breeze across the apples of our cheeks, our feet flat on the smooth wood of the deck, the taste of wine in our mouths, our lives rich and full within us. 

Something to Believe In

They weren't kidding about the snow around here. It just doesn't stop. I feel like it's been snowing for months. Driving to work yesterday in the car, I leaned forward whenever I was stopped at lights and I watched the flakes landing on the windshield. They were fascinating to see up close--these perfectly formed crystals, dissolving in mere moments. I had the tiniest fraction of a second in which to take them in before they became a droplet of water.

My hospice work is going well these days. It continues to be consuming and it continues to offer up days and moments that make me question myself emotionally. But this work also continues to enrich my days and my heart.

I'm continuing to question life. I don't know how it would be possible to enter these people's homes and sit down with them, to hear their stories--of life and love and family and illness--to witness the different ways in which we all approach death and, of course, life--and walk away from these experiences without pondering the bigger picture of it all.

I feel like my brow has been furrowed a lot lately. I feel like I'm constantly chewing on one idea or another, trying to get to the crux of the thing--and I feel like I'm really circling something, digging deeper and deeper, carving out some understanding of the world for myself.

I spend a lot of time in the car these days, in Greg's little green, snow-covered Honda, listening to NPR and random mixed cds and drinking coffee from my pink Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf thermos and pondering the matter of existence. There I am, stuck in traffic on the 90, on my way to work, leaning forward to look at snow flakes on the windshield, my brow furrowed, mulling over my latest idea about why we're here.

It's almost as though I'm trying to solve a riddle. And I feel like I'm getting closer. There are so many components to solve before I can get to the real heart of it all though.

I think that to do this work, to really do this work and to do it well, I have to get clear on my beliefs.

And that requires a lot of pondering. A lot of brow furrowing.

I'm thinking a lot about illness and disease right now, about what causes us to become ill and also about what heals us. I'm thinking about life and why were are here on this earth, going about our days, reproducing and striving for things we're not even sure we want. I'm thinking about death and what happens after we die. I'm thinking about God and all that idea encompasses.

I've been reading a lot of books on spirituality and health and meditation and love and death. Some of the ideas I come across don't fit with what I think I believe. Some add to my growing personal philosophies, some scare me and some soothe me.

All I know is that I'm on a path right now. A path of searching for something to believe in. I don't think it's a path I'll ever come to the end of but I feel as though I'm just beginning to walk it, and the farther I go, the better work I'll be able to do.

For the most part it really feels like a solitary path, and one that I'll almost always walk alone. I think we all have to take our own journeys in an effort to establish our personal belief system. But sometimes I wish I could talk all of this over with someone.

I realize that I've been flailing so much lately because I don't have any firm beliefs about this life. And now that I'm beginning to question and develop a set of beliefs, I have places in which I can put all these experiences, these moments and relationships.

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung comments on the multiple stages of development from infancy through adolescence which have been explored by so many writers. Jung, himself, writes about the developmental stages of adulthood, believing that an exploration of spirituality and higher self is a natural stage in this process.

I really believe that's where I am right now--entering into this stage of my life--and I feel that as I move through this work, I'll move more smoothly into the rest of my life, that all the things I feel confused about will begin to unravel. The books I want to write, the places I want to travel, the people I want to help, all of these things will become attainable.

But for now, there is a cup of coffee warm at hand and snow flakes drifting down outside the window.

2007: Year in Review

And I thought 2006 was a big year.

It's Sunday morning and I'm sitting at my desk in my little apartment in Chicago, on the very edge of a new year. January of 2007 held no fortelling that over the next 12 months my life would lead me in such vast and varied directions...that I would write a book, fall in love, move to Chicago, travel to Taiwan and the Grenadines, and find a job that may very well turn out to be a life calling.

So, sitting here at my desk, my two cats curled around me, Arcade Fire on the stereo, the coffee pot ticking in the kitchen, I can't help but wonder at all that 2008 is apt to bring. There are things I hope will happen, things I know will happen, and things I cannot imagine.

Before beginning that journey I can't help but reflect on what's led me here so far.

2007: Year in Review

January found me coming off a challening set of months of learning how to live on my own for the first time in my life. I'd spent the fall of 2006 really struggling to figure out who I was and what I was doing with myself and by January I knew something really needed to change. I needed to learn how to be quiet.

I slipped out from beneath the covers, unlocked the doors to the patio, stepping out gingerly in my bare feet, the wind instantly lifting my thin t-shirt, reaching up to remove the hanging plants, quickly transplanting the cactus to a less precarious perch. The sky was a bright indigo, white clouds rushing across its depths. The palm trees whipped back and forth, I could see waves in the canals beyond the rooftops.

I scurried back to bed, pulling my knees to my chest, my hair threaded into ribbons and cooled by the breezes. I listened to the wind, could faintly hear the waves breaking on the beach. The world loomed immense and dark outside my little home and I curled tighter into myself, grateful to be alone.

January 1st was spent in my home in Venice with several close friends cooking one of the most memorable meals of my life to date. Timbre and Brian took over the kitchen frying catfish while I tended to my new year's batch of hoppin' john, jalapeno cornbread and individual chocolate puddings. Will brought over some of the best collard greens I've ever had and Rhonda, Liz and Doug joined in as we ate and drank our way into the first evening of 2007.

On January 2nd I quit drinking. At first I didn't really have a plan but as the days stretched into weeks and the weeks became months I realized how necessary and profound it was for me to take a look at my methods of quieting myself. The process wasn't easy but it was definitely healing.

Januray 24th marked ten years since my mother died. I'd been imaginging that day for a long time, what it would feel like to say that my mother had been dead for ten years, what it would feel like to not have spoken to my mother for ten years. But it was different than I imagined.

Ten years. Ten fucking years. It's hard for me to even think about the last ten years in one gulp. I get fragments and moments and phases and it seems like forever and it seems like a week. Flashes of such random things...a hotel bed in Maine, the cold inside a parked car in Vermont, a bar on the corner of Avenue A and 7th Street, the slums of Manila, the 405, my shaved head, my tattoos still scabbed with fresh blood, yoga, and the ocean, the feel of someone's hand on the bare skin of my lower back, a boiling pot of water, the plants that hung in the window of my 5th St. apartment in New York, a pair of shoes I used to wear to my old bartending job, my breath in plumes as I walk up Third Avenue, driving a U-Haul out of Atlanta, a book propped open on a futon mattress, myself doubled over in tears, another me drunk stumbling home, and another me laughing, laughing. Ten years.

On January 31st I got into a car accident. I was on my way to school. My car was totalled. I was unhurt but shaken. But suddenly sitting there in the car, my phone in hand, it all came crashing down, this thing that I'm fighting every day, all the time.  In that moment, phone in hand, sitting there, 28 years old on a cool Los Angeles night, my thumb ready to press a button, the button that will connect me to that person, that person that you call when something like this happens. Except I don't have that person anymore. They're all gone. I'm nobody's most important person and I don't have a most important person.

As awful as that realization was, as hard as it was to face, as much as it sucked the very breath out of me, it was the thing all along that I'd been running from. That very moment, that very truth, that very feeling of utter aloneness, was the thing I'd been running from for years. And finally sitting with it enabled me to move forward.

In February some sort of calmness settled over me. I felt myself relax for the first time in a long time. It was as though there was nothing else to be afraid of. I'd been sober for a month and felt better than I had in a long time. I'd faced the thing I was most afraid 0f -- being truly alone -- and I'd survived.

I was still in school full-time, finishing my Master's degree, attending four classes a week. I was also working full-time in a mental health center and on top of that doing a part-time internship as a therapist in a clinic. My days were full but also full of light and space. I went to yoga several times a week. I went to dinner with friends. I took a lot of baths. For Valentine's Day I went to Cape Cod to visit my grandmother. Snow blanketed the quiet seashore and my grandmother's hands were soft and papery in mine. Returning home to Los Angeles I drove myself home, alone, and it felt good.

It's wonderfully windy this morning. The whole world feels full of possibility, dark silver clouds scudding across the sky, my little home yellow-lit and cozy. I woke up at 5:30 and lay in the dark, warm under the covers, listening to the wind whip down off the ocean and around the corners of my little house. I listened to the doors rattling out in the living room and I stretched long and lean through the sheets. As I lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of my little world, it seemed entirely possible that everything has changed.

February flowed into March like a warm breeze and I continued relaxing into my existence. Not only had I begun to figure out how to slow down but I started working on being present.

I've been trying to focus on right now. This moment. In this moment it's about 10:30 and I'm sitting at my desk in my little home. The double doors are flung open wide to the warm Los Angeles night. Chet Baker is on the stereo, candles flickering all over the house. Being here right now means not thinking about all the things I did today or all the things I have to do tomorrow. It means not thinking about all the things that make me me, all the things I've done or seen or been over my life. It means not thinking about what I'm going to do this summer or when I turn thirty or some even more distant future.

It means just being here right now. It means knowing that I am everything that I have ever been and will ever be right now, in this moment. It means thinking about my life as though this moment is all there is...because really it is.

And it's really a lovely moment. The taste of an apple in my mouth, a saxophone gentle through the room, warmth and light and the dusky evening, me at 28 on a balmy March night in Los Angeles.

Throughout March, every night when I came home I set down my purse, my yoga bag, and instead of pouring a drink, I drew a bath. And every night I sank down into the bath and I closed my eyes and I thought about what I wanted for my life. I thought about all the things I want to do and be and see and touch. And at the end of March, on the night of my last bath that month, I opened my eyes and I knew what I had to do.

I needed to quit my job and write a book. My book. The book I'd been thinking about and talking about for years.

On April 2, much to my boss's surprise, I gave two weeks at my job and I got to work preparing for this monumental task. I told everyone I knew that I was going to begin writing a book. I cleaned and reorganized every inch of my little house, got a new desk, and stocked the fridge with lots of healthy brain food.

On Monday April 16, I woke up, made coffee, opened the doors to the deck and sat down to write the first 1220 words of my now completed book. It was a tremendous feeling.

For the next two weeks I got up every morning at 7:30 and began writing by nine. By the end of April I'd written over ten thousand words. My entire life had changed. I was writing every morning and then running to the clinic to see clients or to my last quarter of grad school in the afternoons. At night I met up with friends for dinners and shows. And without fail, the next morning I was up at 7:30, my fingers poised over the keyboard by 9.

Also in April, something else very significant occurred. In late March I was asked to become a contributing writer on a site called The Nervous Breakdown and in April my first post went up. But before that post even went up a long contributing member of TNB contacted me. His name was Greg Boose. We began emailing each other every day. We wrote about all kinds of things...what it was like to be young and living in a big city, about writing and books and music...we wrote to each other about our families and we wrote about our days. He was very funny and clever.

Every morning when I woke up to begin working on my book I went out to the living room, opened the doors to the deck, made coffee and sat down to read the latest email from Greg who lived in Chicago and who had already been at work for two hours by the time I got up. I'd write him back and then I'd close my gmail account and get to work on my book. When I was finished writing I would lie on my back on the deck in the sunshine and when I checked my email again there would always be another from Greg.

By May I was deep into the writing process of my book. I was writing a whole new chapter every morning and the whole thing just felt like it was flowing out of me. I began uploading audio clips of my progress, all of which can be found in the About section of this blog.

On May 13, Mother's Day, I completed the first section of my book, the section about my mother. I wept, sitting at my desk, as I wrote about the moment I heard that she was gone.

The next morning I woke up and wrote the first chapter of section two, the section about my father. I wrote all through the latter half of May, delving into those days and months following my mother's death, the days in which I got to know my father. On Sunday May 20, just as I finished writing a chapter about my parent's engagement on Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, my uncle called to tell me that my grandmother was in the hospital. She died the next day, on May 21st, my 29th birthday.

Waking up that morning, alone in my little house, on my 29th birthday, before I even heard, I knew that she was gone. And there was something lovely about it happening on my birthday. My grandmother was 96 years old and had lived a long wonderful life.

I flew back to the East Coast the following weekend for her memorial service. I stood in the church, in front of the hundred or more people who were in attendance and I talked about how every time I visited my grandmother she would always take my hand, tears bright in her eyes, and she would say, I've been thinking about you. And what it meant to me to know that no matter where I was in the world, I always knew that my grandmother was thinking about me.

That afternoon, lying on my back in a hammock at my Aunt Pam's house, the warm May air rustling through the trees above me, I thought about my life. I reflected back on the last two months since I had quit my job and begun writing my book. I thought about all the words I had put down and I thought about all the interactions I'd had over those eight weeks. I had opened up my entire world in a way I never had before. For those two months I had said yes to everything that came in my life, meeting all kinds of people and experiencing all kinds of places and moments and breaths that never would have been possible without all the work I'd done throughout the year.

As I thought about those things I realized that the one person I hadn't honored was Greg. We'd been writing every day for two months. We'd talked many times about one of us visiting the other but I always shook my head at the last minute, deciding it was silly and pointless. But lying there in that hammock on Cape Cod, I decided that before I went back to Los Angeles and continued my whole huge life, before I returned only to get swept back up into it all, perhaps I should just see.

I texted Greg from the hammock. What if I change my flight to stop in Chicago tomorrow afternoon? It was Memorial Day Weekend. I'd never been to Chicago. He responded immediately. Yes, please do it!

The next morning, boarding that flight to Chicago, as my feet crossed the threshhold of the airplane I had the distinct feeling of setting something in motion. I knew that I was forever altering whatever path I was on. But even so, sitting there, my forehead pressed to the window as we touched down at O'Hare, I didn't think it would be this. I didn't think that the moment I saw him waiting for me in baggage claim I would feel this strange familiarity come over me, this feeling that we were always going to meet one warm May afternoon just past my 29th birthday.

I flew home the next morning utterly confused about everything.

But before I could even think about anything June was warm and flush upon my doorstep. I went to the final classes of my grad program -- that program being one of the best things I've ever done with my life. I learned more about compassion and humility and kindness during that year and a half than I ever imagined. I'm so incredibly grateful for my experience there.

The second week of June, just after I finished my classes, and just before I formally graduated, Greg came to Los Angeles and asked me to move to Chicago. I knew he was coming to LA to ask me just that and I also knew that I would say yes before he even got off the plane. After dropping him off at the airport the following Sunday afternoon I cried the entire way to my friend Abby's house where I sobbed softly in her backyard under the palm trees, trying to explain what it felt like to let myself love someone as much as I knew I loved him. After the amount of loss I've experienced in my life, it's been terrifying at times to let myself love someone this much.

In mid-June I formally graduated at the Orpheum theatre in downtown Los Angeles. My Aunt and Uncle and cousin had come from Cape Cod and I wore a cap and gown and held a yellow rose and I didn't feel sad that my parents weren't there. Instead I felt more secure and more present to my life than I ever had, the past something I didn't need to carry around as much anymore.

On June 17th, Father's Day, I completed the second section of my book -- the section about my father. Again, I didn't plan it to happen that way but it felt strangely appropriate to do so. The next morning I immediatley began work on the third section, which quickly proved to be the most challenging section.

I plugged away at it though and on July 1st I finished my book. Well, the first draft at least. What an immense day. That afternoon I went for a long walk on the beach, reflecting on everything that had happened over the last ten weeks. It had truly been the most magical time of my entire life.

I waded out into the great swelling Pacific and floated on my back for a while, the blue sky curving overhead. An era was coming to a close. My time in Los Angeles was ending. I took a deep breath and plunged beneath the water, the world hushed and swirling deeply around me.

Greg and I met on Cape Cod for the 4th of July so that he could meet my extended family and we could continue planning my monstrous move. It was crazy to talk about -- me upending my entire life in Los Angeles, five years worth of friends and jobs and homes and memories and favorite restaurants and neighbors and ocean paths. But I never hesitated.

After that trip I went home and spent most of July officially beginning the moving process. I turned down a job offer from the clinic where I was working and informed my clients that I would leaving at the end of August. I gave notice on my apartment and I told all my friends.

In mid-July I went to Chicago again and found an apartment, the very one I'm sitting in right now. I met Greg in the Loop where he works after I signed the lease and we ate lunch together on a high up floor of his big office building. We stared out at the buildings and the lake and I felt quiet inside, overwhelmed by this huge thing we were doing.

When I returned home from that trip it all began to feel very real. I was really leaving Los Angeles.

August brought with it a mad flurry of a hundred things to do in order to get ready to leave. There were moving trucks to book and friends to see one more time. I had to terminate with all of my clients at the clinic which was very stressful and painful and I began to pack up the little home in which I had lived for four years. As excited as I was about my new life in Chicago a certain sadness and a tinge of anxiety began to creep over me.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Mediabistro ran an interview with me about my book writing process and two days later marked my father's four year death anniversary and the day after that Travel Age West sent me to Taiwan to cover a culinary exhibition.

It was unbelievably strange to suddenly be in Taipei, seemingly a million miles away from everything and everyone, looking back on my life that was ending in Los Angeles and my uncertain but sparkling new life in Chicago. I came home on August 14th and had exactly two weeks to finish packing and begin my journey to Chicago.

Greg came out one more time and we spent a lovely day driving up the coast to Los Olivos, tasting wine all day and then floating on our backs in the wide Pacific in the late afternoon. At Beckman Vineyard Greg took this hilarious video of me in which he pretends to be trying to take a picture, asking me to pose with a glass of wine but then saying that the camera isn't working, all the while taking a video.

I spent my last week in Los Angeles amidst a maelstrom of moving boxes and last minute details. My amazing friends came over one by one and in groups to help me pack dishes and tape boxes, load my moving truck and carry matresses. At night I sat on my porch with my neighbor Rhonda, drinking wine and expounding on our swiftly moving lives.

On August 28th I climbed behind the wheel of my 14 foot moving truck with my car on a trailer on the back and I drove myself out of Los Angeles.

I awoke in my new apartment on September 1st and thus began my life in Chicago. I spent most of that month orienting myself with my new city and neighborhood, unpacking boxes and applying for jobs. Those first few weeks went by quickly.

I began my new blog, Life in Chicago, started making friends and found myself thrilled by the changing weather and the beginning of the first Fall I'd exprerienced in years.

October proved to be a harder month. My money had run out and I still hadn't found a job. I was missing my friends and my apartment in Los Angeles. Greg and I were doing really well -- almost better than to be expected but nonetheless it was a challenging time for both of us. I was trying to keep my head up but I continually felt like I was drowning.

I felt so displaced. I couldn't find a job and couldn't figure out what it was I wanted to be doing with myself anyway. My book was finished and I was working on a proposal for a second one but my days spent endlessly alone in my house were driving me to tears on a regular basis. I wrote here constantly about plans to start over, to start fresh, to come up with a new plan, but each morning I woke feeling even more disheartened than the next. It was such contrast to the Spring when my days seemed filled with nothing but light and possibility.

At the end of October, in a strange twist of fate, I went to the Grenadines on a last minute travel writing assignment. That trip renewed the light and possibility that had been quickly evaporating from my days. I was finally able to slip out of my depression long enough to remember what it was I wanted from my life and I came home refreshed and invigorated.

I began November with a renewed sense of purpose and slowly, over the course of the month, things began to shift. It was still a hard month though. I felt like everything I had learned in the Spring had disappeared. I knew, I knew that things were on the verge of changing, that if I could just hold out and breathe, breathe, breathe, that it would all come together. But I couldn't stop the tightening anxiety. I was still crying every day, still waking in the night with feelings of dread and despair, still fearing being alone, and still feeling unable to help myself.

Again the end of the month brought respite in the form of Thanksgiving spent with Greg and his family -- a warm and relaxing week in which I felt able to breathe again. And also in mid-November I was offered my current job as a bereavement counselor in hospice.

Coming home from Ohio with Greg I felt one last deep pull of despair as I returned to my lonely little apartment. I knew I was beginning work in less than two weeks but I could hardly bear much more of the isolation and solitude I felt in my days. I realized I had truly become depressed  and spent the beginning of December trying to pull myself out of it before I began my new job. I talked with close friends for hours at a time and cleaned and rearranged my house.

And on December 10 I finally went to work. I don't want to say that everything hinged on me working...but in some ways it did. Having a job to go to gave me a sense of purpose and place here in this new city. It also alleviated my serious financial anxiety and it gave me something to focus on other than my depression and solitude.

And on my second day of work, in some neighborhood in southern Chicago, leading a group about coping with loss during the holidays, I could literarlly feel light and hope breaking through me.

The rest of December was a busy mixture of work and holiday activities. Greg and I got our first Christmas tree together and drank champagne while we hung the ornaments. We spent Christmas in Ohio again with his family and it was the first Christmas in a long, long time in which I didn't feel sad.

And now it's the day before New Year's Eve and I've been sitting here all day at my desk in my little apartment, writing and reflecting on this last year. It's truly been the most magical year of my life. I've learned so much about life and love and myself, about being kind and about being quiet -- two things that are immeasurably hard to do sometimes but which, when done with intention, can be deeply healing and rewarding.

I know that 2008 will bring a new depth to all I've established this year. In May I will turn 30 and I already know that I will do so with presence and with light.

I'm so grateful for the people in my life. I'm astounded sometimes by how much goodness is in them and by how generous they are.

I wish everyone a new year filled with light and love and all things possible.

It's wonderfully windy this morning. The whole world feels full of possibility, dark silver clouds scudding across the sky, my little home yellow-lit and cozy. I woke up at 5:30 and lay in the dark, warm under the covers, listening to the wind whip down off the ocean and around the corners of my little house. I listened to the doors rattling out in the living room and I stretched long and lean through the sheets. As I lay in the dark, listening to the sounds of my little world, it seemed entirely possible that everything has changed.

February flowed into March like a warm breeze and I continued relaxing into my existence. Not only had I begun to figure out how to slow down but I started working on being present.

I've been trying to focus on right now. This moment. In this moment it's about 10:30 and I'm sitting at my desk in my little home. The double doors are flung open wide to the warm Los Angeles night. Chet Baker is on the stereo, candles flickering all over the house. Being here right now means not thinking about all the things I did today or all the things I have to do tomorrow. It means not thinking about all the things that make me me, all the things I've done or seen or been over my life. It means not thinking about what I'm going to do this summer or when I turn thirty or some even more distant future.

It means just being here right now. It means knowing that I am everything that I have ever been and will ever be right now, in this moment. It means thinking about my life as though this moment is all there is...because really it is.

And it's really a lovely moment. The taste of an apple in my mouth, a saxophone gentle through the room, warmth and light and the dusky evening, me at 28 on a balmy March night in Los Angeles.

Throughout March, every night when I came home I set down my purse, my yoga bag, and instead of pouring a drink, I drew a bath. And every night I sank down into the bath and I closed my eyes and I thought about what I wanted for my life. I thought about all the things I want to do and be and see and touch. And at the end of March, on the night of my last bath that month, I opened my eyes and I knew what I had to do.

I needed to quit my job and write a book. My book. The book I'd been thinking about and talking about for years.

On April 2, much to my boss's surprise, I gave two weeks at my job and I got to work preparing for this monumental task. I told everyone I knew that I was going to begin writing a book. I cleaned and reorganized every inch of my little house, got a new desk, and stocked the fridge with lots of healthy brain food.

On Monday April 16, I woke up, made coffee, opened the doors to the deck and sat down to write the first 1220 words of my now completed book. It was a tremendous feeling.

For the next two weeks I got up every morning at 7:30 and began writing by nine. By the end of April I'd written over ten thousand words. My entire life had changed. I was writing every morning and then running to the clinic to see clients or to my last quarter of grad school in the afternoons. At night I met up with friends for dinners and shows. And without fail, the next morning I was up at 7:30, my fingers poised over the keyboard by 9.

Also in April, something else very significant occurred. In late March I was asked to become a contributing writer on a site called The Nervous Breakdown and in April my first post went up. But before that post even went up a long contributing member of TNB contacted me. His name was Greg Boose. We began emailing each other every day. We wrote about all kinds of things...what it was like to be young and living in a big city, about writing and books and music...we wrote to each other about our families and we wrote about our days. He was very funny and clever.

Every morning when I woke up to begin working on my book I went out to the living room, opened the doors to the deck, made coffee and sat down to read the latest email from Greg who lived in Chicago and who had already been at work for two hours by the time I got up. I'd write him back and then I'd close my gmail account and get to work on my book. When I was finished writing I would lie on my back on the deck in the sunshine and when I checked my email again there would always be another from Greg.

By May I was deep into the writing process of my book. I was writing a whole new chapter every morning and the whole thing just felt like it was flowing out of me. I began uploading audio clips of my progress, all of which can be found in the About section of this blog.

On May 13, Mother's Day, I completed the first section of my book, the section about my mother. I wept, sitting at my desk, as I wrote about the moment I heard that she was gone.

The next morning I woke up and wrote the first chapter of section two, the section about my father. I wrote all through the latter half of May, delving into those days and months following my mother's death, the days in which I got to know my father. On Sunday May 20, just as I finished writing a chapter about my parent's engagement on Nauset Beach on Cape Cod, my uncle called to tell me that my grandmother was in the hospital. She died the next day, on May 21st, my 29th birthday.

Waking up that morning, alone in my little house, on my 29th birthday, before I even heard, I knew that she was gone. And there was something lovely about it happening on my birthday. My grandmother was 96 years old and had lived a long wonderful life.

I flew back to the East Coast the following weekend for her memorial service. I stood in the church, in front of the hundred or more people who were in attendance and I talked about how every time I visited my grandmother she would always take my hand, tears bright in her eyes, and she would say, I've been thinking about you. And what it meant to me to know that no matter where I was in the world, I always knew that my grandmother was thinking about me.

That afternoon, lying on my back in a hammock at my Aunt Pam's house, the warm May air rustling through the trees above me, I thought about my life. I reflected back on the last two months since I had quit my job and begun writing my book. I thought about all the words I had put down and I thought about all the interactions I'd had over those eight weeks. I had opened up my entire world in a way I never had before. For those two months I had said yes to everything that came in my life, meeting all kinds of people and experiencing all kinds of places and moments and breaths that never would have been possible without all the work I'd done throughout the year.

As I thought about those things I realized that the one person I hadn't honored was Greg. We'd been writing every day for two months. We'd talked many times about one of us visiting the other but I always shook my head at the last minute, deciding it was silly and pointless. But lying there in that hammock on Cape Cod, I decided that before I went back to Los Angeles and continued my whole huge life, before I returned only to get swept back up into it all, perhaps I should just see.

I texted Greg from the hammock. What if I change my flight to stop in Chicago tomorrow afternoon? It was Memorial Day Weekend. I'd never been to Chicago. He responded immediately. Yes, please do it!

The next morning, boarding that flight to Chicago, as my feet crossed the threshhold of the airplane I had the distinct feeling of setting something in motion. I knew that I was forever altering whatever path I was on. But even so, sitting there, my forehead pressed to the window as we touched down at O'Hare, I didn't think it would be this. I didn't think that the moment I saw him waiting for me in baggage claim I would feel this strange familiarity come over me, this feeling that we were always going to meet one warm May afternoon just past my 29th birthday.

I flew home the next morning utterly confused about everything.

But before I could even think about anything June was warm and flush upon my doorstep. I went to the final classes of my grad program -- that program being one of the best things I've ever done with my life. I learned more about compassion and humility and kindness during that year and a half than I ever imagined. I'm so incredibly grateful for my experience there.

The second week of June, just after I finished my classes, and just before I formally graduated, Greg came to Los Angeles and asked me to move to Chicago. I knew he was coming to LA to ask me just that and I also knew that I would say yes before he even got off the plane. After dropping him off at the airport the following Sunday afternoon I cried the entire way to my friend Abby's house where I sobbed softly in her backyard under the palm trees, trying to explain what it felt like to let myself love someone as much as I knew I loved him. After the amount of loss I've experienced in my life, it's been terrifying at times to let myself love someone this much.

In mid-June I formally graduated at the Orpheum theatre in downtown Los Angeles. My Aunt and Uncle and cousin had come from Cape Cod and I wore a cap and gown and held a yellow rose and I didn't feel sad that my parents weren't there. Instead I felt more secure and more present to my life than I ever had, the past something I didn't need to carry around as much anymore.

On June 17th, Father's Day, I completed the second section of my book -- the section about my father. Again, I didn't plan it to happen that way but it felt strangely appropriate to do so. The next morning I immediatley began work on the third section, which quickly proved to be the most challenging section.

I plugged away at it though and on July 1st I finished my book. Well, the first draft at least. What an immense day. That afternoon I went for a long walk on the beach, reflecting on everything that had happened over the last ten weeks. It had truly been the most magical time of my entire life.

I waded out into the great swelling Pacific and floated on my back for a while, the blue sky curving overhead. An era was coming to a close. My time in Los Angeles was ending. I took a deep breath and plunged beneath the water, the world hushed and swirling deeply around me.

Greg and I met on Cape Cod for the 4th of July so that he could meet my extended family and we could continue planning my monstrous move. It was crazy to talk about -- me upending my entire life in Los Angeles, five years worth of friends and jobs and homes and memories and favorite restaurants and neighbors and ocean paths. But I never hesitated.

After that trip I went home and spent most of July officially beginning the moving process. I turned down a job offer from the clinic where I was working and informed my clients that I would leaving at the end of August. I gave notice on my apartment and I told all my friends.

In mid-July I went to Chicago again and found an apartment, the very one I'm sitting in right now. I met Greg in the Loop where he works after I signed the lease and we ate lunch together on a high up floor of his big office building. We stared out at the buildings and the lake and I felt quiet inside, overwhelmed by this huge thing we were doing.

When I returned home from that trip it all began to feel very real. I was really leaving Los Angeles.

August brought with it a mad flurry of a hundred things to do in order to get ready to leave. There were moving trucks to book and friends to see one more time. I had to terminate with all of my clients at the clinic which was very stressful and painful and I began to pack up the little home in which I had lived for four years. As excited as I was about my new life in Chicago a certain sadness and a tinge of anxiety began to creep over me.

Everything seemed to be happening at once. Mediabistro ran an interview with me about my book writing process and two days later marked my father's four year death anniversary and the day after that Travel Age West sent me to Taiwan to cover a culinary exhibition.

It was unbelievably strange to suddenly be in Taipei, seemingly a million miles away from everything and everyone, looking back on my life that was ending in Los Angeles and my uncertain but sparkling new life in Chicago. I came home on August 14th and had exactly two weeks to finish packing and begin my journey to Chicago.

Greg came out one more time and we spent a lovely day driving up the coast to Los Olivos, tasting wine all day and then floating on our backs in the wide Pacific in the late afternoon. At Beckman Vineyard Greg took this hilarious video of me in which he pretends to be trying to take a picture, asking me to pose with a glass of wine but then saying that the camera isn't working, all the while taking a video.

I spent my last week in Los Angeles amidst a maelstrom of moving boxes and last minute details. My amazing friends came over one by one and in groups to help me pack dishes and tape boxes, load my moving truck and carry matresses. At night I sat on my porch with my neighbor Rhonda, drinking wine and expounding on our swiftly moving lives.

On August 28th I climbed behind the wheel of my 14 foot moving truck with my car on a trailer on the back and I drove myself out of Los Angeles.

I awoke in my new apartment on September 1st and thus began my life in Chicago. I spent most of that month orienting myself with my new city and neighborhood, unpacking boxes and applying for jobs. Those first few weeks went by quickly.

I began my new blog, Life in Chicago, started making friends and found myself thrilled by the changing weather and the beginning of the first Fall I'd exprerienced in years.

October proved to be a harder month. My money had run out and I still hadn't found a job. I was missing my friends and my apartment in Los Angeles. Greg and I were doing really well -- almost better than to be expected but nonetheless it was a challenging time for both of us. I was trying to keep my head up but I continually felt like I was drowning.

I felt so displaced. I couldn't find a job and couldn't figure out what it was I wanted to be doing with myself anyway. My book was finished and I was working on a proposal for a second one but my days spent endlessly alone in my house were driving me to tears on a regular basis. I wrote here constantly about plans to start over, to start fresh, to come up with a new plan, but each morning I woke feeling even more disheartened than the next. It was such contrast to the Spring when my days seemed filled with nothing but light and possibility.

At the end of October, in a strange twist of fate, I went to the Grenadines on a last minute travel writing assignment. That trip renewed the light and possibility that had been quickly evaporating from my days. I was finally able to slip out of my depression long enough to remember what it was I wanted from my life and I came home refreshed and invigorated.

I began November with a renewed sense of purpose and slowly, over the course of the month, things began to shift. It was still a hard month though. I felt like everything I had learned in the Spring had disappeared. I knew, I knew that things were on the verge of changing, that if I could just hold out and breathe, breathe, breathe, that it would all come together. But I couldn't stop the tightening anxiety. I was still crying every day, still waking in the night with feelings of dread and despair, still fearing being alone, and still feeling unable to help myself.

Again the end of the month brought respite in the form of Thanksgiving spent with Greg and his family -- a warm and relaxing week in which I felt able to breathe again. And also in mid-November I was offered my current job as a bereavement counselor in hospice.

Coming home from Ohio with Greg I felt one last deep pull of despair as I returned to my lonely little apartment. I knew I was beginning work in less than two weeks but I could hardly bear much more of the isolation and solitude I felt in my days. I realized I had truly become depressed  and spent the beginning of December trying to pull myself out of it before I began my new job. I talked with close friends for hours at a time and cleaned and rearranged my house.

And on December 10 I finally went to work. I don't want to say that everything hinged on me working...but in some ways it did. Having a job to go to gave me a sense of purpose and place here in this new city. It also alleviated my serious financial anxiety and it gave me something to focus on other than my depression and solitude.

And on my second day of work, in some neighborhood in southern Chicago, leading a group about coping with loss during the holidays, I could literarlly feel light and hope breaking through me.

The rest of December was a busy mixture of work and holiday activities. Greg and I got our first Christmas tree together and drank champagne while we hung the ornaments. We spent Christmas in Ohio again with his family and it was the first Christmas in a long, long time in which I didn't feel sad.

And now it's the day before New Year's Eve and I've been sitting here all day at my desk in my little apartment, writing and reflecting on this last year. It's truly been the most magical year of my life. I've learned so much about life and love and myself, about being kind and about being quiet -- two things that are immeasurably hard to do sometimes but which, when done with intention, can be deeply healing and rewarding.

I know that 2008 will bring a new depth to all I've established this year. In May I will turn 30 and I already know that I will do so with presence and with light.

I'm so grateful for the people in my life. I'm astounded sometimes by how much goodness is in them and by how generous they are.

I wish everyone a new year filled with light and love and all things possible.