Yugen (u-gen), Japanese: an awareness of the world that triggers feelings too profound and mysterious for words. When that happens to me, it’s usually the result of letting the natural world in past my big giant head, which is always over-thinking, planning, posing, supposing. One of my best memories — which I have to approach sideways in order not to wear it out or lose it — is of standing in front of a huge overgrown wall of purple morning glories on a walk and suddenly having a fleeting insight into how small I was in the vastness of being. It only lasted for seconds and yet years later I remember it as being a long stop-time in which I was completely open and permeable to existence. It was mystical and completely out of character. The only times that come close are when I sometimes make eye contact with a stranger and feel overwhelmed by tenderness for their suffering, enduring, surviving, persisting humanness. When something like that makes it through my tough, 21st century hide, I kind of swoon inside like a Victorian lady. As I took this photo out the window of my third-floor office (my personal laboratory for cloud and shadow study), I was lifted out of myself for a second into a melancholy, unnameable yearning upward. Yugen.

For the last year I’ve been pissing and moaning about moving, getting away, running away. I’ve felt as if  I was through with this city, bored, boring and chafing at the bit. Never mind that I didn’t have any other place I wanted to be, no other place to call “home.” I mentally rehearsed living in Hawaii (too expensive), London (too expensive), going back home to Kentucky (too emotionally expensive), anywhere but here. I can’t say that it’s been a bad year in the sense that so many people are having a bad year by losing jobs and homes and hope, but it’s been a bad year in the sense of being lost, wandering, wondering, wishing I could get out of my skin and be someone better, fiercer, happier, less invested in loss. I’ve been working hard at understanding why I feel this way, so flat and foreign. I went through years when I lost my inner ear for music; I just didn’t feel it or hear it or want it. I was like those people who  suddenly lose their ability to taste because of some sort of illness, and when my craving for music returned, I realized what a big hole its absence had left in my life. Now I can’t get through the day without a soundtrack. Rock anthems on the way to work, jazz to rock me to sleep. Just as recently I’ve been able to see again, really see the beauty that I swim in daily. The moon riding high and pale in a blue morning sky, the russet autumn marsh grass, the ruffled water of the harbor, a hidden pond on my drive to work where an egret lives, the in-your-face sunsets that winter bring. Leaving work as the days grow shorter, I suddenly notice the neon theater sign that has always been just across the street, clouds stained candy-cotton pink at twilight, ordinary buildings made mysterious by the coming night, the small but intense satisfaction of plugging in my strings of porch lights when I come home. I’m not ready to say I’ve made peace with where I am, that I’ll never leave, that I don’t long for some nameless More, but like my ability to hear music again, my eyes are opening to what is exquisite all around me. And that is enough for now.

Walking on Hampstead Heath on a quiet weekday morning, we passed this pond so still and beautiful that it could have been the legendary resting place of King Arthur’s Excalibur or the secret center of the universe. Whenever I look at this photo, I can feel my breathing slow down and my attention wanders far away from computers and spreadsheets and workout classes. I wish I could create a place like that in my mind, my soul, a still center that exists outside fickle time.  I always hope it will happen for me during meditation (when I can be bothered to actually sit down and do it), but instead my head buzzes like a hive of behind-schedule bees or I start to fall asleep. A friend of mine recently took Transcendental Meditation training and now practices 20 minutes every morning and evening. It’s a huge commitment in terms of both time and money, but she swears by it (especially now that’s she’s no longer using the mantra she borrowed from her father!). I guess a mantra is just a way to trick your mind into sitting up and taking notice, or just sitting up and being awake and aware. I always feel like I’m missing the point of meditation and have to be reminded again and again why I should bother,  but this photo makes me wonder if it isn’t just another one of those deep ponds of being that we are desperately seeking beneath all the magic tricks and cheap baubles the world carnival uses to distract us.

…why I need someone to show up at my home or office and force march me to spinning class or weight lifting or just power walking. Why am I so lazy when most of the people I know are exercise junkies with zero body fat? They don’t even need to be self-disciplined because they actually love to exercise.

…why I always sit behind the person on the plane who has to have his/her seat reclined all the way into my lap for the whole flight even while eating. It gives me Row Rage to the point that I want to slam a water bottle into their head as I struggle to slither out of my seat as if I’m doing the limbo in order to get to the restroom. Or bounce my knees against the back of their seat like an unruly two year old. Or open and slam shut my lap tray until they start to bleed from their ears.

…why I still haven’t learned not to start the Monday morning commute listening to any Karen Carpenter song. By the time I get to work, I need Thorazine.

…if I would want to date myself if someone set me up on a blind date with Me? Makes you think.

…when my funny bone got osteoporosis. Realizing that I’ve laughed more in the past two weeks than I have in a long time, especially in therapy which you would think is no laughing matter.

…where I lost my favorite bracelet with Chinese characters painted on the beads. Still looking for it even though it seems hopeless. As does so much of life, but still we have to keep believing in delightful surprises.

(00ps–should have mentioned that the photo was taken at the V&A in London by my talented friend Claire Kramer MacKinnon)

I wish I could write that I say “yes” more often than “no,” but I’d be lying to myself if I did. Most often, I say “maybe,” or “doubt it,” or just “whatever.” That’s when I’m not berating myself for not being taller, younger, thinner, smarter or simply not enough. I’m embarrassed to admit that Simply Not Enough is my default setting. I’m not sure there’s ever been a time in my life that I stopped and admired something I’d accomplished without a nagging inner voice saying it could have been better, bigger, bolder. Or looked in a mirror and wholeheartedly liked what I saw. Or made a decision and not second-guessed myself. And yet Yes is so simple. Yes, I want to devour that double dip ice cream cone sensually and soulfully without feeling guilty five minutes later. Yes, I will stay in bed all weekend and forget about being an adult with chores to do. Yes, I will kiss your mouth off your face. Yes, I will never stop believing in love no matter how many times it kicks me in the ass. Maybe some lucky people are welcomed into the world on the breath of a “yes” while others, like me, take a lifetime to learn the language. Yes. It’s never too late.

A Hollywood sunset and a pink moon, no matter how often they happen, simply blow me away. Watching the sun go down behind the dunes on the beach near my home is so goose-pimply that I don’t know why I don’t do it more often. It reminds me of how small I am. How magical and comforting the tides are, pushed and pulled by the charismatic, sexy moon. How fleeting beauty is. How we take it for granted. As if there are so many sunsets and moon rises we can afford to miss a few. Because we have bank accounts to balance, laundry to do, groceries to buy. I’m so often guilty of forgetting what I was put here to be and see.

This is the first new bathing suit I’ve had in years. Its retro style reminds me of Marilyn Monrow, the ’60s, bathing caps covered with rubber flowers. When I put it on, I feel curvy and lush. It makes me think of deep blue swimming pools, deeply tanned lifeguards, the smell of Coppertone and a transistor radio somewhere playing Bobby Darin singing “Beyond the Sea.” I’m often drawn to clothing that evokes some kind of eerie sense memory, and usually it’s those purchases that I hang on to the longest. Like a leather bomber jacket or a black velvet dress that makes me feel just a tiny bit louche. When that happens, I’m not just wearing a piece of clothing, but also an era, a state of mind, the music that haunts it, the yearning to be transformed.

I’m sure my neighbors think I’m a bit nuts when I wander along the sidewalk taking pictures of the sky. I love trying to capture clouds…if there were a job on Weather Channel for a Cloud Chaser instead of Storm Chaser, I would apply instantly. I never tire of their infinite variety, especially cloud mountains that seem like a Shangri-La just out of reach. Most of the time my eyes and mind are firmly grounded on daily minutiae or my small, human-sized sorrows and worries. I’m staring down when I walk or straight ahead and I forget to look up.   To see a squirrel tightrope walking a power line, a redtail hawk chasing small prey, a red tin roof against an eye-of-god blue sky. My photos never seem to catch that perfect cloud moment, just like I have a hard time doing that in life, but I’ll keep trying and failing and trying and failing and looking up.

I have several sets of prayer beads that I wear as bracelets, and this turquoise string is my particular favorite right now. The beads are heavy and it’s just a bit too long to wrap neatly around my wrist, but that just makes them feel more exotic. I’m not religious so they don’t connect to me to any belief system and I don’t use them like a Catholic or Buddhist would, but the concept of prayer beads makes me unreasonably happy. And lately I’ll take any little scrap of happiness I can find.  This string is literally like a touchstone — the weight and the clicking sound that the beads make when I move my wrist is a reminder of some lost holiness, some ground that has not been profaned, some tiny curl of incense in a faraway, forgotten temple.

Looking through my photos this weekend, I realized that I’m drawn over and over to images of windows. This one was taken from inside a house in Sienna and it’s my favorite because the cloud seems to bleed into the window casement. It also reminds me of the paintings of  the Madonna in a room or tower with a long view out the window behind her. I’m fascinated by windows and mirrors…the former teasing me with a glimpse of freedom just beyond my grasp, the latter reflecting my constant and frustrating search for some kind of bullshit cosmic enlightenment right back at me.  An over-simplified explanation of their appeal, but I suspect they are two poles of my personality, both tugging at my attention. Right now, though, I need to cut a window in my life. When I remember the wide open feeling of the day this was taken in Italy, I’m hungry to live in a place of possibility, to be a foreigner, to have to learn a new language and a new me, to fling open the shutters every morning and see the world freshly made, waiting for me to step into it.