Now Blogging from the West Coast

I moved pretty much across the country at the end of last year, from Washington, DC, to Sacramento, CA.

The move was a long time coming, and friends had been threatening to send in an extraction team for years, although, if we want to get all yogic and new agey about it, there is no extraction team, only the individual. From there, it is the individual's responsibility to the Self to take that first step.

My 15-ish years in the Washington, DC area – 14 within the District's boundaries – meant that I witnessed the revitalization of some places that were pretty sketchy in the late 1990s. I saw the changing climate of politics and protest. I experienced the ebb and flow of the physical presence of friends in a very transient community, to the point where I was losing approximately 8 friends a year to moves. In turn, social media made connecting with now far-flung friends easier, although the painful corollary was, of course, noticing when you were excluded from not-so-far-flung gatherings.

While in D.C., I rehabbed a knee from surgery into regular yoga practice, teaching, and even found myself on the stage at last year's DC Yoga on the Mall event.

This was the slightly chaotic demo session.
I'm in the purple t-shirt in front row, in downward facing dog.

And while we're on the Mall, I ran around and around it a lot.  Another skill that I cultivated was adeptness at traveling through the local airports with multiple pairs of skis and a rolling duffel bag. Coincidentally, I also developed an impatience at other airports when travelers took more than 5 minutes to get through security, but that's a different blog post.

There is a trajectory that many people who at one point called D.C. home take. That was not my path. I remained there longer than many, and nothing cataclysmic occurred that spurred the move to California. I'm still in the same career field. I didn't have a partner in D.C., so it's not like I jettisoned him, either. My move was a product of the hackneyed John Muir quotation more than anything else.

But that doesn't mean the transition has been easy, either. I still have no idea where the nearest mail box is to my house, and I'm ridiculously out of shape for someone who ran a respectable half marathon time in November.

I had so much energy left over after the half,
I ran Colleen's mile 25 with her. While carrying a purse.

My yoga asana practice is intermittent, and the lunch time fast casual food options are meager – D.C. really has that one dialed.

Free yoga in Sacramento,
through Yoga in the Park/Yoga Moves Us!

And, I am actually more neurotic than ever about skiing.

Will I ever keep my hands up and not in a defensive posture? Will I ever not want to puke at some point while skinning? Will I remember to lock down my heels on the downhill??? Will I ever move on from being a backcountry skiing bench warmer, or, as I call it, the C Team??

Stay tuned.