An Odd Vacation

I am taking a few days away. This is to visit an incarcerated friend. He is housed for another fourteen years or so in the Oregon State prison system, and currently at Snake River Correctional Institution, on Stanton Blvd, north and west of Ontario, Or. I am traveling with my former girlfriend who now lives in Vancouver, BC. She maintains her house here in Oregon City, the next town south of me. She has renters, comes down frequently to do the gardening and keeps a room of her own. The house is beautiful and she has little trouble getting renters. We will drive nearly to Oregon's eastern border with Idaho and camp in Farewell Bend State Park. I will be out of communication for a little while, back certainly on Sunday evening.

This is the women I put in a prayer cycle with the intention of ending up with a more or less simple friendship. Without that practice my natural state puts me far away from former lovers, looking rather desperately for replacements and staying generally disturbed for a long while. Instead, with the practice, I ended up peaceful, okay staying alone and not looking with urgency, and my disturbance at losing my lover subsided to an easily managed level within six months. The prayer cycle evolved naturally into a practice, part of my preventative maintenance against my tendency to trash my career.

I trust that you, my friends, will thrive without me.