adventure!

i have been off on adventures lately. the current one being a trip to stinson beach for the weekend to celebrate a friend's birthday. another being trying to type this post on michael's computer, which has a differently responsive keyboard than mine...

have been enjoying a smorgasboard of magazines laying about on the coffee table while coloring a large rainforest themed poster- a tradition for this weekend- and came across an article in this month's bust magazine about a woman, michelle dobrovolny, who biked from manitoba to texas in 58 days. she faced a lot of questions about whether or not she was afraid to travel alone and camp, to the extent that one stranger asked her to e-mail regularly to be sure she was ok. this made me think about the idea of being lost or away from the expected, a theme that has been prominent with me recently.

it started with the taxes. i have to file business taxes in los angeles, since i have a business license and so on to have a service business (coaching) in los angeles. this means that by feb 28, i had to file and input what my income was into the online filinf system. granted, i started the business partway through last year and am in many ways still building the practice and am focusing on expanding my client base at the moment. still, it was a sobering moment to have my tax person say, "oh, you poor kid. you didn't make very much last year." yikes.

so in a way, starting this business has been my own bking route across the country. as i keep pedaling along and coming up with new ways to expand the message that i am out here, i get a few more miles along the road. but, just like it was hard for dobrovolny to bike into a new town without the people she met dumping anxiety for her safety onto her, it is hard for me to feel a sense of success without traditional markers of response, like an income like a geyser, for example.

my recent reading delight has been a book called a field guide to getting lost by rebecca sonit, and it has been my saving grace. i found it because i regularly stalk keri smith's reading list knowing that she is a short cut to the wonderful and unsual in the world of reading, and this was no exception. i am still early on in the book, but it manages to champion the idea of being lost as not such a bad thing. that perhaps being out in the reaches of somewhere you've never been is a way to see more of who you are. and i feel myself relaxing jsut a teeny bit as being lost makes me creative and les fearful of trying out new ideas, like photographing again and maybe putting up something- to be anounced- in my long dusty and dormant etsy shop.

it is all just an experiment, something i tell my clients. and the helpful thing to think is that money is, in the end, just paper.

thank you to whoever once told me that. it has stuck with me.