Church retreat weekend
Youngest Kid and I spent this weekend at a church retreat at Bishop's Ranch, a couple of hours north of San Francisco. It was nourishing in many ways. First, it was nice just to get out of the city. We chose city life very deliberately, and I love living in San Francisco, but I am discovering that getting out into nature every month or two is a key part of happy, healthy city living. This really hit home for me in October, when I stayed with a coworker one night to save myself three hours of commuting between Day 1 and Day 2 of a workshop at another office. The coworker and her wife live out in the country, and as I listened to the crickets chirping through the open window as I drifted off to sleep, my soul relaxed a piece of me I didn't realize had been tense. The ranch is far from being in the wilderness. It's adjacent to a Clover Dairy farm--our noses were well aware of that at times--and the nearby hills are covered in vineyards. But there is no city noise, growin