"The mind can calculate but the spirit yearns, and the heart knows what the heart knows."

We make plans; big ones, lofty ones, your average daily ones. Sometimes they don't pan out the way we expect -- different like -- where we nod and say, "I can live with this," and sometimes they do not work at all.

Stephen King was just going to buy milk at the corner store, walking down a back road in the October woods of Maine when he got hit by a car. Threw him into the ditch and he was unable to walk for months. He just looked in the fridge that morning and realized he didn't have anything to put on his cereal.

I don't think God laughs at our plans or even smirks - I don't have a picture of a God who benignly smiles when we fall on our proverbial faces, even though we are yes, often ignorant and yes, often proud. We are small, with short-sightedness. I suppose he lets us go about the business of life and has an opinion every now and then. "Moves" things in some directions, and leaves others. It is an odd balance of involvement and observance -- another one of those paradoxes that comes along with the keeping of this faith. However the mystery of free will works, it can make for many disappointments when our ideas, hopes, desires veer left when we were expecting them to go right all along.

I imagined my Vancouver adventure to go one way and it went another. All my best laid plans went to some place called the Land of Best Laid Plans where tumble weeds whistle by and it is always dusk and there are never sunsets. Not a land of despair but of disappointment. The whole thing was sort of a paradox in and of itself; a lot of it was wonderful, I felt both a deep and complete happiness and a heavy melancholy, both fulfilled and somewhat at a loss. Rich in experience and poor in pocket. I met a lot of interesting people, in unexpected places. Jasper Morgan for example, at my coffee shop haunt downtown. He is one of these "self-employed" types that run rampant in creatively entrepreneurial hubs like Vancouver who said to me once as we were sitting at the bar by the window, "Coffee, smoking and crossword puzzles keep me alive. Unfortunately, it's difficult to do all three at once." Every day he would smoke a pack-a-day and run the seawall.

In the midst of these characters,
of biking to work in the dawn of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhoods
the 5.30 am bus up Main st -- it smelling like a dark cellar of spilled liquor and disappointed spirits from the night before
the ocean
the damp
the blooms
the skinny jeans & the plaid shirts
the dogs in vests
the espresso
the energy
the expensive music for dirt cheap
the overwhelming colour and taste of good food
the people watching
the pen moving
the shaking like a dog-out-of-river of my soul

I am still processing the last four months. But at the end of the day, at some point in May it was, I decided that the water I was treading didn't seem the right water, or the right tread, or .... the right time to be treading. And my short legs were numb from the movement. I couldn't really explain it to my closest of friends in V why I had to go. The heart knows what the heart knows. The one thing I could grasp onto as a tangible reason was that I had no money left. Economically, the city sure takes you down in the back alley at the knees, executes a swift kick to the ribs and goes through your clothes for loose change. And when I started to pull fuzz out of my pockets and shadow the bottle collectors, I knew it was time to change something. The whole experience left me feeling more bruised and confused and blinking rapidly than down right destroyed.

So I came home. There are a lot of definitions for home but I like this one: "a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates." Home should be a place to be at rest, to cry if you must, to be at ease, to be warm and comfortable. And in my case, where I don't have to pay rent and I don't have to pay to wash my clothes.

I feel sort of like Stephen King in the ditch on the side of the road right now -- wondering what all that was about and for and squinting through the dark for that elusive "point" we're all looking for. But out of his accident, he wrote a lot of great stories.

And I haven't forgotten the pacific.