Slow Love

I celebrated my first few months of unemployment by packing my suitcase and traveling.  I took a road trip across the Southwest soaking in hot springs and looking at art, explored the wats of Thailand and learned how to make tom yum gai, celebrated friends getting married in Mexico,  visited relatives in New York, and saw a half dozen films at Sundance.  I was like an uncaged animal wanting to mark as many territories as possible.  And then something happened.  I longed to be home.  Spring in Southern California is miraculous.  I wanted to hike under snow capped mountains in fields of wildflowers.  I wanted to fall asleep to the scent of night blooming jasmine and awake to the smell of orange blossoms.  I wondered if I was crazy.  I was free to go anywhere, everywhere, and I wanted to be home.  In Dominique Browning's new memoir, SLOW LOVE, she perfectly describes what I was experiencing.  "Slow love is the most sustaining sort of love I have ever known -- a love that comes from an unhurried and focused attention to the simplest of things, available to all us, at any time, should we choose to engage.  Perhaps even more importantly, slow love comes out of the quiet hours, out of learning from the silence that is always there when we want it.  Slow love is about knowing what you got before it's gone."  For this new love, I'm grateful.  This picture was taken during a hike in Palm Springs.