"Contentment is connected with appreciating what you have, with some sense of rejoicing, which is often very hard. You are constantly involved with possibilities of change, all the time changing from one thing to another. You cannot celebrate your own life as what you have, what you are. You are unable to celebrate the simplicity of the practice itself and the simplicity of life. But being contented with what you have IS a celebration."
The basement here has one end that I think I have used twice since we have lived here. But it's really pleasant, and in the winter when the sun is low in the Southern sky it is surprisingly sunny. I keep a geranium on the windowsill, and it blooms through the season. In the other end of the basement is a pretty decent movie theatre with a wall-size screen and great sound that we enjoy occasionally. We just upgraded that to Blu-Ray for HD discs, and also for on-demand NetFlix movies over the Internet.
Mdog continues to display increasing signs of her rapidly advancing old age, and I think I am experiencing some of the inevitable heartbreak in advance, as I try to cherish the days she is here. Nothing is more precious to me than to reach across the bed when I awake during the night and softly stroke her mane or slip my hand under her cheek and feel her snuggle her muzzle closer into my palm.
Work continues to be a pleasant enough diversion, and I am surprisingly able to cruise through the day without desperately craving a nap or losing focus. I actually prefer a faster pace, as the day goes by so quickly. While I can't imagine making a career of such activity, it has the right balance of challenge and simplicity for a short term engagement.
I had a caller at work today who gave me a 510 area code for a callback number. "Oh", I said "..east bay of Northern California, right?". He was there, of course, and as it was slow and he was willing, I engaged him in conversation for a while. He asked me where I was, and when I told him I was in Fort Collins, he laughed and said he had just moved from here back to the Bay Area. "Isn't that sort of the reverse of the normal migration?", I asked him. Again he laughed, and said he had sold his California home near the peak of the real estate lunacy, and came to Northern Colorado for the lower cost of living and reported quality of life.
But...he said he and his wife and family never really felt settled here. Never quite fit in. There was nothing really wrong with it, and there was much to like, but...
I told him how much that described my feelings about it, and we agreed that this wasn't supposed to happen. Everyone who comes here is supposed be all John-Denver-Rocky-Mountain-High, and gush over the mountains and the aspen trees, and ride bicyles to work in the snow wearing lycra shorts, and kayak in the river and climb rocks while swilling a local micro-brew.
But some of us just can't get over the coastal climate with its year-round greenery, and the liberal politics and sensibilities. It's not so much the impracticality of no wine in the grocery store here as the notion here that that the biblical zealotry says it is wrong to sell wine in the grocery store (or anywhere on Sunday until last year). So it is forbidden. Not to mention all the other things you might do or think here that are also wrong. My caller at work sold his Colorado house last summer, after about three years here, and moved back to San Ramon, near where I used to work. Probably bought a foreclosure.
I also continue to read disturbing stories in the alternative press here about serious and chilling distortions of the local criminal justice system. For all its surface charms, I often have a sense that beneath the banal and cheery Walt Disney Main Street prototype exterior lies a dark, intolerant, and unforgiving realm.
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