Above Big Sur is a park called the Ventana Wilderness. One year I went camping there by myself, and hiked around for a week in a miserable heat with about a million biting flies. I followed mountain lion tracks for a whole day. I found a still pool in a deep ravine. The water was like glass and I could clearly see the speckled boulders at the bottom. I swung like an amazon naked from a tree branch and landed in the water.

Seconds later I leapt gasping out and pulled myself onto a muddy ledge. The day was about 90degrees Fahrenheit, the water almost freezing. The stupidest thing I did was to climb up the side of a cliff, because I was lost and didn't know how to get out. I followed a goat path until I couldn't go any further, and then realized I had to get down. Luckily I had the sense to take off my heavy backpack and send it sliding to the bottom, or I probably wouldn't behere to write this. As I attempted to climb around a very tight corner in the cliff, the ground beneath my feet began to slip out, it was just sand. I tried to suction myself to the cliff, and looked frantically around for a handhold. The cliff was smooth and worn, but there were these haggard little plants growing out of it. My feet continued to sink down and I knew I washigh enough up, that if I fell, I would at least be very damaged. Even if I didn't die, it would be days before anyone found me. I decided to bet my future on the strength of a little plant's roots and grasped and pulled myself up. That little plant actually held! It was the first time I ever knowingly risked my life.

My silver flute was my good buddy for ten years, all through grammar school and high school. When I started playing it I would always get very frustrated, and once I even threw it at a dresser. It received a dent in one side which it has carried ever since.

Eventually I got good enough to begin to enjoy it, and even forget the music on the page and just play from within. The pinnacle of my career was a jazz concert I played in high school, I got to play some Claude Bolling. I practiced for weeks. There was this one part of a fast movement I could never quite play, but somehow at the night of the concert, I miraculously played it correctly. After I did that, nothing could go wrong, and it was a really good concert. I finally had to stop playing flute because I got tendonitis in my arms and wrists. I switched to piano, which is a lot harder and even more frustrating. Luckily pianos are too big to throw.

I don't think I've lived in Vienna long enough to find a very special place for me, but sometimes I find a book shop or a library can do wonders for my mood.

Also, I find that underwater, when I dive or snorkel, I feel incredibly happy for no reason at all. Being out on the waves always makes me feel good, because the water is infinitely changeable and always fascinating to watch. I think waves are even more fascinating to watch from the sea than from the shore!

Home is a place where I feel totally relaxed and at ease, accepted, and loved. I think wherever my mother is living usually feels like home, because she always has lots of useless but interesting junk laying around, she can gab on for hours about absolutely nothing, and she cooks a damn good stuffed chicken.

Yearning is the feeling I have when I have not yet found a place to sit. The longer I have to wait around standing up, the more I wish I had a place to sit. But once I am sitting of course, I begin to yearn for standing. It's the wanting of something other than what I have. This eternal problem will never be solved until I die.