A morning at California DMV and I am officially back in California. License plates and a new driver’s license. When the new license came in the mail I first thought, “Oh no! Wrong picture. That’s some old coot!” Then I remembered. It was a picture of an old coot.

So, I have slowly come to ease with my new (to me) status, Californian and Old Coot. And I like it just fine. When I first got here in 1970 it was to get relief from problems back in D.C. and Virginia where I got involved in a lot of stuff and things which were just the natural result (karma) of all the stuff I had been doing and become. In San Francisco they hardened into a personality and a life and a way of seeing the world that would be difficult to overcome. Nevertheless, at some point around age 35 I started to change. Not because I wanted too but needed to, if I wanted to live.

So, here I am in Bay area again, and again no plan and also not a getaway. I’m not running. I’m meandering because that is, it turns out, part of my path. Not seeking, not looking; more allowing and trusting that this life, the one I’m in, is sufficient and adequate to the purpose that I’ve assigned to it.

To reach out, yet not stretch. To yearn and not crave, to touch and not grasp, to release and not discard, to understand rather than insist. Participating in the inevitability of change in a way that right intentions tend toward the good.

To give my passions and indifference a rest, to let my knowing become love.

All those good folk at the DMV showing up for work every day to face a series of people who are anxious and needy and want to hit the road ASAP, and some of them will in ways they hadn’t anticipated. The confluence of everyday people going about the basics of modern life and doing the best they can within the parameters of their lives (karma) and their ideas, wishes, dreams, plans and designs; fears doubts and worries. In that DMV office every individual was related to all the others in basic hopes, dreams and worries. Some worked there, others came to get the service provided and all moved in and out of awareness and the wishes and actualities that came to their minds.

And, then its was lunchtime for some but not yet for others. This was all of humanity in one building at 5300 Claremont, Oakland, CA

A wonderful day. Some nice short conversations with neighbors and then on-line-paying toll-charges from my “Lap Around the US” almost 10,000 miles in six weeks last Fall. Pictures of my truck in some unremembered stretch of Highway in North Texas and a bridge in California taken by a camera along a road and now sending me a bill for $7.53

Life life life. It goes on until it doesn’t anymore. What beauty and grace there can be in not knowing and yet still caring.

The past and the present a

Seed on the ground next to a

Broken dried old twig. Which

Came first, yesterday or a

Hundred years ago? I can’t really say.

‘Cause I just don’t know.