Mount Madonna

While Stacie was reverse-engineering the whole of the Anthro catalogue, and making 17 quilts for Christmas, and blocking an amazing piece of lace, and generally Ruling my Universe from Orbit,

I was sitting quietly at Mount Madonna Center, a place of deep quiet and beauty overlooking Monterey Bay.

I've been there every fall for the past three years for a meditation retreat with Geneen Roth, author of many books on emotional eating. Geneen doesn't write about diets. Her point and purpose is not to teach people how to lose weight (although working with her has certainly resulted in my losing weight—about 30 pounds that I've kept off for years), it's to show that working with our impulse to eat when we're not hungry can be, at least if you're the sort of person who eats when you're not hungry, a perfect spiritual path.

I haven't spoken very much about this, here or anywhere, but I'm a great admirer of Geneen, and deeply grateful to her. I know of no one out there taking a similar approach, and I'm so glad our paths crossed.

And while flying back from San Francisco, I finished the Moth. Blocking commences in one hour!