Home There & Home Here

I'm "Home Here" again, after three weeks spent in San Francisco.


San Francisco is "Home There", because it's where my daughter and son-in-law live, and now my new grand daughter.  She is almost 2 weeks old.
My visit was marked with many of the things I love so much about leaving "Home Here" and traveling: innumerable sense surprises and opening to this experience without judgement.  Not always easy when things got dicey, ie. I had no idea what to "do", but a great place to simply "be".

Having a newborn member of the family is just a revelation.  I was able to hold her when she was 30 minutes old, if that.  All that sweetness, potential and wonder, distilled in a moment's embrace.  Her presence in our lives seems to embody all that we strive for and yet, here she is, the purely uncomplicated Miss Buddha!
I experience her mother as a newborn.  I imagine her father as a newborn.  I remember myself as a newborn.
Having a newborn in the family gives us all the opportunity to pour our hearts out for her well being, and to do the same for ourselves.
It is an opportunity to notice our intense vulnerability, while protecting her within the circle of our arm's embrace.
Now my arms miss her weight, and my body misses her body.  It feels as if there is a small but fundamental truth missing from my "Home Here."

It is bewildering and liberating, all at once, and I've heard myself saying many times, "Form is nothing more than emptiness, Emptiness is nothing more than form."