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Sometimes, we go somewhere for a reason that becomes an entirely different reason once the journey is complete. I recently spent six days in Manhattan, which was booked in, honestly, a snit, as I found my patience exhausted by my husband's adjustment to retirement in Northern Michigan. Also I longed for diversity of people, places, and, yes, noise. Here on the Leelanau Peninsula, there is paradise and a gilded cage that somehow makes the beauty, trees, lakes, rolling hills, squirrels, wild turkeys, and deer less appealing. You miss seeing people who don't look like you, speak a different language, or have a different accent; the sounds of a city with its crowds of people, sirens, and car horns bring peace rather than pain.

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I  grew up in a world with standards that were nearly impossibly high. My parents, both Harvard graduates, and my father, a PhD, were brilliant, funny, and wildly critical. As a child, I barely touched books meant for children, almost immediately reading Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Austen, Woolf, Dickens, and Hardy. I was exposed to Fellini and Truffaut, adult conversations that were inappropriate and enthralling, and adults living life at a speed difficult for their children to match. I was a teenage alcoholic, sober by my mid-twenties and sober still. I want to own this history without the judgment that seems to accompany every choice I have ever made as a writer. Writing, like teaching, is everything good in my life, which also means it needs to be protected and allowed to falter without my rushing forward, declaring I am done. Yes, it is very hard and sometimes awful, but it is also the thing that saved my life. Over the years, the question has been posed, "Are you still writing?" I silently think as I affirm that I am, "Yes, I am breathing, I am alive, I am a writer."

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My first exposure to Buddhism was during a weekend in a monastery in upstate New York, a gorgeous place with gleaming wood and a literary pedigree, albeit one that had been tarnished by some shady behavior (no, it's not just the Catholics). The weekend was offered as a sober retreat, and I was willing to go mainly because I had a major crush on an angry Jewish guy who had signed up. We had been flirting, and the four-hour drive sealed the deal enough that we snuck into what later proved to be a private sanctuary for the students and monks and made love in the hot tub on arrival. Then there were noises in the adjacent room, and the only way to access the exit was through a space that was clearly filled with better-behaved retreatants and Buddhists attending a meditation class. My companion decided to depart fast while people lay out their mats, but I was horrified by the idea of a walk of shame through a meditation class. But there was no alternative, so I opened the door and was greeted by a dozen prone bodies and a monk who sat in zazen but made eye contact and winked. He knew. Soon, he would know everything.

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