Is the famous essay Joan Didion wrote when she traded NY for LA.

I thought I would never leave the mountain, but after not even two years life is pulling me away. We are nomads, there will always be the feeling there is something else to explore. We will be spending a part of the year in France, but also in Amsterdam and travelling. Life is fluid, it wants to show us all of it’s corners. The sharp solitude of the mountains, last week an ashram in France, this week Amsterdam, next week New York and then again the mountains and Morocco.

Joan returned to NY after thirty years in California and never left. The city tends to sticks on you like an old chewing gum. How hard you try, it just never seems to let go of you completely, in my finding.

Sometimes you don’t get what you’re actually doing. You just go with a deep longing or urge and observe what happens, like moving to France. Everybody said we were nuts, but it felt like what we should do. Now I feel above all the deep longing to take my ideas down the mountain to the worktable. My heart is pounding itself a way out of my chest, the energy is soaring inside of me. I need to write, make, create, collaborate. Do what I came to do on this planet.

So here I am, sitting again in my garden house. Kids back into school, happy everywhere, dog stayed in France, husband back to filming. Living in our own house, building a fire place to keep some of the mountain atmosphere. It looks the same, but we are definetley not the same. We changed profoundly and it is sitting here that I can feel it best. I cannot believe we made this move. Sacrificing all this quality of life, the subtlety in which life so clearly manifested itself. The clean air, water, the millions of colors of green, the peace, the tranquility, the river, the pixies and the elves, the fabulous food, the love I felt oozing through my heart every day. Sacrificing it all for this longing inside of me.

When we arrived in France I agreed that I would surrender to what life has to offer. I would stop resisting, stop trying to make things happen or try to avoid them. I would just surrender to what is there for me. The moment I decided to do so an eagle flew just above my head and followed me for minutes. Heaven saying: ok, we heard you. This is where the rollar coaster set off. Into solitude, loneliness, silence, chaos, my dark sides, into love, magic and my light sides, and now straight back into the ‘real’ world. Here we go! All the same, but not!