Five Years & Six Beginnings...

Earlier today, as I was journaling thoughts and plans for the new year, it struck me - not for the first time, but certainly more deeply than before - how much my life has been transformed in the last year. Walking backwards from a year ago, I was instantly flabbergasted at the way my life has been re-set in a relatively short period of time. This despite the fact that within the process, things seemed like they were never going to end.

The last five years of my life have included some of the highest and most of the lowest experiences of my nearly 55 years on the planet.

Five years ago, I was living in Petaluma, about four blocks from where I live now, but the life I was living then and the life I am living now are as different as night and day. The joy I feel now, compared to the misery I was feeling then, is as astonishing as it is delightful.

The journey in between these two points is even more incredible, while also being rather mundane. I don't want to pretend that I have had some amazing adventure (though there are many aspects of the last five years that would certainly qualify as exactly that).

The details of the last five years add a whole new level of meaning to the concept that you cannot step into the same river twice.

The experiences I have had, the friends I have come to know and to value (along with new and deeper relationships to old friends), the ways my life has been confronted and transformed, and the love that I presently feel from the tips of my toes to the center of my soul is nothing short of miraculous to me. In my comparatively short life, I have been in a lot of places (both physically and emotionally) around the world, but the last five years in which I have moved from a little house on Dana Street to a tiny apartment on Fair Street, all within the 94952 zip code have been the most profoundly life-altering experiences (with one singularly significant exception that I will talk about later) of my life.

I began 2004 in a little living room on Dana Street, my partner of 16 years visiting her family in Mississippi as she always did at that time of the year. There was nothing terribly odd about this at the time, but what I didn't realize on that lonely night was that everything I had built my life on for the last 20 years was going to be systematically obliterated over the coming twenty months. We had come through the struggles of raising children, battling cancer, fighting back the difficulties of financial distress and the basic frustrations of our difficult personalities. We had shopped for, bought, and decorated a house together, only to find ourselves trapped inside it like doomed sailors on a becalmed sea. The times when we couldn't keep our hands off of each other had transformed into several years in the same bed when we never made love once.

The stage had been set (we had been working on our respective parts for over ten years) and most of the coming actions had already been determined.

Things were about to get crazy.