I've been in Austin about a day, after a grueling 13 hour drive. Got in late Monday night and then stayed out of the car yesterday. I'm within a 10 min walk of bakeries, organic restaurants, etc. so that worked fine. Also it was warm enough yesterday sitting in the sun out on the deck for a few hours.
Magic enjoys being outside as much as I do, so it was great to be able to have her out so much at this time of year. And it's just nice overlooking a creek from one's private space, even though the things we need from commerce are a short walk away.
I'll be at this location a couple weeks before moving on to a permaculture farm. This is very nice, but I also look forward to that. Here we do hear cars going by on nearby streets about 12 hours out of the day. It doesn't directly bother me, but Magic isn't use to it. We've never lived anywhere together with the sound of traffic audible in the house. She seems to not know yet how to differentiate between that and something she actually needs to respond to. So barking at what to me seems like random moments, but to her is high alert for some reason.
Well today will be another day I stay out of the car and just walk around and sit around. You'll note that even though I went really nowhere yesterday, I also wasn't online. Even as my time has finally opened up due to having made it here and done everything that needed doing before I left Taos, I still don't feel a draw to move more toward online activity again.
I wrote this not too long ago, and will share it with you here....
What's This Life About?
As I head into this next year, and my first birthday as a retired person, I'm continuing to evolve my idea of purpose and place. I spent so much of my life feeling like I was dancing as fast as I could at the edge of survival and always striving to simultaneously keep all the plates spinning without crashing down, that letting that persistent insecurity go has been a process. So has discovering who I am when I'm not striving. And I'm not striving.
I've been enjoying my explorations of off-grid building, diving more deeply into my undergraduate subjects on global economics, creating a happy life for my dog, and adjusting to being far from any ocean for the first time in my life. But none of it really asks much of me, which suits me just fine.
The greatest clarity that has come within all this space is that the purpose of my life is enjoying it, and that one of the things I enjoy most is helping others enjoy their lives more too. And this doesn't have to be something complicated. I don't need to create a project, or organization, or business.
It can be just organizing neighbors by text to shovel someone's driveway before they get home. Or offering my space for a meditation group when their free space has to be used for something else. Or alerting people early to get out of the stock market! It can be simply moving through the world attuned to all the little opportunities to benefit someone with a word, a thought or a deed. I think of it as dancing through life tossing blessings like confetti on all who pass near.
Someday I do think I will build a space that will employ people in a deeply nourishing way, a business whose primary purpose is to support happy lives for the workers while organizing them to provide something of value to the public at the same time. This will likely be in Africa, but who knows. That's far beyond my horizon right now.
Right now there is just the settling into a presence that has no forward propulsion. Right now there is just discovering who I am when all that life asks of me is that I simply enjoy being.
And that's what's up.