5 Years & 6 Beginnings... Part Four

January 1, 2007 found me running Stinson Beach in the sunshine and cold. In comparison to the previous three beginnings, it was a particularly good one.

By the end of 2006 I had come back to Petaluma and begun subletting part of a house just outside of town. This arrangement was extremely centering to me and I spent a lot of time simply lying or sitting in my room, petting the cat, and smiling out at the big tree that filled the view from my bedroom window. It was a settling and grounding experience that I was lucky to have fallen into after wandering about like The Lost Dutchman for most of 2006.

In general, 2006 was a recovery year. I spent most of the first six months in New Orleans, desperately trying to make a life there, and evacuating every once in a while back to my office in San Francisco to sit and have lunch with Jennifer, drop in at Grace or Glide to pick up a small modicum of sanity. By summertime I had pretty much reached the limit of my staying power and I drifted, with deep reluctance, back to California on a semi-permanent basis.

That summer I also dropped in on the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, a group I had been involved with at their inception 20 years earlier, but which I had not visited since 1989. I spent that week in Atlanta speaking about Katrina, along with some of my friends and heros from Churches Supporting Churches and visiting with old friends I hadn't seen or heard from in a very very long time. It was a cathartic, and restorative, experience and one of the things I discovered was how much comfort I gained from meeting up with and sharing moments with folks who had ben through the same thing I had been through.

In the fall, I had another opportunity to meet up with CSC friends when we gave a presentation at Defiance College in Ohio. At that point, I had been back in Petaluma for several months and while I was experiencing the aforementioned comfort and quiet as healthful, I was also longing to be with people who understood what I had been (and was still going) through. My friends from CSC were those folks. When we would see each other we would smile, and hug, and hold each other like long lost relations. It was another aspect of the life of 2006 that brought me back to health.

There had been some rough points that fall as well. I had my car, and my computer, stolen in San Francisco in October, and the new computer I bought to replace it blew up on me right at the end of the year. About that same time, my brain blew up on me as well, and by January 1 I was still struggling through coping with all the residue (physical, personal, and practical) that my occassional seizures force me to deal with.

What I missed most at the beginning of 2007 was any sense that I had an actual life. I was definitely in a restorative mode. Like a cat that gets into a fight, I was hunkered down, licking my wounds, and trying to assemble the details of the past 18 months into a cohesive personal narrative that made sense and had a through line.

On that beach that morning in the sun, I felt like I was coming back to wholeness.

I was moving up from the underworld and had returned to a sort of zero point. I was getting better... But things were still going to take some time.

I was definitely NOT expecting the changes that were lying in wait on the far horizon.