Down, down to Disneyland

Having safely negotiated the cattle-car exigencies of air travel on Wednesday, I arrived in beautiful, sunny and warm Santa Barbara and was whisked away by Melissa to her place for a reviving cuppa tea.  We had an early dinner with our bro, and then went out to La Casa de Maria for a spirituality training session that my sis attends weekly these days.  The subject of the evening was Death; actually appropriate for Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the Lenten period. Someone pointed out during the discussion that Carl Sagan had once reminded his listeners that the human body is made up of stardust; and walking back to the car after the meeting, we saw that the clear skies were pulsating with that energy (amazing expanses of stars and planets and the new moon).

Thursday morning I had time to have my hair cut and styled (something we mountain women just don't bother with on a regular basis, but I had come down to the urban plane and needed to spruce up a bit).  I met a dear friend from Trinity Parish for an early lunch and catch-up on news; and then Sis and I drove down to MouseLand.  The roadtrip through Los Angeles traffic left us feeling beat, so we had a light supper in the hotel room and a long, deep sleep.

Today, Melissa is over at the huge convention center, with about 50,000 other religious liberals, listening to some preaching-to-the-choir.  I have sole occupancy of the nice big hotel room with sliding glass doors to a small balcony and view of the garden and pool area below.

I come along to these weekends to have some girl-time with my sis, and some quiet time on my own for writing and meditating.  (Last year I spent a lot of the time here in working out what I felt about retirement and the move to our current new location in Boulder Creek.  That was a very fruitful exercise, as all my readers now know.

This year, I am preparing to launch the writing of my life story with a sentimental journey home to the town where I grew up, Ann Arbor MI.  I will spend a little time today looking at and sorting out travel data for that trip, planned for late May/early June of this year.  And I am also going through the assignments in a workbook on autobiography, "Courage and Craft: Writing Your Life Into Story."  I have been working on this for the past couple of months, and it's a very good warmup exercise, I'm finding.

Oops: it's lunchtime!  Back later; I have a salad and a bit of bread left from last night's room-service supper – that'll do.