Layer Upon Layer

What the heck?

After losing my studio to gentrification in Long Island City, I developed the brilliant scheme to buy a fixer-upper in Ulster or Greene County, NY, as a studio.  On a very limited budget, I would buy a house that would serve as a live/work space that I could use three or four days/week.  It would offer me a place where I could get solid time in my studio and still be able to continue to teach yoga in the city.  It would be reasonably near the Monastery so I could organize my time around getting there once/week and it would cost less than what I was paying for my space in LIC.  Even the guy who is my financial planner thought it was a good idea, and hey - it isn't often that my ideas get the thumbs up from anyone with any financial know-how.  I have been trolling Trulia and Zillow ever since.

Let's just say that, within my budget range, one encounters a fair bit of squalor.  I have made two excursions upstate to look at places and it is clear that a good deal of sweat equity will be required.  I don't mind that - at all really - but looming large over this whole endeavor is the question - can I really own three houses?  It's absurd!

Added to the layers of possibilities is the fact that my nest is emptying and soon I will have total freedom to decide where I want to live.  That might happen as early as this fall.  My long-awaited dream of  living in Newfoundland could become reality.   But if that is so, why buy upstate?  And what about the Monastery?  Or the Temple in Brooklyn, for that matter.  Can I do yoga therapy in Newfoundland, or rather, would anyone pay me to do yoga therapy there?  And what about the boy friend?  (The what???)

So many questions.

Meanwhile, I started some new work that I can manage while I don't have a studio space.  It involves locks of Lucy's hair from when she was a toddler and old blankets.  It might be hard to understand but I am very excited about this new turn of events.  In the midst of all this coming and going, it feels like the perfect antidote.  As my friend Patti just said to me when I was blathering on and on about all the possible ways the future could play out, all will become clear...in the stillness, the answer will come.  I believe this wholeheartedly because I lived it, over and over again.  I have faith in it so much so that I don't actually worry (too much) about it.  My job is to create the stillness.  Likewise, I have faith in that little rush of adrenaline that I get when I start a new art project that promises to be Something Big.  Yes, right now it just looks like a pony tail and an old blanket, but please believe me when I tell you, there's something very exciting going on there.

One house?  Three houses?  Upstate?  Newfoundland?  Hair?  Blankets? Maybe I should just become a monk and ditch it all!  Or maybe I could spend my time looking at cute cat pictures on the internet, like this one:

Not conducive to stillness.

The possibilities are endless!