A quick update

The last couple of months have been truly transformative, and I found myself driving down the 101 the other day thinking to myself, "Wow, I really love life!!"

I've had a life-changing experience with my tai chi practice. After a recent workshop with visiting instructor Steve Harris from Colorado, worlds opened up to me and I can now send my body into a deep state of bliss doing tai chi, with my mind and spirit following closely behind. I practice 6-10 hours a week, and have begun instructing as well - this is too amazing to not share with anyone who wants to learn!

Everything in life has taken an upswing along with this increased state of well-being - closer relationships, more fun, faster progress on our new venture, and really enjoying life.

Samantha maintains her intense passion for art, devouring new techniques and styles and producing hundreds of pieces of work each month. It's a challenge to know where to keep them all! She has a deepening interest in witches and magic, and has begun writing and illustrating stories (mostly about witches flying on brooms and having adventures) in her journal. We also delved into agglomerative hierarchical clustering recently after watching a Google developers talk - it's a fancy name for a way of organizing data visually, and she picked it up without skipping a beat.

Delta continues to amaze us - the other day we were standing outside on the porch and she looked up at the moon. Then she said these words, "The sun makes music and the moon likes dancing." She and Samantha have been having wonderful times playing together for stretches of up to an hour, and homeschooling is becoming fun again. And when they do encounter conflict, great tenderness can emerge. One time Samantha was upset about something having of hers having been taken and she said "I don't want (Delta)!" To which Delta replied, with tears in her eyes, "I love you." This melted Samantha's fiery moment and the sisters were friends again.

Daniel is flourishing too, despite a lingering cough. He speaks with such passion and animation and eloquence about our venture and grand ideas, with such an incredible vision for the future. (And he has even started doing tai chi, so we get to practice together - he had an idea for extreme tai chi; doing tai chi in all kinds of unusual places around the world! Leave it to him to mod even the most gentle and ancient of practices :)) He has really grown since coming to California, as have I. It just feels like the RIGHT place for us to be.

As my pants from REI say,
life is good.