The heart, above all else is deceitfully wicked.

Seems like it has been a long cold lonely winter...I truly understand what the Beatles were singing about in their HERE COMES THE SUN hit. We have been busy planning our next year. Mary is going into real estate appraisal and I am looking at options.
I am also looking at, no I am not looking--I am struggling with maintaining the Blue Road Blogger website. I had thought life was going to get slower. I was actually expecting large gaps in my obligations that would create the time for what I want to do.
But life always has a way of increasing its speed as we age. It doessn't feel 3 years has passed since we first started looking at the road as a lifestyle. As a means to an end of well regulated existence. We have been across the stste of North Carolina more than we have traveled any state. That inludes east to west and north to south. We have also been to Florida and discovered the beauty of Savannah Georgia. We have wandered into some real hole-in-the-wall places and were almost always impressed by the people we met there.
So I guess it is inevitible that we are now planning our return to Michigan. This will be our home base, as it has been our home since birth. We have been expatriates of a state we can no longer deny as ours. As much as I love North Carolina, I have always known this was just a lay over. As were Madison, Wisconsin; Bolder, Colorado; Honeybrook, Pennsylvania; and all the places I had the pleasure of seeing and sleeping in while I bicycled across America--all 5,000 miles--in 1982.
It is my hope that Michiagn will provide us with the time we need to organize our expectations. I also hope Michigan will also afford me the luxury of healing. I am sure Mary feels a similar pang, as we left so much undone when we jettisoned from Michigan in 2009. Mary believes it is family; but I firmly believe it is much more personal, something much deeper that draws us back. It is not as shallow as a matter of the heart. I have done this many times before, for Mary this exile is completely new, It has taken me all of 52 years to understand what it is that tugs at the soul. The heart really has little to do with our compass. The heart is incapable of finding its way as it is always influenced by the smallest notions and distracted by the weakest feelings. The soul can never be fooled. The soul stands unmoved by emotions, it is only concerned with destiny. And so 2012 begins with our destiny taking our heart back to the beginning, where we seek clarity.