Following my bliss and my blisters

I have been receiving signals about my life choices lately. All of them approve of my spending time outdoors. The night before my first real camping trip in the Maevemobile, I saw a spectacular green-tailed meteorite break into several pieces above the desert behind my Mom's rv park. The night before I headed to Yuma to have a solar system installed and then to Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, I saw another meteorite in the skies over Tucson. Today I was less than half watching a PBS program, but heard one phrase clearly: "Follow your bliss," a quote from Joseph Campbell. The reason I was not really watching was that I was browsing a book on national parks in the southwest, looking for destinations.

The quote resonated in me and evoked memories of my recent experiences in the Coronado National Forest and at Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. In both places I felt a deep peace like nothing I had ever felt before. It was not a hypomanic high or a giddy, in-love emotion. When I looked it up in wikipedia, there was another quote by him in response to accusations that he was promoting hedonism (he was not). The quote was, "I should have said follow your blisters."


I think I need to follow my bliss and my blisters. I'm going to put off doing any significant promotion of speaking to groups about the Fair Housing Act and the ADA as they relate to people with psych disabilities and animals. Instead I'm going to take the spring months to concentrate on healing myself camping and hiking in the wild places of the west. If I stumble onto a speaking gig, that's great, but I'm going to spend my work time on improving my writing skills -- something I can do even where there's no phone service or internet service.