I'm awake at 4 AM to take my Hawaiian daughter to the airport for her flight home to Kauai. She has been visiting here in California since two days before Christmas. A couple of weeks before her arrival I was in the desert of southern California for two weeks. The month of December now well passed, it feels as if it has been an extended spell of visiting, traveling, and holiday celebrating--an interlude from the life I am accustomed to living. Each day the desire to keep up my journal would gnaw some at me, but with such activities at close hand to keep me preoccupied, I easily brushed aside all regular discipline.

I look back to a year ago, however, and see that there is a winter trend to my behavior. Last December it was a three-week visit to Kauai with wife and daughters, when both daughters lived there together. I recall spending many rainy days indoors, stretched out on a couch and reading. When I would step out during a burst of sunlight the gray would just quickly move over me and dump on me. I never thought I'd be anxious to leave Kauai, this island of rich tropical beauty, but the rain had washed the best of my disposition right out of me.

I'm not so sure I can easily account for the last few weeks at home here in Santa Cruz County, on the central California coast. Like I say, a flow of people and events occurred that has kept my daily living pattern pretty disrupted, but I enjoyed every minute of it, and valued the time with family members and being pleasantly forced to step out of my routines.

California continues to be in a deep drought. Many lakes and river beds have gone dry on us, while winter days have been shooting up into the mid-seventies, which is not far from those of the Hawaiian Islands. When the sun drops, however, the temperatures fall dramatically as well. Some mornings lately I've awoken to a light frost. State and local officials now show some concern over what must be done if we receive no more rain this year. Rationing and just doing without altogether may become the new norm. I've heard renewed interest in desalinization plants along the coast as well.

Life seems to always have a string of gotchas that we need to watch out for. If not crime, it's war or disease, and now famine. Not watching the news so closely for a couple of weeks has been a relief for me. Whatever the problems of the world might be, it is refreshing to ignore them for a spell--particularly the problems for which I cannot contribute a solution, which is most of them. But the dry weather I can hardly help but notice. Too much brown vegetation surrounds us, when even a slight amount of rain will usually provide us with a sleek and shiny coat of green hills.

I have racked up some reading on my Kindle the past couple of weeks. I had put off reading fellow blogger Michael Graeme's free books that he so generously offers from his website, so downloaded his novel "Between the Tides", an eerie and romantic tale concerning a middle-aged man and a lady real estate agent. They go to look at a house that is accessed by driving over tidal lands and become trapped there by high tide. I'm still trapped on the island with them today, wondering what will happen next.

Meanwhile, my sister, who loves to dwell in the land of religion and mysticism, got me started reading a couple of books on the Jewish Kabbalah, which I knew nothing about. After studying some of the works of Rav Michael Laitman for a few days, I changed my ideas of what the Kabbalah is all about. I thought it had to do with analyzing ancient texts and assigning numeric values to words, and then somehow using these derived numbers as pointers for what one must do in life. Laitman says that new-age interpretations of Kabbalah have taken it in all kinds of directions that are contrary to the traditional teachings. I can see that a person could get deeply wrapped up in the studies of Kabbalah, but after reading two introductory books on the subject, I feel like I can comfortably move on to other disciplines.

A couple of years ago I bought Tolstoy's "Calendar of Wisdom", which does a pretty good job for me of providing a daily practice of thought, prayer, or meditation, without having to also delve deep into the meaning of words from the ancient Hebrew language. Tolstoy's approach to finding wisdom to live by, consisted of him spending fifteen years reading through scriptures, poetry, ancient texts, and philosophies, from people and cultures all over the world, and distilling from all of them what he considered to be the greatest ideals for all people to live by. The Kabbalah, to me, seems so much more narrow than this work of Tolstoy.

I need to be reminded quite regularly about what is important in life. I find that by keeping a small library of favorite books that I turn to regularly. The titles of some of those books have come to me as a result of reading Tolstoy. Here it is a new year, a time for building up new patterns for living. I find that I don't really need so much to build up anything new, but need to remember the older wisdom I have grown up with, and not let it slip away from me, while learning to part with the prejudices I have also grown up with. The Kabbalah writers might call that an evolutionary growth of the soul.