When you vacation away from vacationland

At the other end of our street, about a half mile from our house, there is a state park with a fabulous driftwood beach. What you can't see in this picture, because it was taken on a cloudy day, is that standing here on a clear summer day you can see Mount Rainier and the city of Seattle on the horizon.

So why, you might ask, would we leave this wonderful spot to go on vacation somewhere else?

Good question!

But here I am, in Barrington Illinois, a distant suburb of Chicago with acres of green grass and huge suburban homes, after almost no sleep last night and a very long day of travel. We've had a fabulous dinner cooked by my beautiful sister-in-law, a lovely evening of conversation, and soon we'll be off to bed, to rise in the morning and head for Iowa.

We do things like this, we Americans --leaving our homes and exploring other parts of the country -- partly because we get the travel bug, partly because we end up with our families spread all over the country and we want to check in with them, and partly because there is so much beauty in our country that it would be a shame to get set on one idea of what is beautiful: there's beauty everywhere, and it takes a lot of different forms.

So I'm hoping to share a bit of that beauty with you -- in this case, the midwestern kind (which we coastal folk tend to ignore) -- over these next few days. No guarantees that I'll have time to meditate or any particular wisdom to share. But who knows: as my mother-in-law used to say, "The Lord moves in mysterious ways." This is where I grew up, and though I love the East and West, this is my home and I look forward to sharing it with you.