To the Journey Sisters (big and small),

It was just over a year ago that we first came together- nervous, excited pairs, strangers to each other, drawn close by an impending dive into the unknown and unknowable. It is wonderful now to look back at those first moments, tentative conversations, preliminary curiosities and see the seeds of the beautiful extended baby family we've created. There was a (not-so-long-ago) time when I would not have believed that such unplanned joy and love was possible. Fortunately, these recent years of my life have been full of powerful lessons in the ultimate potential and perfection of uncertainty- of bold action leading to unexpected wonder.

My pre-baby life seems so far away and always just under the skin. Parts of myself are in retrospect, unrecognizable, yet I remember so viscerally the surging, overwhelming tides of feeling that once pushed and pulled me in every direction, all at once. I remember too, the first glimpses of stillness, the first contact with that mysterious being- intuition, the first sense of true direction. From there, everything happened rather quickly.

At school with "my" first children

In January 2009 I quit my two jobs (teaching art at a charter elementary school and managing a coffee shop), ditched my West Hollywood apartment, gave away a good portion of my belongings and trekked to India. I didn't know how long I would stay, or if I would ever return to LA. My intention was to travel solo for awhile and then to continue an intensive meditation teacher training program that I'd been working towards for two years. The program began in India and then was completed over three months spent in residence in the mountains of Arizona. At the time I left I didn't know whether I'd be able to pay for the Arizona portion of the course so I decided if I couldn't scrape together the money I'd  head to the Himalaya looking for either a wise man to apprentice with or a cave to hang out in 'til enlightenment dawned. I was maybe a little crazy.

On the train from Mumbai-Jaipur

Fast forward a bit (hard to do as I could probably write an epic about those months of wandering), change locations from the foothills of the Himalaya to the snowy peaks of Flagstaff, AZ-- I did make it after all. I settled in with eleven others to begin the long, intense process of learning to teach others the practice that had, just a few years before, radically altered the course of my life and my perspective on just about everything. One of those eleven was a handsome Aussie man with an excellent onomatopoeic surname. We got to know each other through the testing phases of our course, always competing to come out first or best at each individual milestone (I always won). Friendly competition quickly became something much more, something that we struggled to keep within the bounds of the strict rules of conduct for the training. By the end of the three months, we were fully and undeniably in love and without a clue what to do about it. After about a month apart, during which we spoke every day, realizing that even out in the real world our feelings were not changing, I took off for the land of Oz.

On the balcony at our first apartment.

 It wasn't long at all before we discovered that our love was too be big to be contained in just two beings-- our Little One was on the way and had big plans for us. It happened fast, but as we've found, when the time is right, nature has it's own timetable.  What seemed like an endless nine months of some discomfort and adjustment and many, many big changes (we got married! we moved from Sydney to Venice! we taught a lot of people to meditate! we met all of you!) was in a moment compressed until it seemed infinitesimally small and quick-- impossible to have been sufficient for that little being to develop to the point of joining the outside world. But somehow it was, somehow as crazy as the path was, as filled with bumps and turns and mud and mess, it all distilled into pure perfection, on the morning of May 1st, just as the sun rose, when our Saskia Deva Beverley Vroom emerged.

It's very bright out here.

She is a powerful being already. She is what led us to all of you. She fills us with joy and wonder each day and I feel blessed and eager to share her journey with you her sisters, and to watch all the Little Ones as they forge their paths and we fulfill our purpose as their guardians along the way.

Sending love to you all,
Angie