Enforced Inaction

Well, it’s now Wednesday. Monday involved flying out from Salt Lake City and shaking off, for the most part, anyway, the psychic sense of work. I love my work, but I also very much feel a need to be away just for a while…

Touching feet to the ground at the Burbank airport and breathing in the dry hot air helped in the shift toward “holiday.” For the next few days we’re enjoying something of an enforced inaction perched at Jan’s mom’s house in the desert foothills above Tujunga.

Staying with an eighty-five year old we have limited web access (I’m experiencing some withdrawal symptoms, I fear… And, yes, I know just because one is eighty-five it doesn’t mean there has to be limited web access…), and even limited cell phone access.

I spent the entire morning yesterday shopping in order to prepare a vegan dinner (for my sister in law, not my mother in law, who would on the whole have rathered a pot roast…). And then spent the afternoon reading a novel, actually finishing something I started weeks ago. Ah… We had a lovely Tujunga evening, eating our pasta with a spinach, mushroom and garlic sauce (the thickener was something called Tofutti, the ingredients listing of chemicals that allow it to have properties similar to cream cheese was disturbingly long…) and then to an evening on the back porch enjoying the fruits of my mother in law’s feriocious devotion to her gardens, until, that is, a skunk wandered onto the property (we are two streets from the beginning of the desert proper) and who evidenced interest in us. Beautiful thing, almost certainly quite young. So, we retreated back into the house for our last hour or so before retiring…

Today it’s art museums and then dinner out with the sister and brother in law, with whom of all the relatives out here, we are the closest…

I do feel like I’m decompressing. There are a few important things to deal with back home, both church and sangha. But, I’m hoping to let them go for a little, and just enjoy not thinking of tasks that must be done. I’m now in the down time.

Yum…