Remember those essays the teacher assigned us at the start of junior high English classes in September?

Write 3 pages on the topic, “What I did on my summer vacation.”

That’s how I’m feeling in this moment.

As you may know, I’ve taken the past 6 weeks off from writing here in order to give myself the gift of space. I’m a big believer in the power of pausing, in the importance of sabbatical time to renew one’s energy.

Even so, I found myself filling up much of that time with many other rich experiences. So much so that I’m feeling a bit exhausted, and yet inspired at the same time.

It truly does feel like harvest time, both in my garden where tomatoes are bursting out everywhere as well as inside my heart.

In this post, I want to offer you more than simply a laundry list of activities I engaged in this summer. I’d like to also touch in, just a bit, on the essence of these experiences. Some of these will evolve into longer pieces of writing on these topics over the next season, so stay tuned!

♥ The “Fall in Love with Your Work” online course, right here at the LLP in July, was such a joy and revelation for me. Thirty brave souls explored the concept of “liberation-based livelihood” together for 30 days. The joy came in watching as participants broke through old fears and gained new insights. The revelation came in how thoroughly I enjoyed the process from my vantage point of facilitator and teacher. I felt I had found my right livelihood, which I hadn’t anticipated.

I’ll offer the course again this October. If you’d like to learn more and sign up to be notified when registration opens, check out this page.

♥ For 10 days in August, in my capacity as program director, I was immersed in the summer intensive training period of the Upaya Buddhist Chaplaincy Program with some amazing teachers, including Roshi Joan Halifax, Alan Senauke (an old colleague and friend from our days back at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship), Fleet Maull, and Rabbi Malka Drucker.

One memorable moment came on the last night when we were graced by a visit from the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity, a group of folks from Mexico calling attention to the tragic consequences of the “War on Drugs.” I wrote more about that evening in this post on The Jizo Chronicles.

I gave myself the challenge to be fully present that week to whatever came up for the 38 students in the program. As an introvert (but a gregarious one!), being this available and visible is not something that I naturally gravitate towards. So I really pushed my envelope around this and felt the reward as well – a much deeper connection with everyone involved in the program over those days.

♥ I spent a week with my aging parents in Southern California. There is so much here to say… but for now, I’ll just share that the big a-ha moment for me was realizing that spiritual lessons pick us, we don’t pick them. That is exactly why they are spiritual lessons. Acceptance, on a deep level, is a huge part of navigating them. As those wise sages on Star Trek used to say, resistance is futile!

♥ Finally, I re-connected with my Sagittarian nature, taking a journey by both car and train across the Southwest that brought me to all kinds of magical places. Some of these included Canyon de Chelly, a place of ancient earth wisdom, and a stay at La Posada, an incredible oasis of a hotel in Winslow, AZ. I may turn a future LLP post into a travelogue to tell you more about these places and to ponder the nature of magic itself.

Another sweet moment came when I arrived in California and got some live, in-the-flesh time with people who had been only ‘virtual’ online friends until that point – Leslie Rinchen-Wongmo and Joy Holland. I shared a beautiful walk along the Pacific Ocean shoreline with these two wonderful women. I was also blessed to spend a morning at Hazy Moon Zen Center in Los Angeles with Karen Maezen Miller, someone whose writing and Zen practice has moved me deeply.

I look forward to unfolding the lessons from these experiences and more with you over the coming months as we continue our deep dive into what it means to live a truly liberated life.

How about you? How was your summer? (If you live in the Southern Hemisphere of this magnificent planet, how was your winter?) What life lessons have you harvested lately?

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