I realized this weekend that my mood board is so clogged with old clippings, ephemera and photos that it’s like an archeological artifact. Part of the problem is that I’m so attached to all those poems, drawings, trinkets and other bits and pieces that I can’t bear to take them down or figure out what to do with them. But more troubling is that the board has become a kind of decorative element and has ceased to be really inspiring. And even more upsetting is that my entire home “office” has become just as nonfunctional. It’s never been where I write — I do that on my laptop in bed or in coffee shops or on the couch — but it’s become a playroom that’s never played in anymore. How do you keep your mood board fresh and your work room functional? Can’t decide if I need a life coach or a room coach.

I have all my appointments on my iPhone, with Alerts and Second Alerts and Alarms and Birthdays and it makes me feel quite nuts because it’s all so kind of Invisible. Everything seems to be happening at once in a very overwhelming way. Is it because I’m too old to keep a digital calendar, too structured to have my dates floating in the ether? I know that time is not linear, that all kinds of things from the past invade the present, blur the lines between Was and Is, that we cycle around and around, committing the same sins, hitting the same sensitive spots over and over in the great return. But when it comes to “Dentist–Nov 10″ or “Logan’s Bday, Dec 28″ I have to see it all laid out before me like hopscotch time. I crave the white space of open days when nothing is required of me except to dawdle, dream or wander. I need to cross off accomplishments, cancel activities on a day that is too full, put a star sticker by exercise, draw a heart around special events or anniversaries of the heart, doodle a yellow sun on a day I’m really happy, glue oddments and ephemera to the page. That’s the calendar I tape to the inside of my front door so that I can see it first thing in the morning when I leave for work and last thing when I’m locking the door at night.  A little roadmap that gives me the illusion of control, order, security and writes a shorthand short story about my life.

Are you where you belong? If so, you’re lucky, because I’ve never lived anywhere I didn’t consider temporary. Even if I was there for decades. One of the favorite paintings I own shows an open road stretching into the horizon and pretty much sums up my ambivalence about home. I long for it but never feel I’m quite rooted anywhere, that there is always somewhere “out there” that’s my real home. My search is complicated by ruling out places that are haunted by my past, certain locations that constitute holy ground for me, where intense emotions are seared into the atmosphere, where I loved or lost, where emotional vibrations disturb the air like the silence after music. A graveyard in Kentucky, a certain quality of light on a street in San Diego, the townhouse where my marriage died, the university quad where I fell in love at first sight. Places whose soundtrack could only be Chopin’s Prelude, Opus 28 No 4 in E Minor. If I moved anywhere near those spots, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night, wouldn’t be able to stop myself from revisiting the past, couldn’t not haunt them like a living ghost. So my soul is always on the road, always looking for rest, for rescue, for a place that strikes the missing chord.

With the darkness closing in earlier now, I always turn on the white twinkle lights and made-by-a-friend  tin can lights on my porch when I go out in the evening. I love coming home late, driving down my street and seeing from a block away my house welcome me back like a fiesta for one. And I like the idea of  sending out peace and love via prayer flags and party lights to anyone passing by. Porch lights are signs of hope and rescue and respite in a dark sea of night and trouble and losing our way. We all need to have one turned on for us for us somewhere in the world, to guide us home by the  heart strings.

I came back from the “wilderness,” a week in and around Yosemite, to find an email that my mailbox was too full, my mortgage payments for the last two months somehow hadn’t been recorded and a cryptic letter from the IRS that I owe the government $3,000 plus for some reason that remains mysterious no matter how often I read the message. To compound my misery, I stepped on the scale to find that after a week’s worth of grueling hikes, I literally had not lost an ounce of weight. I cried for about 10 minutes (I’m a failure at everything!), went back and read my post about the 5-Year-Perspective (applying, applying, applying) and restrained myself from rushing out to buy a Frosty at Wendy’s (don’t do it!). I know all of this is fixable, and even the weight has its up-side — at least I didn’t gain any. Seems I’m just getting a larger post-vacation slap of reality than usual. Being disconnected from television, work and any responsibility other than getting to the top of the next oxygen-sucking trail meant living moment to moment instead of fake crisis to fake crisis. The real uphill slog comes when I’m home. I hope that when I wade into all this bureaucratic mess next week, I remember sitting with my feet in a clean ice-cold, snow-fed river, the color of sun-bleached grass on the hillside, a coyote pausing by the road to give me a look, the mountain half in shade, half in light — just like life.