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Alone in my hotel room and here’s a different feeling—I’m alone in my hotel room! My wife and I travel reasonably well together, but like any two people, we have different rhythms and different needs and different ideas about what to do and when to do it. So though we’ve done a good job negotiating all that, still there is always some detail to negotiate, some other energy to respond to. 

 

But now it’s just me. And may I confess that not having to talk to anyone, opening the window the amount that’s comfortable for me and choosing the lighting I like and just sitting wholly savoring the silence is a nice contrast to the social whirlwind of these last four weeks. 

 

Of course, teaching a 5-hour workshop today to 30 beautiful souls in London today and then going out to dinner with four of them in a noisy pub is its own kind of social whirlwind and one I thoroughly enjoyed. I love doing these workshops that are the first-time Orff experiences for some of the participants, the great satisfaction of opening the door and inviting them into this beautiful house that just may (or may not) be the home they live in years to come. If that be so, sweet to imagine them remembering me as the person who might have changed their life. Or at least given them a happy day. 

 

Equally pleasurable is how most every workshop I do these days is a reunion of sorts with people who have worked with me at other times (some as long ago as 30 or 40 years!) and other places. There were many in today’s workshops, people I had taught in Turkey, Hong Kong, Salzburg, Canada, India, England, Ukraine (online) and other places. Such a delight to re-connect and enjoy again together the joy of music-making and dancing. As I’ve said many times in the last 4 weeks of posts, I’ve loved remembering that life is sweet just biking, hiking and wandering around beautiful towns and cities. But equally sweet to return to the work I was born to do and feel the pleasure it gives both me and the participants. 

 

Meanwhile, my wife Karen is winging home to San Francisco, where she’ll have the grand pleasure of re-connecting live with our daughter Talia, on Facetime with Kerala and the grandkids. She’ll get to be back in our home, make her own meals with no restaurant bill at the end, walk around the city with no Google map to follow, return to the routines she’s developed that sustain her. She loved the traveling but was ready to return to all of that and more. To come home.

 

And here am I again, savoring this first taste of Solitude that will be with me in the travels to come. And has been with me my whole life. It is through my comfort in being wholly at ease in my own body, heart and mind that (ironically) I feel most deeply connected with others. That I feel at home wherever I may be. 

 

So it is.