I loved Thanksgiving this year. There is a sadness to it, apart from Maria, my original family is either scattered far from me, or we have grown out of contact with one another. I miss my daughter in Brooklyn and wish life had brought us closer to one another. I take responsibility for moving to the farm, moving away from what was familiar. She has a great and fulfilling life and I am nothing but proud of her and happy for her. My Thanksgiving began with a call from her, a good talk, a good start to a good day. Perhaps one day we will share Thanksgiving together again.

My Thanksgiving was so different from the many Thanksgivings I shared with family and friends in the other world. Sometimes I just blink at the different phases of my life, how different they were from one another. I am working hard on my spiritual life, to understand the power and nature of fear and anger in my life. When I meditate on a day like this, my mind drifts back to the other Thanksgivings, and I try and simply accept them. They are all my life. They are all me. People tell me I have changed, but I do not believe that people become other people. They simply change and evolve, if they are lucky.

And there was great joy in this Thanksgiving, it was one of the most meaningful of my life. Maria and I  got up early, went out in our nightclothes to feed the donkeys and the sheep and let the dogs out. I am usually wide awake in the middle of the night, but I slept well last night.  We read in bed for hours, talked, got up and made breakfast. We took the dogs for a walk in the woods. We went to visit some friends nearby and we had an easy, sweet and completely comfortable time. I am so lucky that Maria and I found one another, and the day was suffused with appreciation of that miraculous thing.

We came home, fed the animals again, sat by the fire and read, talked until we began to drift. It was a crisp, warm day.  I meditated then, feeling some fear rising up in me with the old memories, and I worked on breathing, deeply and slowly. The more I do this, the deeper it goes, the more peaceful I feel, the more I see the fear as some alien system running inside of me, becoming smaller and less coherent. And then, as I almost always do at the end of my day, I came to blog. I loved everything about this day, and am grateful for it. It was a day filled with love and peace and ease.

Tomorrow, the book tour officially ends at Bartleby’s Books in Wilmington, Vermont. I am coming to an important point in my long fascination with fear, coming face-to-face with this beast that has stalked me most of my life. I am so grateful for that as well.