Back from Hiatus

Here is Nashville on the last day of May 2011. This is a humid morning mist that will burn off by 10. Anyone walking a dog, or just themselves, will have to seek shelter after that. It will be in the mid-nineties for over a week, and the sky is cloudless. No storms to cool things down-

I have taken a month off from posting to contemplate leisure, peace, and repose. Contemplate, not find, for I have been working too much. What time I have had off I have travelled. To St Petersburg with Tolstoy. To the Don River in Russia with Mikhal Sholakov. To Hawaii with James Jones to visit Private Prewitt and Sergeant Warden. They do not know that the war is coming to them. I do.

And I have been to Mexico with Diana Kennedy and Rick Bayless and Zarela Martinez. And with the writers Rick Skwiot and Tony Cohan- seekers looking for a less complicated, more abundant life. When Cohan talks of a tiredness so great that he and his wife have to strip it away layer by layer, I see this is how I feel about my own life. I think of Thoreau at dusk, peering into the darkening New England woods, listening to the song of the wood thrush- a song he said transported him to "a Carolina or Mexico of the soul".

How wonderful it would be to find it!