I've been trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up.  I'm making progress on checking the things I need off my list, but I haven't actually done what I need to do--sit down and figure out what the end point is.  What does my "perfect life" look like?  (And I put that in quotes because I know it won't be perfect, but what are the aspects I want in my life). It's difficult to see the forest through the treInes at this point. I'm setting myself up nicely for what comes next, but there is a wild card in my life that keeps everything from feeling like I'm on a stable path.  I'd like that path, please.   I have vague ideas, but nothing concrete these days.

Hospice volunteer training is in a few weeks. I should have my first case by July, I suspect.  I am both calm and over-thinking it at this point.   I have a few weeks to get myself centered a bit. At least, that's how I'm viewing it.  A reboot to the soul.  It isn't going to be easy but it will be full of ease.  Mostly because that is how it has to be.  I am yearning to return. I am ready for this.

Maybe.

In work news,  my role is changing to something bigger, but I'm not quite sure how this all manifests.  In some ways, it takes me away from what I love in research.   In some ways I wonder if this taking away is another sign that I am in the wrong place. OTOH  It is  sitoo good of a thing to pass up in terms of getting connected in what happens research-wise and starting to know the players of the consortium.  While I am wholly disinterested in what this particular thing is, I am wholly interested in who I can potentially meet.

There is a marriage between what feeds me intellectually and what feeds me emotionally/spiritually. I want to find it.  If there is an ever an opportunity to figure out what that is, it is here.  It may not stay in Seattle, but I believe in the depths of my heart that it all starts here. I've believed this for 15 years of diversions and side-tracks. But it is here.  And I am closer to it now than I was musing about it in a rental car on the coast of California fifteen years ago.  It is the same musing, but not at all.  It is an ever-widening spiral.  That I know will make sense, I just need to be in the right place.  But that is here.

I need to marry my loves somehow.

I need to marry my loves and still get out of the heart of the city so I can marry another part of my love to all of this.  I still need some land and some water.  A little land. A little water.   A  little garden. A little music. A little books.  A little nook. A little fire.

I want such a simple life and it feels so far away from me, such  a total pipe dream.   Me, a calling, books, music, bees, garden, rabbits (not for eating!), sheep, chickens.  (you don't see goats anymore, do you? no you don't.  and not that I don't love goats), instruments, laughter, friends, community.  so simple.  so complex.