4:00pm Saturday afternoon, alone in Robin’s house in West Oakland, last afternoon living in California. Adam and Rachel are fetching me in about an hour. Dinner with them, then they will drive me to SFO and it’s over.

My friend Mark W recently shared a poem by a friend of his Maya Rachel Stein that captures precisely what I’m feeling:

“It looks like the sky is coming apart and together at the same time “

And the body is holding its losses like a fist.

And a fleshy hope is opening to an unprecedented vastness.

And whatever we think we are leaving behind will keep insisting.

And the things we desire will elude us.

And our efforts will pose as failure.

And we will not recognize how far we’ve come.

And we will solve one problem and create another.

And we will feel broken.

And we will not be broken.

And the silence will be deafening.

And we will love destructively.

And no one will appear to be listening.

And there will be too many doors to choose from.

And we will keep saying, “I don’t know how to do this.”

And we will be more capable than we ever imagined.

Goodbye San Francisco.