It might have been your classic dark night of the soul, except that the evening itself was cool and peaceful and all hell didn't break loose until well after daybreak, a few hours after I'd drifted off to sleep in the middle of Nowheresburg, PA, with a head full of Zen and slowly tinkling wind chimes, wondering if I should go ahead and move to the Catskills anyway.  Maybe I should explain.

Right around Groundhog's Day I left my beloved Chicago and headed east, seeking invigoration of my creative spirit and guided by the potential of a potential in both the work and the love that had seemed to elude me for so long.  I took up with friends in a slowly dying coal town two hours west of the Holland Tunnel and began trolling for work in New York City.  But with quiet insistence the Catskills beckoned, like a foghorn from a distant lighthouse.  My would-be partner called Woodstock home, and on my visits from the flat-as-a-dollar-bill Midwest she and her son had introduced me to the same mountains and forests that I'd been in love with since pasting cheap reproductions of Frederick Church paintings on my notebooks in high school.

But when our romance ended abruptly on April Fool's Day, I assumed that even the expansive gates of the Hudson would be far too claustrophobic haunted by the ghost of a dead relationship.  With a gray and steely heart I took an apartment in Brooklyn, determined to move on and not look back.  Still, lingering doubts nagged, and one night shortly after finishing a book on Zen I idly floated a question to the universe about my earthly destination, before making an attempt at No Mind that took me straight to dreamland.

I was rudely awakened by a scene out of my own personal "Dawn of the Dead," confronted by a housemate who without warning had apparently lost his mind, and who was soon drawing blood from my hand with his bare teeth.  I escaped to the only safe harbor I knew within a day's drive: my friend's home in Woodstock.  By the time I made the three-hour trip, the Brooklyn apartment had evaporated and a new one had magically appeared in Kingston, already furnished with what I needed.  No matter how I looked at it, there was a big red neon arrow pointing upstate saying, "Be here.  Now."

Five months later, I still can't say I know why I've been directed here.  Definitive answers to questions about work and love have been in short supply, but they probably always will be.  What I do know is that I can't picture anywhere more welcoming, more healing, more rife with possibilities right now, anywhere I'd rather be while I open myself to the answers.  So for the foreseeable future...I'm home.