Saying Goodbye...

This is not a day I have been looking forward to. Later this morning, we have to say goodbye to George...


... and leave him in Laguna with his caretaker, Lisa, and her dog Chazzie, his chum, while we head north to Los Angeles to pack and get ready for our long European journey. It is not easy to say goodbye to George. He is such a dependent, loving, trusting little cuss, and an important part of our lives. We get very much attached to these animals who entrust us with their lives and offer us in return their extraordinary loyalty, their companionship, and their love.

Harder still, perhaps, to say goodbye to George because I find it harder than ever, these days, to leave at all. I'm also very much attached to my routine and it gets no easier, with age, to change it. The discomforts and perils of travel are bad enough in themselves, but I have grown exceedingly (too?) comfortable with the way I live my life here at home. In concert with Ellie, I have designed it and worked for it in accordance with my desires and needs. The familiarity of our daily life brings with it a kind of ease that is hard to sacrifice, even for the more exotic pleasures of travel.

Still, we are committed, the airplane tickets purchased, the visa (for Russia) stamped inside our passports, the hotel reservations made and the deposits paid. We leave tomorrow morning, and will be back around June 10. My posts in The Buddha Diaries, assuming I can make the time to write, given a busy travel schedule and assuming that internet connection is inexpensively available at most destinations these days, will follow our journey, first to England for a couple of days, then on to Finland and Russia for a ten-day tour before returning to England for another week with family.

I hope you'll join me on the trip. I won't be reading elsewhere as assiduously as I usually do, and will miss the daily adventure of that invitation into other people's joys and tribulations here in the blogosphere. But it would drive me crazy to attempt to check in with everyone AND keep up with the travel schedule AND post my own adventures, so I'm choosing to make that determination in advance. And if my own entries are sporadic, well, so be it. The one thing I don't need to pile on to everything else involved in going away is that absurd, sometimes obsessive sense of obligation to my writing. Let it be a good exercise in learning to let go.

May we all find true happiness in our lives...