Come Walk with Me

More than twenty years ago, I rounded a bend on a little dirt road leading to the Jikoji Zen Buddhist Retreat and met the biggest madrone tree I had ever seen. Come walk with me... Sometimes we don't realize we've made a lifelong friend until we've been visiting them for twenty years. This old madrone has watched me hurry past on countless hikes to the Jikoji Zen Center. Looking through old photographs, I realized she wasn't simply changing. She had quietly been teaching me

One extra loop. One unexpected turn. And suddenly, my familiar old hiking trail was completely enchanted. Come walk with me... I’m beginning to think there may be a little magic happening in these Santa Cruz Mountains. Yesterday, Ghost and I were finishing our hike. We wanted to take just another quarter mile to reach our two-mile goal, so we took one extra loop. We came around a corner… And there was a man standing on top of a huge boulder, waving an enormous bubble wand and

When Jim and I celebrated our tenth anniversary, twenty-six years ago, we did something a little unusual. We put a big flip chart up on our cruise cabin wall and planned the next ten years of our lives... Come walk with me... Some dreams begin with a single wish. Others quietly grow for decades. As I looked through old photographs this week, I realized these three little redwoods weren't just trees. They had been standing beside one of the biggest dreams Jim and I ever share