Summer Solstice!

Yesterday, at 4:59 p.m., P.D.T., we entered SUMMER!!!! (I only know that because I heard it on the radio). Nonetheless, I do make a mental note each year of spending even a few minutes quietly, thinking about what the passage of another season means to me.

So yesterday on the Summer Solstice, we celebrated being on a very long sandy beach - watching surfers and kayakers ride the massive waves under partly cloudy/partly sunny skies, watching the mist from the ocean spray onto the beach (it looked a little like fog rolling in)... just LOVING LIFE. I was so grateful for everything in my life in that moment. It was bliss.

There was a moment, in one of the two villages we visited yesterday, when I walked by a person, who I said Hi to, as you do in all these small coastal towns (and probably in big cities, although I don't find that to be the case myself)... and he replied, "How ya be?" We had already walked by each other, and we continued going on our ways, but my mind stopped dead in its tracks - here people don't ask about what you're DOING, they want to know how are you BEING.... and that is SUCH an important distinction. I recently read "To Have or To Be" by Erich Fromm which articulates exactly the distinction I'm talking about. But in that one moment, I realized that here was a place where people got It - there was no rushing around, caught up in stress. You just got done what you needed to get done, but more importantly it is who you are BEING while you are DOING the day-to-day necessities of life that is what matters. It also made me realize how unconscious I was in that moment, and I was grateful for his words.

Now I'm unpacking from that short trip and re-packing for the cob workshop, which begins tonight at 7. I don't know how often this next week I'll be able to get internet access, so you might not here from me while I'm cobbing, but rest assured, there will be lots to talk about when I come back!