God, Line 1 is For You

 I have this memory of being at the beach with my husband.  it was sometime in the last 20 years.  We were lying on a blanket in the sand.  I was reading a book and taking notes in a notepad.  And my husband said something like, "It seems like you are searching for something," or "What are you searching for?" or "It looks like you are on some kind of a search."  I don't know what he said.  But I think it is one of the first times that someone else commented on a dynamic that as I look back on my life I realize has been there for a long time.  IN SEARCH OF ... When did it begin? I think I am wired to be a little on the isolated side, so "searching" became a sort of natural response to this strange feeling of being isolated and yet not wanting to be isolated.  I'll blame it on the DNA.  My father was a gregarious extrovert who loved attention.  My mother was painfully shy and wanted more than anything to be invisible at all times.  And so t

 I'm sitting in my home office, looking out onto the back yard.  There's a pot about 18" away from me on my glass-top desk containing the spikey-leafed "startups" of a Thanksgiving cactus.  I have one of these at my office and I recently snipped of the ends of several of the limbs and stuck them in this pot on my desk.  The plant in my "work" office originated from the plant in my "home" office -- well, except that plant doesn't exist anymore... I had a giant schefflera and a corn plant that were each about 6.5' tall in our family room.  A curly fig on the kitchen island.  A green vine on the shelf above the sink; and two more in my meditation room, in different pots.  I had two peperomias -- one in the family room and the other also in my meditation room.  And I had three separate pots of varying sizes of a vine that isn't available in stores because the friend who "produced" it years ago never patented it.  He called it